CONTEMPORARY ARGENTINE ART AND ECOLOGICAL CRISES

AN ABSTRACT

SUBMITTED ON THE 18 DAY OF APRIL 2013

TO THE DEPARTMENTS OF THE HISTORY OF ART AND

LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE SCHOOL OF

LIBERAL ARTS OF TULANE UNIVERSITY

FOR THE DEGREE

OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

BY

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– LISA CROSSMAN

APPROVED: ______THOMAS F. REESE, Ph.D. DIRECTOR

______MICHAEL PLANTE, Ph.D.

______ANTONIO GOMEZ, Ph.D.

______FLORENCIA BAZZANO- NELSON, Ph.D. ABSTRACT

This dissertation explores contemporary Argentine art that has responded to local environmental issues and global ecological crises. This text focuses on diverse works produced between the 1960s and the present by artists based in La Plata and Buenos

Aires. The projects analyzed in this study reveal the complexity of the concepts of nature, earth, land, environment and ecological crisis in contemporary society. They expose a series of interrelated issues and layers through which these concepts are defined. In order to designate the major approaches to ecological crises adopted by these artists, this study is divided into three sections, which denote distinct artistic methods and values: raising awareness: fighting against urban degradation; recuperation; and exploration. An analysis of individual works in relation to their central methods and contexts reveals a series of convergences and divergences.

I argue that my selection of artists’ works contended with the conflict caused by industrial development and neoliberal economic policies and/or reconsidered the concept of nature and individuals’ relationship to it, shifting the dialogue about the environment to questions of place, engagement and adaptability. Collectively these artists’ works present a multifaceted image of the environment and its relationship to people, which is shaped by both the nuances of a particular location and each site’s or artist’s connection to a broader international context.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The inception, creation, and completion of this dissertation were aided by the support of a number of institutions, artists, colleagues, advisers, and friends. To all who are listed below and to those who, for the sake of brevity, are not stated, I am immensely grateful for your support. I am indebted to Florencia Bazzano-Nelson for her encouragement and feedback on this project through all stages of its development. I am thankful for Thomas Reese’s role as the chair of my committee, during the writing and editing of this text. His thoughtful and thorough comments were invaluable. Michael

Plante and Antonio Gómez also offered insightful comments, which aided me in my revisions and will be useful in the future development of this text.

While Laura Murphy and Laura Malosetti Costa were not on my committee, I owe them both a great deal of thanks. Laura Murphy’s course on environment and development, my discussions with her during the initial stages of my project’s development and her participation in my comprehensive exams provided me useful information and feedback that I have continued to consider. Laura Malosetti Costa warmly welcomed me to Buenos Aires, discussed my evolving project, and helped to connect me with a number of artists whose works are the focus of this dissertation. Her assistance during the first part of my fieldwork was vital.

ii I am also indebted to all the artists who I worked with throughout the duration of this project: Mónica Millán, Teresa Pereda, Juan Pablo Ferlat, Alejandro Meitin, Silvina

Babich, Rafael Santos, Daniel Acosta, Joaquín Fargas and his assistants, Héctor Puppo,

Emiliano Causa and Andrea Juan. I am also grateful for Charly Nijensohn’s response to my inquiry. I hope to write more about his work in the future. I am appreciative of

Rodrigo Alonso’s suggestions, Isabel Plante’s thoughts and sharing of her dissertation with me.

My visit to Magdalena and tour of the coastline helped me to better understand the site and the circumstances and aftermath of the oil spill discussed in Chapter 3. I am thankful for Rafael Santos’s facilitation of this trip and the time that people took to meet with me and to show me around. Similarly, my visit to the Parque Hudson, participation in the Pachamama festival, and discussions with Rúben Ravera all helped to inform my understanding of SOS Tierra, which is held at this location. In my final days of follow-up fieldwork, Alejandra Fenochino and her husband brought me to Tecnópolis in August

2012, which was also informative.

During my fieldwork, I also utilized a number of archives and libraries. I am grateful for the support and patience of the personnel at each of the following institutions: the Museum of Modern Art Library (Manhattan and Queens), Fundación Espigas

(Buenos Aires), Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Museo Nacional de Bellas

Artes (Buenos Aires), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Latinoamericano (La Plata),

Biblioteca Nacional, Hemeroteca (Buenos Aires). I am grateful for the continued support of the departments of Latin American Studies and the History of Art at Tulane University

iii and to the School of Liberal Arts for the Summer Merit Fellowships, which helped fund my fieldwork and support my writing.

Finally, I owe all my friends and family many thanks for their patience and kindness. In particular, I am very grateful for the support of Derek Burdette, Cammie

Hill-Prewitt, Lillian Kass, my mother, Elise Dietrich, Miranda Lash, Kael Alford, and

Gwen Murray.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS …………………………………………………………...... ii

LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………….viii

PREFACE ……………………………………………………………………………...1

INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………………...7

Terms and Theoretical Paradigms I. Nature and Place……………………………………………………………………..12

II. Environment and Developmental …………………………………………………...21

III. Ecologies, Globalization and Ecological Crises………………………...... 25

IV. Contemporary Argentine Art ………………………………………………...... 30

Chapter Overview ……………………………………………………………………....35

RAISING AWARENESS: FIGHTING AGAINST URBAN DEGRADATION

CHAPTER 1: THE ROOTS OF ECOLOGICALLY CONSCIOUS ART IN ARGENTINA, 1960–1980 ………………………………………………………….....41

Landscape, Development and the Avant-Garde ……………………………………….44

Industrialization’s Social and Environmental Violence ……………………………….56

Ecological Action for a “Planetary Consciousness” …………………………………..65

Early Texts on the Urban Environment ……………………………………………….72

v CHAPTER 2: ACTION ART FOR ENVIRONMENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS ……...77

The Rise of the Environmental Movement and Art’s insertion into Public Space .…………………………………...... 80

Grupo Escombros: Nature and Human Rights ………………………………………...87

Uriburu: Green Art for Greenpeace ………………………………………...... 94

Acosta: Action Art, from La Boca to the Parque Hudson ...…………………………...101

Stereotypes and Celebrations of Nature: Strategies for Raising Consciousness ………………………………………...... 108

RECUPERATION

CHAPTER 3: CREATIVE RESPONSES TO ECOLOGICAL CRISES: DIALOGUE AND COMMUNITY …………………………………………………………………..117

Grupo Escombros: Poetry and Community ……………………………………………121

Ala Plástica: Creative Approaches to Expand Local Discussion of the Land ………....130

Ala Plástica and Rafael Santos’s Magdalena Project …………………………...... 137

Community and Dialogue ……………………………………………………………...144

CHAPTER 4: POETICS OF PLACE: MATERIALS, MEMORIES AND RITUALS ……………………………………...... 155

Past Representations of Rural Places and Indigenous Peoples ………………………...163

Pereda: Earth / Land ………………………………………………………………...... 171

Millán: Solitary Journeys in Nature ……………………..……………………………..181

Methods of Engagement and the Reconstitution of Place……...………………………190

EXPLORATION

CHAPTER 5: VISUALIZING ECOLOGICAL CRISES: LIMITS AND ADAPTATION…………………………………………………………199

vi Antarctica as a Global Symbol: Artist Residencies and Scientific Collaboration……...206

Juan: Catastrophe ………………………………………………………………………212

Fargas: Invention and Adaptation ……………………………………………………...225

Fargas and Grupo Proyecto Biopus: Virtual Possibilities ……………………………...231

Global Ecological Crises and Art’s Limits ………………………………………….....236

Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………..242

Bibliography ...…………………………………………………………………………332

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Nicolás García Uriburu, Vertical Coloration, Iguazú Falls, 1971. The Museum of Modern Art Library.

Figure 2. Exhibition photographs of Berni’s xylographs, Argentine Section in the Italian Pavilion, 31st International Art Exhibition, Venice, Italy,1962. Antonio Berni: A 40 años del premio de la XXXI Bienal de Venecia, 1962–2002 (Buenos Aires 2002), n.p.

Figure 3. Exhibition photographs of Berni’s xylographs, Argentine Section in the Italian Pavilion, 31st International Art Exhibition, Venice, Italy, 1962. Antonio Berni, n.p.

Figure 4. Antonio Berni, Inundación en el barrio de Juanito, oil and mixed-media, 186 x 124 cm, 1961. Antonio Berni (Buenos Aires, 1977), p. 92.

Figure 5. Antonio Berni, Juanito cazando pajaritos, 1961, xilo-collage, 174 x 128 cm Antonio Berni, Plate 50.

Figure 6. Antonio Berni, Juanito bañándose, 1961, xilo-collage, 194.5 x 145 cm. Antonio Berni, Plate 53.

Figure 7. Antonio Berni, Juanito pescando, 1962, xilo-collage. Antonio Berni, Plate 49.

Figure 8. Antonio Berni, Juanito pesca con red, 1962, xilo-collage. Antonio Berni, Plate 51. Figure 9. Antonio Berni, Juanito con pescado, 1961, xilo-collage, 169 x 126 cm. Antonio Berni, Plate 52.

Figure 10. Antonio Berni, Tormenta en la pampa, 1962, 160 x 110 cm. Antonio Berni, Plate 57.

Figure 11. Antonio Berni, Pampa y Cielo, 1962, 160 x 110 cm. Antonio Berni, Plate 58.

Figure 12. Nicolás García Uriburu, Coloration of the Grand Canal, Venice, 1968. Uriburu: Utopia of the South (Buenos Aires, 2001), p. 77.

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Figure 13. Barton Silverman, Photograph of Nicolás García Uriburu’s coloration in the East River, New York City, The New York Times, May 27, 1970. The Museum of Modern Art Library.

Figure 14. Nicolás García Uriburu, Portfolio (Manifesto), “Intercontinental Environment of the Waters,” 1973, Silkscreen, 75 x 55 cm. The Museum of Modern Art Library.

Figure 15. Nicolás García Uriburu, Latinoamérica reservas del futuro, 1973. Uriburu: Utopia of the South, p. 123.

Figure 16: Nicolás García Uriburu, Coloration, Puerto Madero, Dock 3, Buenos Aires, 1992. Uriburu. Utopía del bicentenario, 1810–2010: 200 años de contaminación (Buenos Aires, 2010), n.p.

Figure 17: Grupo Escombros, La Ciudad del Arte, Announcement, December 9, 1989, La Plata, Argentina. Fundación Espigas.

Figure 18: Grupo Escombros, Sutura on the cover of La Estética de la Solidaridad: Segundo Manifesto, December 9, 1989, La Plata, Argentina.

Figure 19: Grupo Escombros, Siembra, December 9, 1989, La Plata, Argentina. Fundación Espigas.

Figure 20: Grupo Escombros and Greenpeace América Latina, Flyer for Recuperar, 1990. Courtesy of Artist.

Figure 21: Grupo Escombros, Recuperar, Ciudad de Avellaneda, 1990. Courtesy of Artist.

Figure 22: Grupo Escombros, Crimen Seriado, La Plata, Argentina, June 10, 1995. Courtesy of Artist.

Figure 23: Grupo Escombros, Crimen Seriado, La Plata, Argentina, June 10, 1995. Courtesy of Artist.

Figure 24: Grupo Escombros, El Árbol, Crimen Seriado, La Plata, Argentina, June 10, 1995. Courtesy of Artist.

Figure 25: Greenpeace América Latina and Grupo Escombros Flyer, Map for Recuperar, 1990. Fundación Espigas.

Figure 26: Niclás García Uriburu, Tree Plantation, Avenida 9 de Julio, Buenos Aires, July 9, 1987. Uriburu: Utopia of the South, p. 220.

ix Figure 27: Nicolás García Uriburu, Basta de contaminar, left half of banner, 1999. Uriburu: Utopia of the South, p. 284.

Figure 28: Nicolás García Uriburu, Empresas Contaminantes Auspician, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2000. Uriburu: Utopia of the South, p. 282.

