Telescoping the past from the endless plains

LAURA MALOSETTI COSTA

Austin - Texas

Congreso; 3rd. International Forum for Emergent Scholars. Synchronicity / Contacts & Divergences; 2012

CLAVIS, Center for Latin American Visual Studies. Universuty of Texas, Austin

Although some German, English and French artists who came to South America from the beginning of the nineteenth century travelled to the Argentine pampas, they failed to see them as a possible landscape. During that century ? the era of exploration, colonization and landscape painting in America ? no landscapes were painted of those immense plains. This absence will be the centre of these reflections, focusing on two main issues: on the one hand the role of schemata from the perception to the representation of nature, and on the other, the interaction of national politics regarding the ways of appropriation of the land with the emergence of desire and memory in the construction of landscape. Modern and contemporary approaches to the "issue" of the pampa landscape will be considered in relation with the nineteenth century local traditions.