Landscapes of Disappearance

Abstract

This articles critically reflects on the relation of violence and landscape images in Latin America, particularly through questioning its role in forced disappearance. I argue that landscape images obscure and conceal the violence and tensions over a territory, while they are frequently the only evidence of that violence. It is an image that contains violence while trying not to show it. By recurring to a montage of en plein air landscape paintings from the late nineteenth century with recent films that expose the relationship of landscape, violence and disappearance, I critically reflect on the ways in which the landscape has been used as a system to homogenize the territory in both the liberal and neoliberal eras. I analyse the strategies used in Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz, 2010), Enrique Buchichio’s Behind the Truth (Zanahoria, 2014) and Nicolas Pereda’s Summer of Goliath (Verano de Goliath, 2010) to expose the political uses of the landscape, while also proposing aesthetic approaches to overflow that usage. I set these films against 19th century paintings by Jose Maria Velasco in Mexico, Alejandro Ciccarelli in Chile, Ricardo Borrero in Colombia and Juan Manuel Blanes in Uruguay, which present the territories of the young nations stripped from the struggles and the heroes that brought them to independence; and are instead tamed by the gaze of the painter, showing their land as ready to be exploited. Their contrast makes evident the continuing relationship of territory, extraction and repressive violence that has crossed Latin American history for the last 150 years.