Figure 29: Nicolás García Uriburu, Utopía del Bicentenario: 200 años de contaminación, 1810–2010, mixed media, 106 x 128 cm. Uriburu. Utopía del Bicentenario, 1810–2010, p. 29.

Figure 30: Daniel Acosta, Riachuelo box, mixed-media, 1997–1998. Courtesy of Artist.

Figure 31: Grupo XI Ventanas, Proyecto Ria-Chuelo, La Boca, 1997–1998. Grupo XI Ventanas: Arte acción, 1996–2002 (Buenos Aires), n.p.

Figure 32: Grupo XI Ventanas, Quilmes Baja Temporada, Quilmes, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2001. Grupo XI Ventanas: Arte acción, 1996–2002, n.p.

Figure 33: Daniel Acosta and Paloma Acosta, Deriva, July 8, 2005, Riachuelo, La Boca, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Courtesy of Artist.

Figure 34: Daniel Acosta, Deriva, July 8, 2005, Riachuelo, La Boca, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Courtesy of Artist.

Figure 35: Daniel Acosta, Aire, 1st Festival del Aire, Vela de Coro, Venezuela, August 14, 2007. Daniel Acosta: Proyecto Terra, p. 29.

Figure 36: Grupo Escombros, Recuperar, 1990. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 37: Grupo Escombros, Agua S.O.S., 1990. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 38: Grupo Escombros, El árbol de la vida, organized in San Juan’s Plaza 25 de Mayo on November 4, 2010. Flyer. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 39: Grupo Escombros, El Sembrador de Soles, 2002. Pamphlet.

Figure 40: Grupo Escombros, Rascacielos, 1990. Proyectos para el desarrollo de los Países Bananeros según las Grandes Potencias, 11. The Museum of Modern Art Library, Queens.

Figure 41: Especies emergentes poster, Argentina, 1995. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 42: Ala Plástica exhibition, Valorización ecológica y cultural de los humedales del Delta del Paraná,’ Sala microespacio del Museo del Bellas Artes in La Plata, December 3, 2010. Courtesy of artist.

x Figure 43: Arrhythmias of Counter-Production: Engaged Art in Argentina, 1995–2011, exhibition poster. October 6, 2011–January 20, 2011, University Art Gallery, University of California at San Diego. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 44: Flyer for Colony Park public forum. Argentina. July 2011. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 45: Ala Plástica, Cartografía original Emergente del Relevamiento, 60 x 93 cm. 1999. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 46: Rafael Santos, Photograph of Magdalena oil spill, 1999–2007, video. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 47: Rafael Santos, Photograph of Magdalena oil spill, 1999–2007, video. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 48: Rafael Santos, Photograph of Magdalena oil spill, 1999–2007, video. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 49: Teresa Pereda, Páginas de artista, 2000. Four wood and glass boxes with soils from different regions of Argentina and inkjet text on handmade paper. Each object is 26 x 36 x 4 cm. Teresa Pereda. Tierra (Buenos Aires, 2008) p. 78. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 50: Teresa Pereda, El libro de las cuatro tierras, 1996–1998. Wooden box with a hand printed book on paper created from soils from Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Neuquén and Misiones provinces and cotton pulp. Box also contains four tubes with soil from these regions. Teresa Pereda. Tierra, p. 74. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 51: Teresa Pereda, Itinerario de un país, 1996–2006, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Raúl Lozza, 2007. Teresa Pereda. Tierra, p. 118-119. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 52: Mónica Millán, Petrona, pencil drawing on paper, 55 x 75 cm, 2012. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 53: Teresa Pereda, Recolección en el Salar: Cita en Jaruma, 2008. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 54: Teresa Pereda, Flores para un Desierto, part of Recolección en el Salar: Cita en Jaruma, 2008. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 55: Teresa Pereda, Recolección en la Amazonía: Cita en Morena, 2009. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 56: Mónica Millán, Si gano mucho como mucho, si gano poco como poco, pencil on paper drawing, 150 x 200 cm, 2008. Courtesy of Artist.

xi Figure 57: Mónica Millán, Picnic a Orillas del Paraná, installation, detail, 2007. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 58: Mónica Millán sitting in Picnic a Orillas del Paraná, 2007, textile, sound and light installation. Approximately 200 x 190 x 220 cm. The sounds were recorded during two trips to the Río Paraná (Posadas, Ombú, Colonia Polana-Posadas, Misiones) in February and March, 2004. Sound assemblage and publication: Mene Savasta Alsina. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 59: Mónica Millán, Paisaje Misionero, 2005. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 60: Mónica Millán, El Río Bord(e)ado, Photograph from Millán’s expedition down the Río Paraná, 2004. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 61: Mónica Millán, El Río Bord(e)ado, pencil drawing on paper, 130 x 104 cm, 2007. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 62: Mónica Millán, El Río Bordeado, La Línea Piensa, Exhibition view, Centro Cultural Borges, Buenos Aires, 2009. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 63: Mónica Millán, Guaridas in Vértigo de lo lento, Bienal del Cuenca, Ecuador, 2004. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 64: Vértigo de lo lento, in the exhibition Tales of Resistance and Change: Artists from Argentina, Frankfurter Kimstverein, 2010.

Figure 65: Mónica Millán, Photograph of Petrona, 2002, Yataity, Paraguay. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 66: Teresa Pereda, Recolección en el Bosque. Cita en Yatana, Bienal del Fin del Mundo, 2007. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 67: Teresa Pereda, Recolección en el Bosque. Cita en Yatana, Bienal del Fin del Mundo, 2007. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 68: Andrea Juan, Getting Over installation with artist, Teoría de la catástrofe, 2004, Espacio Fundación Telefónica, Buenos Aires. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 69: Andrea Juan, Estratos sonoros en la segunda fase de la teoría de la catástrofe, 2002. Andrea Juan: Getting Over: Hacía una nueva ilusión (Buenos Aires, 2004), p. 43. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 70: Andrea Juan, Instalación Azul, Getting Over, photo-objects, 2004, Andrea Juan: Getting Over: Hacía una nueva ilusión, p. 22. Courtesy of artist.

xii Figure 71: Andrea Juan, Metano, Bienal del Fin del Mundo, installation diagram, 2007 Andrea Juan, http://www.andreajuan.net. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 72: Andrea Juan, Metano, installation view, Bienal del Fin del Mundo, 2007. Andrea Juan, http://www.andreajuan.net. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 73: Andrea Juan, Metano, photograph, 2006. Assistant: Yanina El Kassisse, Collaboration: Roció Souto, Carlos Gutiérrez, Matilde González y Rubén Martinini. Andrea Juan, http://www.andreajuan.net. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 74: Andrea Juan, Metano, photograph, 2006. Andrea Juan: Proyecto Antártida, p. 28. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 75: Andrea Juan, Metano, photograph, 2006. Andrea Juan: Proyecto Antártida, p. 30. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 76: Andrea Juan, El bosque invisible: Serie Azul, 2009. Andrea Juan, http://www.andreajuan.net. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 77: Andrea Juan, El bosque invisible: Serie Patagonia, 2008. Andrea Juan, http://www.andreajuan.net. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 78: Andrea Juan, El bosque invisible: Serie Antártida, 2010. Andrea Juan, http://www.andreajuan.net. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 79: Andrea Juan, El bosque invisible, Antártida 3014, Serie Antártida, photograph, 2010. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 80: Andrea Juan, El Bosque Invisible, Antártida 2323, Serie Antártida, photograph, 2010. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 81: Andrea Juan, El Bosque Invisible: Serie Antártida, 2010. Andrea Juan, http://www.andreajuan.net. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 82: Joaquín Fargas, Sunflower – Centinela del Cambio Climático, Ushuaia, Bienal del Fin del Mundo, 2007. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 83: Joaquín Fargas, Don Quijote contra el Cambio Climático, from Proyecto Utopía, Sur Polar III, Universidad de Tres de Febrero, 2011. Photograph by Lisa Crossman.

Figure 84: Joaquín Fargas, Extinción – Creación, from Proyecto Utopía, Antarctica, 2011. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 85: Joaquín Fargas, Quiescencia, from Proyecto Utopía, still from one of the videos, Antarctica, 2011. Courtesy of artist.

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Figure 86: Joaquín Fargas, Don Quijote contra el Cambio Climático, Antarctica, 2011. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 87: Joaquín Fargas, Biogame, 2011 (Fargas, Crédito Ambiental information Packet).

Figure 88: Joaquín Fargas, Biosfera, 2006–2012, Courtesy of artist.

Figure 89: Grupo Proyecto Biopus, Coexistencia, 2011.

xiv 1

PREFACE

Several years ago, I began an investigation of artists’ responses to environmental problems in the Americas and the underlying values and ideas that shaped their works.

My interest was divided among artists working in New Orleans, where I’ve resided for the past seven years, those producing in other parts of the United States, and artists working in Latin America, to which significantly less scholarly attention than the aforementioned region has been devoted. I approached the subject with a broad focus. I read a range of interdisciplinary texts, developed an undergraduate class, and presented scholarly papers on the subject. My research, presentations, teaching and ensuing dialogue with other academics and my students encouraged my commitment to study ecologically conscious works that incite thoughtful reflections on “nature” as a fraught, pluralistic, and mutable term.

Art about the environment is riddled with inconsistencies, especially as artists who have produced such works are not part of a single movement or united by the same concern with the environment. I thus adopted an open eco-critical approach to this inquiry, exploring the manifold concept of the environment as defined through intersecting notions of land, earth, and nature as materials, ideas, places, and ecological issues. I elected not to confine my research to works by artists who exclusively defined

2 their practice as “ecological,” which expanded my scope even further in order to expose how ecological reflections by visual artists often also engage with other themes such as history, human rights, science, and personal experience. I began my work with a number of questions (each of which exposed the challenges of scale and plurality): How does one write a comprehensive text on an idea as complex as the environment, which is physically manifest and codified by particular histories, economic conditions, politics, changing scholarly and scientific positions, and variable expressions in cultural production? How does one deconstruct a term that has innumerable applications and that has often been ensnared by the myth of a singular, universal understanding, value or expression? How are “nature” and current moments and definitions of ecological crises culturally contingent? How do they respond to local and international contexts? I continued to consider these questions throughout my dissertation research and writing, seeking to balance these deliberations with analyses of specific works of art produced by artists residing in two neighboring cities in Argentina: La Plata and Buenos Aires.

Scholarship focused on ecologically conscious works produced in Latin America has centered on a few artists, as is the case with Óscar Mauricio Ardila Luna ’s La imposibilidad de la naturaleza: Arte y naturaleza en el arte colombiano contemporáneo,

1991–2003 (2007), or one, as is the case with Pierre Restany’s Uriburu: Utopia of the

South (2001). The lack of an open-ended, comprehensive text that focused on the works of a number of artists reinforced my drive to pursue this topic and inspired me to create a text that captured the range of work produced by artists in Argentina.

This nation seemed an apt choice due to the notoriety of Nicolás García Uriburu

(b. 1937) and the ample scholarship on other topics related to art production since the

3

1960s. However, this selection also posed a significant challenge as “nature” and ecological issues in the visual arts are more of an exception than a common trend, despite the increasing number of artists and curators who have begun to reflect on these themes.

In my prior graduate research on the art history of Argentina, I quickly realized that

Buenos Aires was, and continues to be, central to cultural and political life. In considering art since the 1960s, I wondered where art about environmental concerns or people’s relationship to it fit between concrete abstraction and socially conscious, conceptual responses to unstable political conditions and humanitarian issues. Amidst a series of other political and economic crises, the environment could seem superfluous, especially as there has not been a national crisis over natural resources.

From the inception of my investigation, scale, time, and organization posed major obstacles. I experimented with different frameworks that narrowed this expansive, interdisciplinary topic based on a sub-theme or geographical boundaries, settling on a project defined by a confined geographical space (a nation) in order to limit the variables.

