Visualising waiting territories: the case of Louis de Boccard

DIEGO JARAK; MARIANA GIORDANO

Waiting Territories in the Americas: Life in the Intervals of Migration and Urban Transit

Cambridge University Press

Año: 2016; p. 307 - 333

In this chapter, we approach explorers ― as well as their voyages, theirstance of authority and the intersubjective ?contact zones?3 theyrepresented ― from the perspective of waiting territories. Some groupsexperienced waiting territories as territories of uncertainty and as placeswhere they lost control of their destiny: this was the case with indigenousAmericans. Marginalised and undermined by the gaze that Europeantravellers and scientists cast on them, they seemed trapped between theirmobile ― nomadic ― past and the unknown future that awaited themonce their land was taken from them. For other groups, such as thetravellers and scientists who were responsible for the narratives thatsidelined Native Americans, these same waiting territories were places of(re-)discovery and expectation.we focus on six albums compiled by one of theseexplorers, the Swiss naturalist and explorer Louis de Boccard7. In thesealbums, de Boccard recorded his journey from Switzerland to Argentina,and his travels from Argentina to Patagonia, via the Uruguay river and itsJesuit missions, the Gran Chaco and the Mato Grosso, until he finallysettled down in Paraguay. Indigenous Americans and the Americanterritory feature prominently in his accounts of his voyages of exploration.In this chapter, we examine what his photographs and albums (consideredas visual narratives) have to tell us about these territories and theirinhabitants. His images dramatise a certain tension between uncertaintyand expectation. However, they do not represent waiting as such. Howcould they? Instead, what his pictures conjure is the spectre of waiting.