Avaliação: Historia del arte y la estética de las Américas: global y local – Beyond Borders: Testimonial Landscapes and the Art of Collective Memory Making in Latin America

Contemporary Latin American and Diasporic visual artists have frequently appropriated the body as a means of forming and transforming notions of personal and collective identity, often inserting themselves into the landscape as means of imagining place as a central aspect of Latinidad. This paper focusses on embodied approaches to landscape in photography and video art, considering key works by Laura Aguilar, Ana Mendieta, and Cecilia Vicuña. While these artists have often had their oeuvres read through eco-feminist contexts, this paper argues that their work includes broader considerations of cultural identity. In order to conduct more comprehensive analyses of these works and to acknowledge their participation in embodied forms of collective memory making across Latin America and its diaspora, this paper introduces testimonial landscape as a framework for studying visual approaches to landscape as a means of exploring marginalized and minoritized identities.

Unlike land art and eco-feminism, testimonial landscape addresses confessional aspects of works that relate directly to the landscape, building from testimonio to focus explicitly on visual manifestations of spatial connectedness as a means of cementing identity. Often viewed as a literary genre, testimonio is a strategy in which an individual acts as witness or protagonist for others who have experienced similar situations but were unable to give proper expression to them. Thus, this paper argues that works of testimonial landscape are those that participate in collective memory making for marginalized individuals via an artist’s explorations of the self through close contact with the land.

• Latin American Art
• Art and Memory
• Diaspora
• Testimonio
• Landscape