Landscapes, tourism and the building of an ideal retreat. Visual imaginaries of travel in Argentina?s printed culture at the beginning of the 20th century

FARA, CATALINA

Tel-Aviv

Workshop; International Workshop on the Discourses and Materialities of Tourism Program; 2020

Bar-Ilan University

Tourism had an impact in the construction of modern landscape representations by establishing new ways of knowing the own country and others. As many authors have pointed out, tourism was a useful tool in the construction of national identities. In Argentina?s case the main tourist centers were related to natural beauty, as part of the process of the anesthetization of nature imposed by modernity; which transformed landscapes into the main way of representing national identity. Since the late 19th century, the expansion of the railway system allowed new relationships between people and places. It also facilitated the development of new touristic areas and popularized travel as a consumable product for the expanding middle class. Tourism practices took advantage of the printed culture (illustrated magazines, postcards, posters, urban advertisements), which was also key in the making of an aspirational consumerism rhetoric. In this presentation we will focus on the visual imaginaries of travel in printed media, in order to understand how the territory was recognized, promoted, visited and represented. It will explore how tourist practices led to the multiplication of landscape images from certain areas of the country, that crystallized in paradigmatic representations of the diverse regions and settled shared visual schemes with the contemporary landscape painting.