I elected to focus on Argentina due to my desire to examine people’s complicated relationship to the natural environment in a place that is often considered devoid of environmental work or to be home to only one significant ecologically conscious artist. In

2009, I learned of the collective Ala Plástica (and former member Rafael Santos), which was gaining academic attention in the United States through the scholarship of art historian Grant Kester.1 Through the investigation of primary materials (newspapers, exhibition catalogues, art journals and reviews, and talking to artists, curators and historians in Buenos Aires), I formed a list of artists who had centered on an iteration of

1 I met Rafael Santos at A Studio in the Woods, a local artist residency program, in 2009. We discussed the work of other collectives such as Grupo Escombros and Grupo Etcétera.

4

“nature” and that seemed to respond to an ecological crisis (defined as either an event or enduring conditions that were often embedded within broader ruminations) in their work.

My selection reflected diversity in approaches and foci, centering on the premise of ecological crises. This heterogeneous selection revealed the significance of national context and each artist’s navigation and engagement with the art scene in Buenos Aires and abroad. It soon became apparent that local, national, regional, and international contexts specific to each artist’s work and approach to both nature and art were significant. Furthermore, art and the environment, as distinct and vast concepts, posed two separate poles that intersected and that were negotiated in varying ways by selected artists.

Another challenge inherent in this project was that of writing on contemporary art, which is still in the process of evolving and did not permit me, as researcher, a temporal distance from focal works. While my narrative begins with a chapter on the

1960s, the majority of my dissertation focuses on work produced between the 1990s and

2012. My research was also limited by time and funding. I only had approximately three months of funding in 2011 to conduct research in La Plata and Buenos Aires in addition to a brief follow-up trip the following summer. The Internet was a valuable resource in that it granted me a means to continue correspondence with artists and in that many resources applicable to their works are digital. Still, my work would have benefited from a prolonged visit. I shaped my study around artistic methods and intentions as a means to reflect on how and why ecologically conscious works have been produced in Argentina since the 1960s.

5

Critical reviews and scholarship available on each artist also varied greatly.

Uriburu has received an enormous amount of popular and critical press for his colorations, which he has produced throughout the world since 1968. Yet, with a few exceptions, much of this literature presents a superficial account of these actions. Ala

Plástica has principally been written about by U.S. scholars and has been granted little local recognition by art institutions. Scholarship on Grupo Escombors has focused on their work in relation to other issues, such as their use of public space or the group’s entire body of work, which centers more on social injustice and participatory art that serves as a symbol of democracy. Daniel Acosta has remained outside of the international spotlight and has attracted sporadic attention from critics for his own work and for his involvement with SOS Tierra. Most of the materials I acquired about his work were self- generated or associated with exhibitions. U.S. anthropologist Arnd Schneider and local critics have written about Teresa Pereda’s art, focusing on her work’s ties to national identity and her use of earth as a physical and symbolic material. Her performances have also been superficially connected to relational aesthetics. Critical texts on the art of

Mónica Millán, Andrea Juan, Joaquín Fargas and Proyecto Grupo Biopus principally appear in exhibition catalogues and local publications. Each artist has also generated his or her own material and explanations of his or her work.

While I analyzed the critical reception and the scholarly interpretations, many gaps were filled by my own discussions with artists, their materials and an examination of the works themselves. In some instances, such as my investigation of long, involved projects like Ala Plástica’s work in Magdalena, I measured the artists’ accounts against publicity about the oil spill, my informal discussions with locals, my visit to Magdalena

6 in 2011, and the theory of dialogical aesthetics which the group employs as a means to explain their work as art. Similarly, my analysis of SOS Tierra was limited to accounts by

Rubén Ravera, director of the Parque Ecológico y Cultural Guillermo Enrique Hudson,

Acosta, the pamphlet and blogs that he produced, and my visit to the park in 2011. My knowledge of Pereda’s interactions with local community members is also based on her recollections. There are, however, video documents of her gallery performances.

Millán’s, Pereda’s and Juan’s works respond to the nuances of sites that I have never visited and only came to know through each artist’s own materials and other scholarship.

My reliance on the artists’ words and the constraints of time create certain limitations and shifted the scope of my analysis to the artists’ intentions, rather than to the reception of the works.

In all instances, I adopted an eco-critical approach to these works and asked questions that were intended to uncover the values they attached to the environment and the factors shaping their definitions and approaches to ecological crises and nature. Each chapter reflects a reading of multiple artists’ works against each other and a common theme. Each chapter incorporates pertinent contextual information and theory to help frame selected works and to assist with my analyses of them, explaining how artists navigated scale, time, cross-disciplinary concerns, and the dynamic concepts of environment and ecological crises. This dissertation represents an initial attempt to produce a text on “Contemporary Argentine Art and Ecological Crises.” In many ways, it represents more of a beginning than an end to this study.

7

INTRODUCTION

Ecological crisis has manifested itself as part of globalization. It has taken on various permutations, referring to the critical threat of environmental disasters and the dysfunctional relationships that societies have developed with the natural environment.

As contemporary artists grapple with local circumstances and global institutions and phenomena, their responses to the environment and ecological crises are incredibly diverse. Linda Weintraub’s recent text To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet includes a series of schematics that explore the primary features of works by the artists covered in her book: art strategies, genres, eco issues, and eco approaches.1 Her diagrams demonstrate the difficulty of categorizing contemporary art as a field and “eco art”—a designation that many artists have shirked despite the environmental focus of their work.

They also reveal that each artist’s approaches and concerns are varied, meaning that the work of few artists referenced in the diagrams can be described solely as having one concern or adhering to one genre. Weintraub’s multifocal approach alludes to the elusiveness of art, environment, and ecological crisis as concepts.

1 Linda Weintraub, To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012).

8

Environmental art2 developed in the late 1960s and 1970s, emerging with renewed vigor in the early 1990s, and again resurfacing in recent years. The terms of the dialogue during each of these periods was connected to stages of the environmental movement, current artistic trends, and advancements in technology and scientific understandings of nature. Scholarship on environmental art was centered on production in the United States and Europe, the locations of its first concentrated development.

Weintraub’s text offers a survey of artists since the 1960s who have worked on environmental themes throughout the world, expanding the geographic scope of environmental considerations. This survey, like other recent scholarship, points to an erosion of barriers and an expansion of the categories of environment and art.3

In this dissertation, I will focus on how contemporary Argentine artists, working in La Plata and Buenos Aires, have responded to local environmental issues or the idea of an ecological crisis. My approach aligns with the tradition of eco-criticism, as my investigation centers on how artists define, value and align the environment with human experience.4 I selected artists from one nation in order to elucidate the importance of place and local circumstances, despite the increasingly complex and transnational quality

2 Environmental art is an umbrella term. Ecological art is often used to characterize art that addresses environmental problems and is intended to function politically either through intervention or reflection. I consciously use the term “ecological art” only in incidents when artists or collectives define their work as such. If an artist does not refer to his or her work as “ecological art,” but it does address such themes, I have elected to refer to it as a work that addresses ecological issues.

3 Kirsten Swenson, “Land Use in Contemporary Art” and Janet Kraynak “The Land and the Economics of Sustainability.” Art Journal 69, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 15-25.

4 Cheryl Glotfelty, The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996). Eco-criticism began to be published in the United States in the 1970s, referring to critical examinations of the way that nature, the relationship between people and nature or that of nature and culture are articulated in literature. This mode of critical inquiry itself constitutes a diverse number of approaches to the topic of the natural environment in cultural production.

9 of contemporary art. Argentina serves as a significant focal site due to the early, innovative environmental work of Nicolás García Uriburu, the critiques of development supported by Jorge Glusberg, and the integration of nature into some works by artists associated with the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) in the 1960s. I also selected

Argentina as a means to assert the critical importance of opening the dialogue about contemporary art and ecological crises to include a discussion of locations that are peripheral to past ecological hotspots. While the Amazon was a central concern for

Uriburu and for critic Pierre Restany, and Antarctica for artist Andrea Juan, most of the artists in this dissertation create work that addresses Argentina’s urban and rural environments. These artists attempt to create projects that consider “nature” as more than an isolated entity to be preserved or reconstructed, envisioning it as part of complex local sites and global environmental conditions.

The longstanding centrality of Buenos Aires and periodic tumultuous political climate in Argentina rightly led to visual artists and the urban public granting more attention to the topics of development, the city and politics than to “nature.” Natural resources were relatively abundant, land ownership was associated with the wealthy and later foreigners, and the provinces were historically deemed inferior. Additionally, in a review of the Bienal del Fin del Mundo (2007), Argentine art historian Teresa Riccardi observed, “At present, environmental legislation and scientific investigation, at least in

Argentina, fail to make their presence felt or, one might say, to be active in our every day community. In other words, they fail in helping to design ways for us to think and move in such a diversified world.”5 Her quote affirms the presence of a general apathy for the

5 Teresa Riccardi, “1st Biennial of the End of the World,” LatinArt.com (2007), 1. 10 environment in Argentina. Only a minority of artists and associations seek to make this issue visible. Yet, their significance within the international spectrum and their persistent attention to the environment offer insight into the growing impact of grassroots actions and the increasing number of texts, art and exhibitions about the environment. Uniting their disparate projects together in this dissertation creates a web-like construction that is testament to the contested notion of the natural environment, which continues to be realized through modern and postmodern lenses.

This dissertation analyzes not only the work of Argentine artists who have offered a humanistic critique of the urban ecosystem, considering development’s negative outcomes, but also those who have united considerations of the natural environment with those of human rights, identity and global phenomena. The complexity of the issues and range of methods, motivations, values and locations of these projects form a network that consists of a series of independent works. Artist and critic Luis Camnitzer has described the difficulty of defining conceptual practice in the region:

In fact, to describe the Latin American situation with precision, the closest thing would probably be one of those enormous rhizomatic configurations that can go underground and span several (small) countries, popping up everywhere as what we visually identify as mushrooms.6

This metaphor is also fitting for this study in that it underscores the distinction of each artist’s work, as well as the importance of the common ground from which they’ve sprouted. This study positions a selection of artists’ projects as loosely interconnected examples, which brings these works into dialogue with one another, seeking to privilege the heterogeneous and non-hierarchical.

6 Luis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 12. 11

This dissertation will demonstrate that nature is perpetually thought through a series of oppositions that are tied to the nostalgic desire of an imagined nature and the reality of its condition. My sampling of artists’ works expound the primacy of three intertwined issues: the disconnection between Buenos Aires and surrounding areas, which has endorsed the idea that nature is an object to be exploited or disregarded; conflict caused by industrial development and neoliberal economic policies; and the need to reconsider the relationship between science and art, technology and nature.7 Each artist or collective grapples with these ideas. When considered together, the works discussed in this dissertation promote a multifaceted image of the natural environment and its relationship to people.

Underlying my investigation is my interest in unraveling how nature is constructed; in other words, how is it represented, used, regulated, valued and what motivates people to seek environmental change. The theoretical backdrop for this investigation derives from work by scholars outside of Argentina, some of whom have engaged directly with the artists I will discuss, and others whose scholarship offers important parallels that help to contextualize my focal artists’ works within the global sphere. In Argentina, studies on the history of the environment, environmental movement, and representations of landscape in the visual arts are the exception.8 The few existing studies about the environmental movement in Argentina and the history of

7 In this text, neoliberalism is considered in terms of the implementation of neoliberal economic policies in Argentina and in much of Latin America in the 1990s. These policies were characterized by increased privatization, foreign investment, decrease in state welfare, and deregulation, including decreased legal protections of the natural environment.

8 For example, Laura Malosetti Costa approaches her analysis of landscape in terms of its absence in “Politics, Desire and Memory in the Construction of Landscape in the Argentine Pampas,” Journal of Visual Art Practice 5, no. 1 and 2 (2006): 107-119.

12 environmental policy provided me with significant context.9 The subsequent pages of this dissertation will establish the theories that shaped my consideration of the terms nature, land, environment, and ecology, explaining how each fits within the parameters of this study.

