Counter-narratives of the Landscape in Four Acts: Magda Portal, Pedro Nel Gómez, Fernando Vallejo and Blanca Wiethuchter.
Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: This dissertation examines counter-narratives of landscape in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru considering two moments of crisis and political discontent: 1929 and 1989. The main purpose is to understand how these counter-narratives invalidate the exhaustion of the notion landscape as studied by metropolitan scholars such as Danis E. Cosgrove and M.J.T Mitchell. Inspired by Peruvian Gamaliel Churata and British English John Berger, this study initially enters in dialogue with the deconstruction of the landscape and then, prioritizing current trends, locates the conflictive configurations and coexistence of counter-landscapes that politically empower alterity. A specific examination of the last-named scenario takes place along four ashyncronic case-studies or "acts". The first analyzes the Peruvian avant-garde publication referred as the 'journal with four names' (1926-7) where Magda Portal, among others, alters the dominant landscape in order to politically empower Lima's peripheries. The second investigates the avant-garde Colombian artist Pedro Nel Gomez's mural artwork, within the context of the indigenist group "Los Bachués", and how his widely criticized ugliness turns into defiance of cultural harmony and hegemonic perceptions of the landscape. The third act examines Los días azules (1985) by the Colombian writer Fernando Vallejo in which the landscape disrupts the physical sequence of the landscape through the act of remembering. Finally, the fourth act studies Blanca Wiethüchter's poem Madera viva y árbol difunto (1982), in order to explain how the Andean landscape ruptures a naturalistic tradition that attempted to dominate people and places. I argue that each of these four discarded counter-narratives of the landscape questions the colonially-tamed gaze, and its impulse to homogenize cultures and dissidences. As such, instead of dismantling the notion of the landscape, this study will reinstate its social and marginal imaginaries by recognizing the materiality of landscape, and, most importantly the political role of imagination in shaping the sense of the real.
Author: Maurício Duarte
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2160711923