Tess Renker and Victoria Taborelli analyze contemporary literary works that inquire how depictions of rural spaces embody geo-racial imaginaries through conceptions of progress based on linear time. Renker will study the reinscriptions of Peru's Internal Armed Conflict (1980-2000) in the works of David Quichua Chaico’s Llagas y cicatrices (2016), Juan Carlos Zea’s El hijo del silencio (2017), and Lurgio Gavilán’s Memorias de un soldado desconocido (2017) showing that their “landscape photos” and “landscape narratives” might be wielded as a vehicle for anti-racist resistance, enacting a decolonial re-inscription of Conflict-impacted territories through memory. Taborelli’s work will discuss the rewritings of nineteenth-century José Hernandez and Esteban Echeverría’s Argentinian canonical texts in the novel Las Aventuras de la China Iron (2017) by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara and the play Las Cautivas (2021) by Mariano Tenconi Blanco. Taborelli’s main argument is that these works displace the image of the countryside as an empty space in which to establish the future of the nation, and create instead a picture of abundance, mixture, and rhythmic convergence with the river’s current. The topography of the river works as a metaphor to reimagine the national future and to consider the unrealized possibilities of the past as a source of futurity.
Haley Stewart and Irene Rihuete-Varea explore the entanglement of specific forms of temporality and the representation of the environment in contemporary Latin American visual and cinematic productions. Stewart will present on Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña’s precarios, a type of found-art made out of materials like ocean detritus and garbage that has been a repeated motif and form of making in her oeuvre. She will show how these meditations on precarity and evanescence have been key to Vicuña’s development of a cosmological idea of memory, and more broadly, to a cosmological turn in Chile’s postdictatorial context. For her, these precarios are best thought of as little ritual objects comparable to Andean ‘miniatures’ (Allen, 2016) intended to subtly rearrange the cosmic fabric through a cyclical and ephemeral relationship with time. Rihuete-Varea’s talk engages with slowness in Ana Vaz’s feature length documentary It is Night in America (2022), which portrays wild animals in the city of Brasilia. Rihuete-Varea argues for a critical reconsideration of slowness in Vaz's production of radical and unsuspected views on nonhuman beings. In the documentary, openness, narrative distortion and durational experimentation (the combination of uneventfulness and shock) foster, and problematize, the possibility of an ethical multispecies encounter. Rihuete-Varea reads the representation of animals in the film through a third option in contemporary debates in animal studies: the cinematic animal is not pure vulnerability (Pick, 2011) nor pure sign (Giorgi, 2014), it is the confirmation of an “out there” and the impossibility of reaching it. Narrative techniques associated with the impression of time and its modification are crucial in the film’s achievement of the uncanny affective layering that explores the intersection of the city of Brasilia, which is portrayed as a hallucinated modernist experiment, and the wildlife that has always been there.
During these presentations, we will investigate what contemporary productions make visible about our relationship with a mediated nature that is always rendered through specific temporal conditions: as memory, as future or as experienced time. We will explore how landscape is historicized and politicized, how the possibility of relation with the non-human animals that inhabit it is represented, and finally, we will analyze how the modes in which canonical works portray natural environments are reexamined to challenge positivist assumptions of linear time and an atemporal nature.