This investigation relies on primary sources, including artist documents such as unpublished writings and interviews, contemporary newspapers and journals, and exhibition catalogues. It takes into account the artists’ perspectives and the critical and theoretical work of other historians and critics. My approach seeks to negotiate the local and international, and to utilize the inherent flexibility of these artists’ approaches through an interdisciplinary contextualization of this topic. The artworks themselves remain central to the direction of this dissertation and each chapter. In order to frame the discussion of contemporary Argentine art and ecological crises, this introduction offers a critical overview of significant theoretical considerations of nature and place (or site), environment and development, ecologies and ecological crisis, and contemporary

Argentine art.

TERMS AND THEORETICAL PARADIGMS

I. Nature and Place

What is nature and what are the limits of the terms that have been used to describe it? Nature has many meanings, often referring to the notion of some earthly “essence”

9 In particular, Antonio Elio Brailovsky and Dina Foguelman’s Memoria Verde: Historia ecológica de la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1991) and Graciela S. Melitsko’s “The Emergence of Environmental Activism in the City of Buenos Aires: Citizen’s Movement on Toxic Contamination” (master’s thesis, Tufts University, 2007) presented pertinent background information on the history of land use and regulation of natural resources, as well as some outcomes and reactions to these policies. 13 that exists around us, including scenery comprised of such living things as trees and flowers. Scientific studies, religion and visual representations all shape cultural understandings of nature. These constructions are complicated by the conflict that exists between need and desire, between the physical reality of the world and the complex meanings that are attached to it, and between local understandings of it and knowledge of its vast, global scale.

A careful analysis of theoretical reflections on nature implies the instability of it as a concept and the uncertainty of what this term means today. The most useful perspectives for my work reflect diverse disciplinary considerations by scholars from the

United States and Europe; they were selected as examples that highlight the theoretical trends that are driven by cultural and/or ethical motivations. They include British philosopher Kate Soper and geographer Maria Kaika, U.S. scholar of environmental ethics and public policy Andrew Light, French sociologist and anthropologist Bruno

Latour, and Spanish painters José Luis Albelda and José Saborit, who have critically interrogated nature as an overdetermined concept. Kaika and Light have explored this concept in relation to place and to contemporary environmental art. In particular, Kaika examined nature’s connection to the city, probing how nature has been framed in the modern era. In City of Flows: Modernity, Nature and the City (2004), she argued that

“nature” and the “city” are “hybrids,” which demand a simultaneous consideration of the built and natural environment.10 Her testament of nature as “hybrid” recalls Donna

Haraway’s assertion of nature as “cyborg” or Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s vision

10 Maria Kaika, City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and City (Routledge: New York, 2004). 14 of it as a “machine.”11 These models blur the distinctions between the natural and the artificial.

In Kaika’s article, “The End of ‘Pre-Modernity’: Nature as Progress’s Frontier,” she continues her analysis of these concepts, arguing that nature was “constructed not only as ‘the other’ to human civilization, but also as ‘the other’ to human settlements or cities.”12 She ascribes a “double coding of nature” that constitutes the foundation of past and contemporary constructions, considering it as a model for “superior moral and ecological order” and as “barbarian, wild and uncivilized.”13 According to Kaika, nature is part of a nostalgic past that often reinforces its present invisibility in the urban center.

Although she focuses on Western cities, her work has particular relevance for my study of Buenos Aires where a similar omission of nature emerged against the processes of settlement and industrialization.

In the nineteenth century, such elite figures as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento

(president of Argentina, 1868–1974) “continued to present cities as civilizing nodes in a countryside capable of engendering only barbarism.”14 Buenos Aires was, as Angel Rama has attested, a “lettered city” (the seat of literary production, the state, and a national ideology steeped in urbanism and the mythologizing of the frontier) and the cosmopolitan core of the nation. The landed oligarchy and the army seized frontier land from

11 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge: New York, 1991), 1-4. Ronald Bogue, “A Thousand Ecologies,” in Deleuze/Guattari & Ecology, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2009), 46.

12 Maria Kaika, “The End of ‘Pre-Modernity’: Nature as Progress’s Frontier,” in Groundworks: Environmental Collaboration in Contemporary Art (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University, 2005), 60.

13 Ibid., 62.

14 Angel Rama, The Lettered City, trans. and ed. John Charles Chasteen (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996), 12. 15 indigenous peoples, placing these territories under the control of the wealthy.15 Land was not accessible to the broader public, imbuing the term with social and economic connotations linked to privilege. Still, the rural areas, although considered inferior to the city, assumed an important role in the construction of a national identity. Nature was a significant trope in nineteenth-century literature and later in film.

Modernity enforces conceptions of land as territory. It is defined as a resource that is known through labor and ownership. Natural areas have been fragmented and compartmentalized into usable parts; and the value of a place has often been determined by its economic worth. Andrew Light’s essay “Environmental Art and the Recovery of

Place, ” discusses projects by artists that were part of the exhibition Groundworks:

Environmental Collaboration in Contemporary Art (2005), in whose catalogue his essay and Kaika’s appear. He asked, “Why do we come to the conclusion that some places are more important than others?”16 He observed that many contemporary artists, including such groups as Ala Plástica, began to work in sites that were previously overlooked in global considerations of the environment, offering a nuanced vision of other areas and asserting their value. This essay commended those who consider nature beyond the constraints of a pristine “wilderness,” arguing that framing environmental issues in terms of place ties them to local values, which makes them digestible and meaningful.17 Light’s discussion of the environmental movement, which is based on its development in the

15 Ibid., 54.

16 Andrew Light, “Environmental Art and the Recovery of Place,” in Groundworks, 49. He cites Environmental Historian William Cronon’s essay “The Trouble With Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” The New York Time Magazine (1995). Principally he is discussing the environmental movement, noting how the environmental justice movement sought to integrate social issues with natural ones.

17 Ibid., 53.

16

United States, is productive because it argues that the consideration of place is significant in that it promotes attention to areas throughout the world that are not readily associated with conservation sites and can lead to a growing valuation of a more diverse selection of locales beyond their utility as productive landscapes.18 He stressed the ability of individual stories, such as oral histories or visual documentation, to shift the abstract to the personal and concrete. Stories make others understand or sense why a place is significant.

The artists selected for analysis in this dissertation frame nature in relation to place either through the literal use of a public site or through representation of a specific locale. For them, it is because nature is tied to life (local and global, social and cultural) that it gains significance. All of their works are about nature as a mutating component of place that is understood through human experience. Nature’s integration into the city and modern life complicate the notion of nature and its current significance. The idea of place as an inclusive, dynamic environment is perhaps, as Light suggested, an apt way to reframe “nature” and to liberate it from opaque, essentialized visions of it.

Postmodern theorists have argued for the deconstruction and destabilization of nature as a culturally constructed concept and shifted the discourse to explorations of the tensions that exist between nature’s physical manifestation and conceptual constructions of it. In La construcción de la naturaleza (1997), which investigated how artists, activists, and advertising agencies have represented this concept, Albelda and Saborit

18 Mick Smith argued that postmodernism is a part of modernism and that modernism’s drive is to exceed all limits. His goal was to link individuals to sites, adding a rootedness to the fragmentary quality of postmodern theories. An Ethics of Place: Radical Ecology, Postmodernity, and Social Theory (State University of New York Press: Albany, 2001).

17 deconstructed “nature.”19 They sought not to reframe nature, but to understand its cultural complexity and how visual representations reinforce these understandings. The theoretical opposition of postmodernism and ecology’s framings of nature were eloquently interrogated by Soper in her essay “Nature/ ‘Nature’” (1996), which critiqued postmodernism’s deconstructivist strategies. Soper argued that postmodern theorists too often reduce nature to its discursive construction, considering it as “existing only in the chain of the signifier.”20 She further asserted that ecology’s, in its broader cultural application, endorsement of a universal model is unproductive in that it limits a plural understanding of nature, even if it was helpful in that it emphasizes its materiality.

Postmodernism’s fractured, ethereal imagining of nature poses an obstacle to practical action.21 Ecology grounds nature through an emphasis on its physical reality and allows one to attach value through its wholeness, whereas postmodernism offers a critical edge and a nuanced understanding of the flexibility and instability of culture’s discursive construction of nature. Both methods, Soper suggests, have something to gain from the other.

Latour opposes the image of nature as a singular, essential concept and argues that the notion of “nature” as universal and culture as particular is outmoded.22 In Politics of

Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004), he proposed a reevaluation of

19 José Albelda and José Saborit, La construcción de la naturaleza (Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana, 1997).

20 Kate Soper, “Nature / ‘Nature,’” FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture, ed. George Robertson, et al (London: Routledge, 1996), 22.

21 Gentiane Belanger, “Points of Interest at the Center for Land Use Interpretation: A Tour in the Margins of Social Ecology,” (master’s thesis, Concordia University, 2008), 50, 54 and 65. She cites Brian Wallis’s position that ecological art engages the viewer directly through “participatory aesthetics.”

22 Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Harvard University Press: Cambridge and London, 2004), 48 and 49.

18 political ecology by examining the connections between nature, science and politics. His conclusion demanded the need for the disintegration of barriers between these concepts:

“. . . we will have to deal simultaneously with the sciences, with natures, and with politics in the plural.”23 His quote affirms the mutability of these concepts and the complex manner in which they take form and inform one another. They are subjected not only to the forces of globalization, which are defined by institutions that drive its processes, but also by local circumstances. His text assessed the tension amongst objectivity, subjectivity, and values in shaping the manner through which individuals come to know nature and to act.24

Since the 1960s, artists have similarly grappled with the concept of nature, but through more secular lenses than in earlier eras. Some have strategically sought to represent nature’s essence, presuming that there is an intrinsic, universal code through which one can understand nature. This method has poetic potential in its intention to show the global scale and significance of nature, but it also has limitations and can err on the side of cliché. German artist Joseph Beuys, whom Nicolás García Uriburu cited as an influential peer, created distinct means of facing the challenge of counteracting modernity’s Enlightenment-based vision of the land through performances that sought to imbue nature with a spiritual significance. His legacy is shaped by these cryptic performances, his theorization of social sculpture, and practical, environmental actions such as tree planting. In “Contradictory Modernities: Conceptions of Nature in the Art of

23 Ibid.. 3. Political Ecology is a theoretical approach that assesses the human impact on the natural environment through considerations of historical, political and social systems. Nature is understood as an integrated part of a local system, rather than as a universal construct.

24 Ibid., 4.

19

Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter,” geographer Matthew Gandy assessed the relationship between nature and modernity in the work of Beuys, arguing that “for Beuys, nature holds innate meanings capable of guiding human thought and action.”25 Gandy, like Albelda and Saborit, critically examined the value that is placed on nature in comparison to symbols of modernity and provided insight into the foundational importance of a partly-essentialist artistic representation of discourses on nature that are rooted in pre-modern or non-urban constructions of nature.26 In other words, the assignment of alternative modes of value, be they based on tradition, religion, or myth, has the potential to frustrate the highly rational, technocratic approach to the environment that modernism endorses. Still, the efforts of ecologically conscious individuals to define nature’s “essence” as the antithesis of modernity are not entirely productive. Rather than placing nature in opposition to modernity, the two need to be examined jointly. Nature is a flexible and hybrid entity that is indeed plural in its physical form and conceptual imagining.

Both the material reality of the natural environment and abstract perceptions of nature are specific to location and context. In considering these theoretical positions on

“nature” and environment in relation to their manifestations in Latin America, it is necessary to also make clear the region’s own adaptation of theories of modernism and

25 Matthew Gandy, “Contradictory Modernities: Conceptions of Nature in the Art of Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87, no. 4 (December 1997), 636.

