The Affordances of the Acousmatic: Questioning Argentineness in El futuro perfecto

This article argues that the extensive use of acousmatic voices in El futuro perfecto ( The Future Perfect , Nele Wohlatz, 2016), which portrays a young Chinese woman beginning to learn Spanish after immigrating to Buenos Aires, allows the film to participate in the important process of undoing essentializations that link sound and race, as well as race and nationality. By making acousmatic nearly all the characters identified as Argentine, the film refuses to reproduce long-standing ideas about race in Argentina and ultimately interrogates audiences, questioning their assumptions about what kinds of bodies can produce a supposedly Argentine voice.