Indexing the landscape

The ancestral gesture of recording inhabited and passable places through images, of collecting data and elaborating a complex network of signs through which to identify these contexts and indicate the distinctive elements of each place, led to the creation of taxonomies with the aim of conceptualising and making functional the spatial categories and metaphors that would describe the territory and the transformations operated on it by human beings in their daily activity. Possibly, the conception of landscape reaches its greatest expression, as a historical construction, in the establishment of borders that testify to the emergence of the nation-state and the geopolitical redistribution in the modern/colonial world system. The chimera of ordering that incommensurable universe and capturing it in a representation on a minimal scale, encompassable from the near distance of the spectator, has established the genealogy of the concept of landscape in disciplines and narratives such as those of Western art history, philosophy, geography, cartography, architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism, etc. 

Ese régimen de producción de imágenes que evolucionó en paralelo a los desarrollos tecnológicos ha respondido a las ideologías y funciones estratégicas del moderno imperialismo. Según el filósofo Jean-Marc Besse, a partir del siglo XVI “el paisaje es (…) la ilustración visual de la nueva experiencia geográfica del mundo”. La imaginación de ese mundo como totalidad y de las tierras desconocidas adquirió forma en los mapas renacentistas como proyección de un deseo antropocéntrico expansionista y de dominación de la naturaleza. Las primeras imágenes exóticas, racistas y coloniales de Abya Yala o América llegaron a Europa a través de las ficciones y visiones de los dibujos, pinturas y grabados de artistas viajeros comisionados por las metrópolis; y circularon a través de postales y de la prensa ilustrada de la época. Las novedosas fotografías aéreas tomadas en 1859 se consolidaron como técnica de captura de imágenes con objetivos militares durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial.

Indexing the landscape is thus tantamount to producing a notion of “landscape”, to conferring meanings on these images as political devices that will play an essential role in visual culture. This exhibition does not aim to focus on the repertoire of images included in it as objects of contemplation, but rather to attempt to reveal the epistemological conditioning factors and power relations that have intervened in these constructions. In this exhibition, the walls of the room do not become the shop windows of tourist agencies where a picturesque catalogue of places and landscapes can be observed through the eyes of the anthropological traveller of overmodernity. Here, the urgent questions are posed not only to potential audiences, but also to those who have been responsible for producing such images: how does an artist behave when he is aware of the dialogue he engages in with a long tradition of representation that responds to the ideologies, interests and patriarchal violence of the modern/colonial gender world system; what strategies to adopt in the face of the mechanisms of invisibilisation that run through the canons of representation of the landscape genre in the history of Western art; what strategies to adopt in the face of the mechanisms of invisibilisation that run through the canons of representation of the landscape genre in the history of Western art?