26 Gandy, “Contradictory Modernities,” 637. Gandy argued for the need for a dialectical conception of nature that supersedes “ . . . the empty polarity between various social constructivist conceptions of nature and the predominance of purely biophysical and essentialist conceptions of nature that permeate political discourse in wider society.” Gandy states that “Essentialist discourses of nature are distant echoes of a pre-modern era, yet these mythical strands of meaning persist because of the innate complexities of relations between society and nature under late modernity.”

20 postmodernism to suit local experiences. Much scholarship about Latin America, produced within and outside of the region, posits that modernization and modernism, postmodernism, democracy, and the conditions for cultural production evolved differently than in other parts of the world such as the United States and Europe.27

Postmodern conceptions of cultural production in Latin America have also been read in terms of the distinct manner in which modernity and modernization, as separate phenomena, have been conceived and experienced in the region.28

As these theoretical paradigms and the actual experiences of development, democracy, and culture are contingent upon local contexts, it is inevitable that the value of nature and the development of an environmental movement and its principle tenets vary as well. Despite these variations, the environment has been partly shaped by outside forces and artists interact within international networks. Throughout this dissertation, the natural environment and ecological crises will be considered based on both local and international contexts and theories, alluding to the distinctions and similarities that exist between contemporary artists working in Argentina and those based in other regions.

27 For example, see Nelly Richard, “Cultural Alterity and Decentering” in The Postmodern in Latin and Latino American Cultural Narratives: Collected Essays and Interviews, ed. Claudia Ferman (New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1996), 7 and 3. Néstor García Canclini, “Modernity after Postmodernity,” in Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America, ed. Gerardo Mosquera (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). Canclini, like other scholars, draws attention to Latin American artists’ negotiation of the local and international in their works. José Joaquín Brunner, “Notes on Modernity and Postmodernity in Latin American Culture,” in The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, eds. Ana del Sarto, Alicia Ríos, and Abril Trigo (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 298. Brunner also argued that it is unproductive to imagine that modernity is experienced or perceived in the same way by all.

28 For instance, see Gerardo Mosquera, “Postmodernity: Art and Politics in Latin America,” Art Nexus 22 (October–December, 1996): 70.

21

II. Environment and Development

The question of how nature is imagined in Argentina is tied to considerations of modernity, including freedom and industrialization. The term environment alludes to the human dimensions of nature. Environment, like environmental art, serves as an umbrella term that encapsulates the built and natural elements that define a given place. In

“Radical Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique”

(2008), sociologist and historian Ramachandra Guha reflected on the differences between environmentalism in nations such as the United States and Germany and in

“underdeveloped” nations. He argued that environmentalism “is [often] a question of sheer survival, not of enhancing the quality of life.”29 Thus, rather than fighting for the preservation of natural reserves, many ecologically concerned groups struggle to give rural populations greater access to the land and the right to choose what happens to areas that are increasingly being controlled by urban institutions and multinational corporations. In Argentina, the environmental movement initially coalesced around urban contamination and the perils of rapid, informal development. On a macro-level the environment is often considered in relation to political and economic structures that are tied to studies of poverty, and on a micro-level it is frequently explored in terms of individual lifestyle choices.30 Similar to the theoretical interrogation of the relationship between nature and culture, development is inextricably bound to environment.

29 Ramachandra Guha, “Radical Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” in Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application, fifth ed., eds. Louis P. Pojman, and Paul Pojman (Belomnt, CA: Thomas Wadsworth, 2008): 344.

30 Ibid., 340.

22

Development has shaped the current condition of the environment. It is an integral part of international economic policy and globalization. In 1949, Harry S. Truman first annunciated the need to alleviate poverty in “underdeveloped” nations in his inaugural address; this rhetoric shifted to sustainable development after the World Commission of

Environment and Development’s publication of the Brundtland Report in 1987.

Wolfgang Sachs in Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power outlines the etymology of development and its embedded connotations, arguing that it is based on a Western-centric model.31 Similarly, he historicizes concern with the environment in terms of development, demonstrating that the 1970s oil crisis brought international attention to the limitation of natural resources and the need for environmental regulations.32 Sachs asserted that “environment” constitutes a particular construction of

“nature” that is based on a consideration of nature as an “object of politics and planning.”33

Theories of sustainable development advocated for the environment to be studied in relation to poverty. Rather than ignoring environmental concerns in the pursuit of increased economic opportunity through industrialization, sustainable development became a mutable term that evidenced an awareness of the problems that unchecked industrialization had posed to “underdeveloped” regions with minimal regulations. The goals of environmental action, in a global context, thus shifted from an emphasis on

31 Also, see Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, trans. Patrick Camiller (London and New York: Zed Books, 1997) advocates the local responses to development–globalization and Richard Peet and Elaine Hartwick, Theories of Development: Contentions, Arguments, Alternatives, 2nd ed. (London and New York: The Guilford Press, 2009).

32 Wolfgang Sachs, “Environment,” in The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, ed. Wolfgang Sachs (London and New York: Zed Books, 2010), 26.

33 Ibid., 33.

23 conservation to one that envisioned sustainability as part of the process of economic expansion and construction of added infrastructure.34

The rhetoric of sustainable development, however, does not in itself ensure improved land use policies or even offer a renewed vision of the modern paradigm that drives a detached perspective of the environment as a resource. Anthropologist Arturo

Escobar has noted that since the 1980s, scholars and policy makers have adopted an objectifying view that has been turned toward nature, envisioning it as a resource and commodity that was legitimized by the discourse of sustainable development.35 While sustainable development adopts an ecologically conscious approach, its application continues to be defined by the marketability of nature. Sustainability, as many scholars have recognized, has become a marketing motto used to purport an ethical position—a concern with the state of the planet’s environment. Sustainable development represents a commendable paradigmatic shift, as it offers a more complicated assessment of poverty and ecologically conscious position on development, but there are still shortcomings, as its rhetoric is often not supported by action.

The idea of sustainability has also been incorporated into critical writings on contemporary art. Sustainable art was used as another designation for art that, as design historian Victor Margolin defined it, engages with the land or landscape, employs recycling as an artistic method, or “responds to social justice through the production of objects or discourse.”36 The art analyzed in this dissertation is most notably guided by

34 Kraynak, “The Land and the Economics of Sustainability,” 20.

35Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994), 155.

24 engagement with the land or landscape and/or a united concern with the environment and social justice.

Grassroots movements formed throughout Latin America, beginning in the 1980s in opposition to theories and ideologies that govern international development institutions like the World Bank that posited universal, technocratic solutions to local problems.

Grassroots movements problematize globalization through local considerations and actions, also considering how one place relates to another. Some artists have adopted similar strategies. Scholarship too has begun to redirect studies of Latin America by focusing on social movements’ responses to poverty and the disparity of social welfare.37

In general, these groups coalesce around a single issue such as the natural environment or gender inequality. Wolfgang Sachs, like Escobar in his Encountering Development: The

Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995), offered a poststructural reconsideration of nature and development, providing a critical, historical analysis of development from its inception in the postwar era to the rise of postdevelopment in the

1980s.38 Escobar described development as a “regime of representation” that was defined by “places of encounter where identities are constructed and also where violence is originated, symbolized and managed.”39 Development was based on vertical systems of

36 Victor Margolin, “Reflections on Art and Sustainability,” in Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2005), 20-30.

37 This trend is evident in both general texts such as Duncan Green, Faces of Latin America (UK: Latin American Bureau, 2006) and texts that deal with environmental justice and/or agrarian reform. For example, see Miguel Teubal, “Agrarian Reform and Social Movements in the Age of Globalization: Latin America at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century,” trans. Mariana Ortega Breña, Latin American Perspectives 36, no. 4 (July 2009): 9-20.

38 See The Development Dictionary.

39 Escobar, Encountering Development, 6 and 10. Development theories are based on Enlightenment ideas that purport that the spread of science and modernization will increase people’s quality of life. The success of development policies was conventionally measured by economic growth. 25 power that advocated the insertion of universal models of progress. His book asserted that the concept of development had marginalized and objectified regions such as Latin

America, proposing “industrialization and urbanization . . . as the inevitable and necessarily progressive routes to modernization.”40 Postdevelopmental models proposed by many social movements offer an alternative to past models of development in that they begin with local circumstances and coalitions and build outwards. They seek dialogue, negotiation and considerations of the particularities of place that is open to a broad sector of the population. These models attempt to combat the homogenizing forces of globalization and ascribe to art an important role in postdevelopment.

III. Ecologies, Globalization and Ecological Crises

Considerations of ecological crises are multifaceted and exhibit multitudinous responses. Many artists approached the idea of ecological disequilibrium by describing it in relation to local and global circumstances tied to land use, resource depletion, environmental catastrophes, pollution, and climate change. Some of their projects were

Responding to the evidence that policies driven by development theories did not alleviate poverty in “third world” regions and to the connotations that were attached to the designation of nations as being “underdeveloped,” postdevelopment theorists critiqued the unequal divisions of power inherent in the conventional application of development policy, which was driven by Western notions and values assigned to this concept. Postdevelopment theorists rightly call for a pluralistic vision of development and privilege local values and actions. They draw from a range of postcolonial and poststructural theories. For example, Arturo Escobar responded to the work of such theorists as Michel Foucault and Edward Said. Richard Peet and Elaine Hartwick astutely point out that some scholars who endorse postdevelopment “romanticize local alternatives to development” and do not account for the potential benefits of some parts of past models of Western thinking and conventional development that should be salvaged and utilized in unison with new models. See Peet and Hartwick, Theories of Development, 236. Indeed, there are limitations and benefits to any approach and new approaches should remain critical of their own endeavors.

40 Ibid., 39. Gustavo Esteva and Grant Kester similarly have responded to the problematic of development and offer poststructuralist analysis of these dynamics. See Esteva, “Development” in the Development Dictionary, 1-23 and Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Duke University Press: Durham, 2011).

26 symbolic and general; others were rooted in highly specific or local circumstances. The artists’ sense of imbalance was caused by the inability to comprehend fully phenomena like climate change or to control environmental disasters or land use policies, and the unstable complexity of nature’s hybrid forms. For some, it is also rooted in a nostalgic imagining of past or rural connections to nature that are presumed to be peaceful or inform personal identity.

Ecology is the study of the complex interrelationships between living things. It is a scientific discipline, a movement and, more generally, a means of understanding the world. The ecology movement is a social movement that developed in the United States and Europe in the late 1960s. Using the scientific concept of ecosystems and ecological studies, this movement critiqued industrialization and promoted the conservation of nature. Sachs proposed that ecology is novel in that it is an “anti-modernist” movement that embeds science.41 In other words, it rejects the modernist use of science, which promotes a detachment from nature and segregated studies of it, but still relies on science as a means to understand nature and its connection to humans. It also seeks a pluralistic, relational understanding of nature, while concurrently relying on a total vision of it. A number of theoretical positions developed from these foundational ideas. For example,

Deep Ecology, initiated by Norwegian philosopher Arne Ness in 1972, advocates the development of an eco-centric attitude in which people are imagined as only one part of the world, rather than as superior to the natural environment.

Félix Guattari proposed a critical definition of ecology that demonstrates its significance as a methodological means of understanding the world. Guattari’s The Three

41 Sachs, “Environment,” 29.

27

Ecologies proposes that ecology encapsulates three principal “registers”: the environment, social relations and human subjectivity.42 His “ecosophy” thus seeks to undermine passivity and to encourage thinking in broad and complex terms without reverting to a false construction of a whole. Late-capitalism is implicated as the culprit of the crises at hand, which is parallel to many artists’ critiques of development and neoliberal policies. For Guattari, art is powerful in its potential to make complex issues accessible or to serve as a stable means to enter into reflection on a changeable, vast topic.43 His position supports a productive means of evaluating work about the natural environment. Such projects, while each limited in its own way, invite critical assessment of a challenging topic.

Ecological crises reflect globalization’s forced dependencies and interactions between different geographical points, as well as the spread of consumerism, rapid industrial production and homogenization. In relation to the land, large transnational corporations are increasingly controlling all aspects of agricultural production. Pollution, waste management, the supply of natural resources, and the protection of natural areas are increasingly seen as global responsibilities that require collective action. In particular, climate change represents an ecological crisis that impacts people in all of earth’s regions, acting as a driver of local environmental catastrophe. Due to the fact that such phenomena as climate change are exacerbated by a number of individual actions throughout the world, it is difficult to define what an individual’s role is in causing such

42 Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (London and New Brunswick: The Athlone Press, 2000).

43 Gary Genosko explains this in his essay “Subjectivity and Art in Guattari’s The Three Ecologies,” stating “Ecosophic activism ‘resembles’ the work of artists in extracting details that serve as path-breakers for subjective development and as guidance in responsibly negotiating refrains.” In Deleuze/Guattari & Ecology, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2009).

28 environmental degradation or how a single person can seek to counter these effects.

Globalization endorses a vision of ecological crisis that is overwhelming in its scale and that is inevitably convoluted in its interconnectivity.

The conditions of globalization have altered the way in which we understand space and time. Technology and the global environment are perceived as vast interrelated systems that defy our ability to realize a fully stable or satisfying understanding of them.

Chemist Paul J. Crutzen’s definition of an Anthropocene era suggests a burgeoning awareness of human’s interconnectivity and impact on nature.44 Historian Dipesh

Chakrabarty’s essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses” (2009) described the discursive shift towards a conjoined vision of human and environmental histories that implicates human action in global environmental change.45 He explored shifting understandings of the world and history that are shaped by a growing awareness of people’s active impact on the environment, which has dramatically increased since the postwar era.46 Evaluations of historic and current conceptions of nature and humans are entangled. Chakrabarty argued, “the idea of the Anthropocene, the new geological epoch when humans exist as a geological force, severely qualifies humanist histories of modernity/globalization.”47 He asked “if indeed, globalization and global warming are born of overlapping processes, the question is, how do we bring them together in our

44 The biologist Eugene Stoermer coined the term “Anthropocene” in the late 1980s, but Paul Crutzen has introduced it to a wider audience, beginning in 2000. See Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, IGBP Newsletter 41, 2000 and Paul J. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind: The Anthropocene,” Nature 415 (2002): 23.

45 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, 2 (Winter 2009), 197-222.

46 Ibid., 209-214.

47 Ibid., 211. 29 understanding of the world?” and “how does the crisis of climate change appeal to our sense of human universals while challenging at the same time our capacity for historical understanding?”48 While Chakrabarty’s preoccupation is with history, his reflections on the changing conception of the interrelationship between society, nature, and globalization provide insight into the exigent character of ecological crisis.

It is widely known that collective actions such as industrialization and consumption often have unintended or unanticipated repercussions. The discomfort associated with being part of the cause of a catastrophic problem and the inability to parse out precisely how one is connected to this issue can lead to anxiety. If one recognizes the ecological crisis as being, in part, human-made, than it is not only changes in nature that people fear, but also the unintended, disregarded, or not fully comprehended consequences of industrialization and globalization. Techno-modern paradigms have, in part, provoked environmental catastrophes. The sciences, economics and technology have often resulted in actions that have spurred ecological degradation and climate change, but these same systems are also needed to understand the problem and to propose revisions. This human-nature crisis presents a conceptual challenge, which many artists confront in their work.

Globalization has also presented a number of social crises of which the environment is only a part. Latour argues that ecological crises “are never presented in the form of crises of ‘nature.’ They appear rather as crises of objectivity…” that implicate

“all objects” as part of this crisis.49 Each chapter examines the ways in which particular

48 Ibid., 200 and 201.

49 Latour, Politics of Nature, 20. 30 artists approach these “crises of objectivity” and offer modes of reframing nature in order to reassign ways in which individuals view, understand and interact with and, at times, regulate the land as part of other social interactions and culture. Grupo Escombros unites social and environmental violence; Ala Plástica presents a pluralistic response to a crisis in land use exacerbated by globalization and neoliberalism’s objective lens; Teresa

Pereda reacts to a crisis of identity that is tied to ideas of land and nature; Mónica Millán explores her personal connection to nature and to landscapes and traditions that are changing or being forgotten. Andrea Juan reverts to romantic invocations of the travelling artist and scientific explorer in images that challenge science’s detached vision of nature and perpetuate a glorification of crisis itself as an inevitable part of global transformation.

The number of varied responses signals the fact that there is no consensus about how one should face the ecological crises of contemporary life. These crises are comprised of strata shaped by rapid industrialization, an uneven distribution of freedoms and wealth, and the environmental consequences of these economic and political policies.

IV. Contemporary Argentine Art

Art historian Andrea Giunta has noted, to define contemporary art, “…we would nowadays have to draw up multifocal diagrams, whose connections would interact and overlap in all directions at once…” because of the pluralistic nature of contemporary art and scholarship about it.50 Today, contemporary art is characterized by interdisciplinarity, appropriation, new modes of circulation and funding, and a diversification of institutional support. The object holds a persistent but precarious place in contemporary production;

50 Andrea Giunta, “Avant-Gardes and Contemporary Art,” in Arte Argentino Contemporáneo (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario: Buenos Airses, 2004), 312. 31 the viewer’s and the artist’s roles are redefined through varying uses of public space and new modes of participatory practice and media. Contemporary art too responds to globalization’s homogenizing forces and local reactions. Travel is tantamount and the

Internet is a crucial tool. The focal artists of this dissertation utilize varying levels of interdisciplinary work. Their understanding of their work as artists and their relationships to art institutions and other art professionals vary as well. Predominantly, Buenos Aires is the central location in the network of geographical points that artists unite through their works, but it is not a solitary one. Many artists regularly participate in international residency programs, conferences, and have collaborated with artists and scholars from other nations, and exhibited abroad.

In Argentina, the art of the 1960s51 was defined by internationalism and the development of vanguards, some of which experimented with technology and circuits of media circulation, others of which asserted the political potential of art. These early experiments informed later production, as decades later artists sought to reconsider art’s social function, its relationship to politics, its use of public space, and the utility of technology. The Dirty War (1976–1983), the ensuing restoration of democracy and implementation of neoliberal policies in the 1990s, and the economic crisis of 2001 each had an impact on artistic production between the 1970s and the present. Andrea Giunta’s

Poscrisis: Arte argentino después de 2001 (2009) explored the ongoing shift toward collective art that seeks to promote social change. She also demonstrates the growth of connections between artists in Buenos Aires with other parts of the nation and internationally through biennials, awards, and residency programs. These opportunities

51 This dissertation defines contemporary art as that which has been produced since the 1960s. 32 increased after the economic crisis.52 Few Argentine artists centered their production on environmental issues; those who did saw the environment in light of economic and political issues.

Luis Camnitzer, Reinaldo Laddaga and Grant Kester have advanced scholarship respectively on conceptualism in Latin America, ideas of participatory art and its construction of temporary communities, and art that is the dialogue that it produces. Their scholarship provides an important context for this study.53 Luis Camnitzer’s writings on conceptualism and notions of “aestheticized politics” and “politicized aesthetics” informed my position on visual art concerned with ecological crises, which develop from the tradition of conceptualism that he describes in Conceptualism in Latin American Art:

Didactics of Liberation (2007). Camnitzer explored the inception of conceptualism in

Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, arguing that its development in this region was distinct from its formation in the United States and Europe. His reflections on the malleable barrier between art and politics during these decades provide a foundation for my consideration of the manner by which artists borrow “non-art” strategies and take on

52 Valeria González, “Contemporary Art and Argentinean History,” in Poéticas contemporáneas: Itinerarios en las artes visuales en la Argentina de los 90 al 2010 (Fondo Nacional de las Artes: Buenos Aires, 2010), 296. The essays that accompany this catalogue, including those authored by Andrea Giunta, Ana Longoni, and Inés Katzenstein, present the key issues, events and methods that define contemporary practice in Argentina.

53 See Luis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation and “Art and Politics: The Aesthetics of Resistance,” NACLA Report on the Americas 28, no. 2 (Sep.–Oct. 1994): 38-44; Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Reinaldo Laddaga, Estética de la emergencia: La formación de otra cultura de las artes, 2a ed (Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo editora, 2010). In addition to the work of these scholars, see Nelly Richard, “Lo crítico y lo político en el arte,” in Fracturas de la memoria: arte y pensamiento crítico (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores Argentina, 2007): 13-106 and her The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural Transformation and Poetics of the Crisis, trans. Alice A. Nelson and Silvia R. Tandeciarz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). Richard’s critical analysis of socially engaged groups provides a model for how to assess the practices of ecologically engaged artists and collectives.

33 political themes, as well as how groups who located themselves on the fringes of the art world utilize aesthetics for social or political purposes. Still, the artists described in this dissertation who began their work between the 1990s and the present assert that their work is not political, in a sense reflecting a desire to supersede politics and enact a democratic process of transformation through art. Additionally, Ana Longoni and

Mariano Mestman’s Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde”: Vanguardia Artística y Politica en el 68 Argentino and Giunta’s Poscrisis: Arte argentino después de 2001 provided a foundation for comprehending collective practice and political art production in

Argentina, while Reinaldo Laddaga’s Estética de la emergencia: La formación de otra cultura de las artes proposed revised notions of local interactions and temporary communities in contemporary artistic practice.

Much of the art that is the subject of this dissertation exhibits artists’ attempts to develop new forms of engagement with the viewer and higher levels of participation.

Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory of relational aesthetics marked an important transition in the rise of participatory practice, beginning in the 1990s. Bourriaud claimed that the modern era “was based on conflict, whereas the imaginary of our day and age is concerned with negotiations, bonds and co-existences.” He continued, “Art, likewise, is no longer seeking to represent utopias; rather, it is attempting to construct concrete spaces,” temporary “micro-communities” within the gallery’s walls.54 The insular gallery space now can also be activated as a “feedback zone” that facilitates dialogue and the creation of these temporary communities that are not meant for longevity, but rather as spaces in which experimental, temporary bonds are created between individuals through collective

54 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance, Fronza Woods and Mathieu Copeland (France: Les presses du réel, 2002), 45-46. 34 actions or interactive artworks that reveal the potential for change and a more critical understanding of extent networks. Grant Kester’s theorizing of dialogical aesthetic, much like the gallery-based theory of relational aesthetics developed by Bourriaud, accounted for how non-object based art that is defined by the relationships formed between individuals within the community and with those designated as artists, are formed, addressing the creative, transformative potential of actions that encourage different communities to discuss key issues. The utopian hope of this type of practice is that these dialogues will lead to discursive changes that will buttress practical changes. Ala Plástica has formed a relationship with Kester and has aligned the group’s theoretical understanding of their work with his theory.

The most pertinent contemporary studies of Latin American visual art that address environmental crises have centered on Colombia.55 Óscar Mauricio Ardila

Luna’s La Imposibilidad de la Naturaleza: Arte y Naturaleza en el Arte Colombiano

Contemporáneo, 1991-2003 (2007), dealt directly with the theme of ecological art and focused on the work of Colombian artists María Elvira Escallón, Alberto Baraya, and

Juan Fernando Herrán.56 La Imposibilidad de la Naturaleza utilizes distinct theoretical frameworks to analyze the work of each selected artist and his method highlighted the distinct nature of individual artistic projects and the necessity of creating a flexible model by which to investigate artworks about environmental problems. Scott Matthew

55 Due to the amount of recent research, number of artists working on this theme, and exhibitions, Colombia is a great candidate for this research project. However, I feel that it is more productive to follow the precedent that is being set by scholars working in this nation and to explore the incidence of this type of work in other nations.

56 Santiago Rueda Fajardo’s Una línea de polvo: Arte y drogas en Colombia (Bogotá: Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá, 2009), offers a parallel example of a study that explores the multidimensional nature of a variety of works of art that address the social, political and environmental impact of the drug trafficking industry.

35

DeVries’s dissertation “I Can't Believe It's Not Nature: Ecology and Environmentalism in

Recent Spanish American Fiction” (2009), observed that representations of nature in literature during the nineteenth century in this region are largely concerned with the notion of progress and that those in the twentieth century generally either critique the modern utopian vision of development or seek refuge in idealized visions of the past and imaginings of the perceived more ecologically-sensitive practices of indigenous groups.

He further observes that more recent literary works have dealt with the theme of ecological crisis, revealing the primacy of reevaluations of “modernization” and industrialization in environmental discourse.57 In a general sense, the works analyzed in this dissertation conform to the trend that he lays out, demonstrating the pervasiveness of the idea of ecological crisis in cultural production about the environment. Visual art, however, permits alternate modes of engagement with its audience and the physical spaces that it represents or occupies. The range of issues that these artists address in their works reveals that there is not one ecological crisis, but many that are embedded with distinct ruminations on democracy, the meanings of place, geographical divisions and a negotiation of past and present cultural constructions of nature.

OVERVIEW

This dissertation has three sections that each marks a conceptual shift in perceptions of nature and responses to ecological crises: raising awareness: fighting against urban degradation (chapters 1 and 2), recuperation (chapters 3 and 4) and exploration (chapter 5). These sections also indicate variations in modes of artistic

57 Scott Matthew DeVries, “I Can't Believe It's Not Nature: Ecology and Environmentalism in Recent Spanish American Fiction” (PhD diss., Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2009), 2-3. 36 production. The chapters are loosely arranged chronologically, but these works cannot be arranged in a strict, linear progression. My narrative exposes a series of overlaps, convergences and divergences in contemporary Argentine art that respond to moments and interpretations of ecological crisis. The works that are grouped together in each chapter share similar motivations and values. Nevertheless, within each chapter, it is evident that the artists embrace distinct approaches. The chapters illuminate a spectrum of values about “nature” and considerations of place.

The first chapter of the dissertation examines the roots of the artistic explorations of the environment that are the subject of subsequent chapters. The narrative begins in the late 1960s in the city of Buenos Aires. It explores the city’s pictorial role as a protagonist in art and the processes through which nature was first neglected and then granted a greater level of attention due to the negative impact of development and international concern with the environment. Vanguard artists examined the many systems that defined life in the twentieth century and participated in the international arena. Antonio Berni

(1905–1981) presented Juanito Laguna at the Venice Biennial in 1962 and Nicolás García

Uriburu (b. 1937) performed his first coloration at the Venice Biennial in 1968. Pierre

Restany published “The Manifesto of Rio Negro” in 1978, and the “Machu Picchu

Charter” was signed in Lima in 1979. In these cases, nature was defined as an important component of urban space that needed to be recovered in the wake of development. As there was not a strong, sustained environmental movement in Argentina, artists, critics, and architects associated themselves with the international discourse on the subject.

Ecologically conscious works produced in Buenos Aires and La Plata were often produced as critiques of other social and development issues. Unlike the United States, 37 the environmental movement developed not as one centered on conservation, but on problems caused by industrialization. Berni's work represents an early critique of development. His representations of the physical landscape were used not only to express the negative social consequences of industrialization, but to also demonstrate that the mistreatment of the physical environment was tied to social violence. Uriburu’s practice was oriented around international exhibitions and the repetition of a single action, his coloring of waterways green, throughout the world. Geopolitics was a crucial consideration for Uriburu’s work. His representations of maps of South America became a call to fight against northern exploitation and to consider South America’s natural resources (waterways in particular) as united. These works, and many texts discussed in the chapter, are influential in their insistence on considering the natural environment in relation to urban development and various aspects of globalization, responding to the bonds between local and global manifestations of ecological crises.

Chapter 2 traces the parallel rise in Buenos Aires of environmental movements and action art that decried environmental degradation and raised awareness poetically or didactically in the period between the 1990s and the present. It investigates the confluence of performance and activism not only through the work of Uriburu and Grupo

Escombros, but also through Acosta’s deviations from this mode of practice as he adhered to performance work that was further removed from activism. The chapter documents the development of the environmental movement in Argentina and Uriburu's and Grupo Escombros’s collaborations with Greenpeace and Acosta’s organization of

SOS Tierra on the grounds of the Parque Hudson. These artists used the rivers and public parks as sites to raise environmental awareness and incorporated symbolic codes that 38 have commonly been used to make the concept of nature digestible and to make the purpose of the work self-evident.

Chapter 3 focuses on work committed to recuperation through dialogue and direct local mediations on the land. Ala Plástica and Grupo Escombros each valued art as a catalyst for constructing future realities. Community and dialogue are key components of these artists’ projects and central themes in their work. Ala Plástica and Escombros demonstrate two different approaches. Each began to produce ecologically conscious work in the 1990s that was positioned in response to neoliberal policies that inhibited local control of the land. Ala Plástica’s projects responded to the ways in which people’s diverse needs of the land and the particularities of place are often overshadowed by the desires and projections of those who reside far from the areas that are impacted by land use decisions, which results in a homogenized and disconnected vision of the land as resource. They continue to use interdisciplinary methods of practice to transmit diverse perspectives of the land, promote conservation, change policy and create communities and dialogue. Escombros used poetry and public space to reinforce a sense of community and poetic reflections on nature. Their work endorsed horizontal dialogue and equated human rights with nature’s rights, linking the ideas of liberation and freedom among trees, animals, and people. Ala Plástica draws attention to rural concerns, while

Escombros remains based in the city.

Chapter 4 continues the exploration of the theme of recuperation, but focuses on representations of rural places by Teresa Pereda and Mónica Millán. Their art responds to a perceived disjunction between rural sites and the urban center and seeks to reassign importance to “nature” as an important aspect of personal and local identity. Both artists 39 utilize anthropological strategies in some works and piece together fragments that unite their personal connection to rural places and interest in “nature” with other narratives and references. Millán’s drawings are sometimes about specific landscapes that are undergoing transformation and other times represent a composite view of “nature” that presents a complex interrogation of one’s personal experience of the natural environment through photographs, recordings of nature, and found materials. Pereda’s art reveals the cultural significance of the concepts of land, earth, and “nature,” emphasizing a national need to develop a more inclusive, pluralistic consideration of these terms. Her work integrates the physical earth as a recurring, fundamental material in her work.

Stories and her journeys form a network that gestures to her goal of an increased awareness of the relations between places.

Chapter 5 turns the lens to work that responds to the idea of ecological crisis as a global phenomenon, emphasizing the potential of technology and science to understand the changing dimensions of this crisis and to reconsider or experience nature’s evolving conditions. The selected works were informed by scientific research or technology and their creators centered on the global and virtual spheres as new sites of engagement.

Thus, exploration is the emphasis of these projects. Andrea Juan’s and Joaquín Fargas’s work on climate change in Antarctica form the center of this chapter, which also introduces projects by Grupo Proyecto Biopus, who represent a younger generation of artists who use technology and the virtual realm to address environmental issues and social-ecological relationships. All respond to the ways in which science and technology impact people’s perception of nature and the function of art as a tool for mediated reflection. 40

The works documented in this dissertation represent a series of proposals that sought to effect change. Many were idealistic in their ethical ambition and produced hope, but also doubt, about the artists’ actual ability to promote sustained change through their work. Regardless of their specific impacts, these projects provide access to various sites and positions in today’s ecological crises and the field of contemporary Argentine art. Environments and the crises that they face enter into the work of Argentine artists in a dynamic manner that supports a generally open construction of nature that unites them with parallel social, political and economic concerns. 41

CHAPTER I: THE ROOTS OF ECOLOGICALLY CONSCIOUS ART IN ARGENTINA, 1960–1980

In the 1960s, a handful of Argentine artists and intellectuals began to voice their concern with modernization’s impact on nature. Through texts and images, they evaluated the social and environmental costs of industrialization and the toll of multinational corporations’ increasing power. These discussions emerged through international dialogue. In particular, Paris and New York City were key sites where cultural producers were exposed to an increasing popular awareness of ecology.

Theoretical considerations of art’s potential function within broader systems also impacted these artists’ content and approach.1 In Argentina and internationally, the boundaries of art were expanding in relation to new critical perceptions of the structures that shaped the social, the built and natural world.

This chapter interrogates overlapping paradigmatic shifts in the understanding of art and environment that shaped focal works produced during the 1960s and 1970s.

Artists’ diversification of materials and strategies created new means for nature to be considered and represented. The rise of ecology further led to more holistic

1 Rodrigo Alonso, “Sistemas, Acciones y Procesos. 1965–1975,” in Sistemas, Acciones y Procesos. 1965–1975, curated by Rodrigo Alonso (Buenos Aires: Fundación PROA, 2011), 13-24.

42 considerations of environment, which in turn opened up new possibilities for nature to be thought through development and geopolitics.2 My incursion into the topic of art production about the environment in Argentina is by extension also an interrogation of the tenuous relationship between Buenos Aires and the provinces, the rise of urban development’s negative impact, and the expansion of international networks. This chapter provides a historical overview of these issues in order to frame the international dialogue and national circumstances to which early ecologically conscious works responded.

While not pervasive, these contributions directed attention to issues that were otherwise predominantly disregarded in Argentina.

The city is a protagonist in any investigation of Argentine considerations of the natural environment. Geographers Erik Swyngedouw and Maria Kaika’s article “The

Environment of the city . . . or the Urbanization of Nature” (2004) assesses the construction of “city” and “nature.” In this text, they argue for “a political-ecological perspective” that accounts for the fact that the city and nature are joined through social, economic and political processes.3 This theoretical perspective is crucial to my analysis.

It defines the poetic reflections on the natural environment by Argentine artists Antonio

Berni (1905–1981) and Nicolás García Uriburu (b. 1937). Waterways, particularly the

Río de la Plata estuary and the Riachuelo, the Pampas, the Amazon, and the city are the primary landscapes represented or alluded to in selected works. These sites served as

2 This application of ecology extended beyond the purely scientific use of the term and was characterized by a broad consideration of social, political and economic forces with natural ones. In general, ecology connotes an interest in the relationship between society and the natural world.

3 Erik Swyngedouw and Maria Kaika, “The Environment of the City . . . or the Urbanization of Nature,” in A Companion to the City, eds. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 567.

43 archetypes through which theories and universal assessments of the threats faced by the natural world were refracted.

The texts and visual works discussed in this chapter present a loosely defined network that links Argentina, Europe and the United States. These contributions are significant in that they illuminate an early range of interests in the environment in relation to the particularities of the Latin American and Argentine context. Berni and Uriburu utilized urban detritus and waterways to comment on industrialization and geopolitics. A few texts accepted the possibility of an imminent environmental crisis, if changes were not made to how nature was conceived or utilized. Three of these principal examples will be analyzed in this chapter: Argentine artist, design theorist and educator Tomás

Maldonado’s reflections on environmental planning and design, published in the 1970s; the French critic Pierre Restany’s “Manifesto of the Rio Negro,” published in 1978; and

“The Machu Picchu Charter” of 1977, which was signed by an international group and called for a reassessment of urban design and industrialization.

“The Machu Picchu Charter” is emblematic of a conceptual shift in how environment and development were considered in relation to the Latin American region.

Rather than addressing ecological concerns from a conservationist perspective or aligning with developmental rhetoric, the Charter demonstrates an early, international critique of

“The Athens Charter” (1933) as a template for urban design. The document addressed problems such as pollution and the limited availability of natural resources, arguing that rural immigration was the root problem of urban decay and one of the major challenges faced by cities. The Charter targeted “environmental pollution” as a primary threat caused by “unplanned urbanization and excessive exploitation of resources” that not only

44 causes environmental degradation, but also impedes human welfare.4 It also validated the significance of cultural specificity in urban design. Their goal was not to preserve nature as an unchanging entity, but to create a more sustainable balance between natural and built spaces. These projects began to critique the modern tenets that shaped utopian visions of development and the perception of nature as a resource that should be dominated. They reveal traces of the preoccupations that define later environmental activities in Buenos Aires, beginning in the early 1990s.

LANDSCAPE, DEVELOPMENT AND THE AVANT-GARDE

The division between Buenos Aires and the surrounding territory began with the city’s initial attempted settlement in the sixteenth century. Numerous scholars have recognized the binary construction in the literary and intellectual canon that pitted

Buenos Aires, the “civilized capital,” against the provinces and the Pampas, which were perceived as “barbarian, uncivilized” areas.5 Art historian Laura Malosetti Costa explored the absence of visual representations of the Argentine Pampas in the nineteenth century in her article “Politics, Desire and Memory in the Construction of Landscape in the

Argentine Pampas” (2006). In this text, she asserted that very few visual representations

4 “La Carta del Machu Picchu / The Machu Picchu Charter,” L’Architettura 48 (Dec. 2002): 802.

5 Laura Podalsky, Specular City: Transforming Culture, Consumption, and Space in Buenos Aires, 1955–1973 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 33. Laura Malosetti Costa states that “ . . . el campo era el pasado, el atraso y la barbarie; la ciudad, el futuro luminoso, la civilización.” In Laura Malosetti Costa, Pampa, Ciudad y Suburbio (Buenos Aires: Fundación OSDE and Imago Espacio de Arte, 2007), 11. For additional reflections on this division, as seen through artistic representations of the city and the countryside, see Laura Malosetti Costa and Diana Wechsler, eds., Ciudad / Campo en las Artes en Argentina y Latinoamérica, 3 Jornada de Teoria e Historia de las Artes, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 25-26 y 27 de septiembre de 1991, CAIA jornadas 82 (1991).

45 of the Pampas, which centered on the plains as subject, were produced until the 1880s.6

She argued that the delayed visual representation of the Pampas as an autonomous landscape, worthy of representation in its own right, was due to the lack of schemata in this genre that would allow recognition of the plains as a space that was beautiful or pictorially engaging. This landscape was the site of centuries of territorial conflict. The

Pampas were feared, but desired. As Malosetti Costa has demonstrated, an investigation of nineteenth-century visual depictions of the Argentine landscape has to center on the absence of this subject in painting.

This chapter’s investigation of ecologically conscious works of the 1960s and

1970s necessitates a similar analytic strategy; one that focuses on the creation of works that critique the rhetoric of development and the promise of modernity. While these questions are inherently tied to environmental awareness, some works are more overtly

“environmental” than others. Stitching together these fragments allows one to decipher how and why some artists elected the environment as a subject, which lays the groundwork for understanding how later artists addressed the environment in relation to development and social issues. This section is thus as much about the absence of ecological consideration as it is its presence, just as it is as much about the city as nature.

The Pampas were tied to larger pictorial and literary narratives that subsumed the importance of the land itself. This area served as the stage for territorial conflicts and became the property of the conservative elite who remained in power until World War I

6 Laura Malosetti Costa, “Politics, Desire and Memory in the Construction of Landscape in the Argentine Pampas,” Journal of Visual Art Practice 5, no. 1 and 2 (2006): 108.

46 and limited access to the land.7 The restricted access to this area also re-focused attention on the capital as it became the primary site for opportunity, development and economic growth, drawing over six million immigrants in the nineteenth century.8 The importance of international trade and the merchant class bestowed special attention on the city.

The growth of the suburbs began in the late-nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century. In the 1920s, artists such as those in Los Artistas del Pueblo began to document these outlying neighborhoods.9 Tangos and books were also written about this growing urban sector. For example, Manuel Gálvez published the Historia de Arrabal in

1922, and Bernardo Verbitsky continued the genre in the novella La Villa Miseria

También es América in 1957. After the economic crisis of the 1930s, internal migration soon began to contribute to the expansion of the city’s boundaries and the shantytowns, or villas miserias, developed.10 Yet the visual arts that were and continue to be given the most attention from this era ignored the rise of informal development and its consequences.

Immigration continued through the twentieth century and persists today. The settlement of peoples from other nations and Argentina’s provinces has shaped the demographic and contours of the city. The early lack of visual representations of

7 Ibid., 116.

8 Ibid., 116. For additional discussion on the settlement of the Pampas and the development of Buenos Aires, see Jonathan C. Brown, A Brief History of Argentina, 2nd ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010). For discussion of this topic in relation to environmental concerns, see Antonio Elio Brailovsky and Dina Foguelman, Memoria Verde: Historia ecológica de la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1991.

9 The group was comprised of Abraham Vigo, José Arato, Augustín Riganelli, Guillermo Facio Hebequer and Adolfo Bollocq after 1917. See Patrick Frank, Los Artistas del Pueblo: Prints and Workers’ Culture in Buenos Aires, 1917–1935 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006).

10 Maria Cristina Cravino, Las villas de la ciudad: Mercado e informalidad urbana (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, 2006), 21.

47 surrounding landscapes and the Pampas’ subservient role as backdrop rather than subject in paintings, underscores the prominent position that Buenos Aires assumed during the process of modernization. In the exhibition catalogue Pampa, Ciudad y Suburbio (2007), its curator Malosetti Costa noted in her discussion about post-late-nineteenth century artistic representations of the river and Buenos Aires that “Pero si lo pensamos en relación con aquellos perfiles del siglo XIX, vemos los términos de la ecuación ciudad / río (naturaleza y cultura) invertidos: la ciudad se minimiza y pierde interés, opacada por las dos presencias imponentes de mar y cielo,” highlighting the symbolic importance of the river, as well as the centrality of the seaport in economic life and visual documentation of the city.11

A new urban culture emerged between the 1950s and 1970s in Argentina. In

Specular City: Transforming Culture, Consumption and Space in Buenos Aires, 1955–

1973 (2004), Laura Podalsky, a professor of the literature and cultures of Latin America, explained that this “new urban sensibility fostered the notion of Buenos Aires as modern(izing) metropolis—a vision resonant with the Economic Commission for Latin

America (ECLA)” that “inspired developmentalist discourses emerging at the time in a number of Latin American countries.”12 During these decades, political control fluctuated among varying parties and the economy shifted from the dominant, nationalist agenda of the Perón era to the expansion of multinational corporations and foreign takeovers of local business sectors such as chemicals and banking.13 As economic ministers and

11 Malosetti Costa, Pampa, Ciudad y Suburbio, 15.

12 Podalsky, Specular City, 7.

13 Brown, A Brief History of Argentina, 222-224.

48 politicians rotated through office, they ignored the growth of the villas miserias within and surrounding the federal district. Podalsky demonstrated the role that the political environment and policies had on the growth of Buenos Aires’ informal urban sector. She explained that class-based spatial divisions within the city were exacerbated by the difficulty that lower income people had obtaining housing loans.14 She also noted that during the 1960s and 1970s the government periodically ordered the forced removal or re-location of the villeros.15

The economic promise of the influx of multinational corporations took precedence over the environmental impact that the rapid informal development of the villas miserias produced.16 The residents of outlying areas were subjected to poor environmental conditions due to industrial pollution and lack of sufficient residential infrastructure. Scholars such as Podalsky have commented that the avoidance of the problems of the villas miserias in the 1960s evidenced the lack of a “larger social vision promoting a more coherent urban plan.”17 The failure to accommodate the continued influx of workers into the city through the addition of infrastructure and the pollution caused by industrial waste became the main focus of environmental dialogue in the late

1960s and 1970s. Berni’s works of Juanito Laguna represented the conditions of the villas miserias, Uriburu’s colorations brought awareness to urban pollution, and “The

Machu Picchu Charter” called for urban planners to consider both of these issues.

14 Podalsky, Specular City, 102-103.

15 Ibid., 105.

16 Isabel Plante, “Consagración de los producciones visuales y critica institucional entre Paris y Buenos Aires (1962-1972)” (PhD diss., Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2009), 264-265.

17 Podalsky, Specular City, 16.

49

In the 1960s, national discourse among the elite in Argentina centered on modernization and progress on multiple fronts, spurring a push to expand international networks, industrialization and new forms of cultural production.18 Mass media and technology were altering the production and consumption of culture.19 The appearance of

Arte nuevo, an expansive term used to describe experimental production between 1956 and 1965, is evidence of the cultural significance of new media and capitalist expansion.

Artists and intellectuals feverishly sought to dialogue with the rest of the world after the fall of Perón. Informalism, Pop Art, Conceptualism and the creation of happenings, environments,20 video and media art dominated Argentina’s visual production during the

1960s.21 As has been commonly recognized in scholarship on this era, art production split along two lines: art that addressed social concerns and that which utilized technology to examine the modern. For example, Antonio Berni’s Juanito Laguna series of the 1960s and 1970s offered social commentary, while the collaborative project Tucumán Arde,

1968, pushed the boundary between art and politics. These works diverged from such pop lunfardo installations as Marta Minujin’s technologically savvy environment La

Menesunda, 1965.22

18 Andrea Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism and Politics: Argentine Art of the 1960s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 86.

19 Jorge Glusberg, “Luis Benedit: Las memorias del olvido,” in Luis F. Benedit en el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, ed. Jorge Glusberg (Buenos Aires: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1996), 13.

20 In this instance, environments refer to installations.

21 Marcelo E. Pacheco, “From the Modern to the Contemporary: Shifts in Argentine Art, 1956 – 1965,” in Listen, Here, Now!: Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-garde, ed. Inés Katzanstein (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 16.

22 Minujin collaborated with Rúben Santantonín, Leopoldo Maler, Pablo Suárez, David Lamelas and Rodolfo Prayón. See Jaqueline Barnitz, Twentieth-Century Art of Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 253.

50

Jorge Romero Brest and Jorge Glusberg promoted the international circulation of

Argentine art during the 1960s and 1970s. Cultural institutions like the Instituto Torcuato

Di Tella (ITDT) facilitated the creation of stronger ties with New York City and Paris, showcasing the technologically inventive, the performative and the abstract. The Centro de Artes Visuales of the ITDT, directed by Romero Brest between 1963 and 1970, broadcast the advent of an avant-garde to an international audience by showcasing the new methods of art-making that young artists employed to reinvent Argentina’s cultural image.23 Similarly, curators such as Glusberg contributed to the expanding artistic network through his direction of the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC).24 Glusberg organized the international circulation of exhibitions, funded symposia, and published catalogues in Spanish and English through the CAYC. This interdisciplinary institution supported conceptual production and arte de sistemas.25 In the exhibition catalogue for

Arte de Sistemas (1971), Glusberg described this type of art as a mode of production that stressed process and that “aprovechando la metodología de la ciencia, sus posibilidades de abstracción y modulación . . . ”26 He included the ecological work of artists such as

23 Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism and Politics, 121. The Centro de Arte del Instituto Torcuato Di Tella formed in 1960. Romero Brest became its director in 1963 after he resigned from his position as the director of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Giunta demonstrates that the institute’s financial reports, which begin in 1963, show that the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and Harvard contributed a substantial amount of funding. For more information see 364, n. 6.

24 Glusberg created the Centro de Estudios de Arte y Comunicación in 1968, which became the CAYC. The CAYC was affiliated with the Grupo de las Trece, which also formed in 1971. The group was comprised of Jorge Glusberg, Jacques Bedel, Luis Benedit, Gregorio Dujovny, Carlos Ginzburg, Victor Grippo, Jorge González Mir, Vicente Marotta, Luis Pazos, Alfredo Portillos, Juan Carlos Romero, Julio Teich and Horacio Zabala. Alonso, Sistemas, Acciones y Procesos, 233 and 242.

25 Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 62. Glusberg owned the light bulb fixture company Modular and was able to finance CAYC’s activities independently. The conception of systems art paralleled the work of Hans Haacke.

26 Alonso, “Sistemas, Acciones y Procesos,” 16.

51

Uriburu, Christo, and Agnes Denes in this particular exhibition, which opened at the

Museo de Arte Moderno.27 Uriburu’s Vertical Coloration (1971) is a conceptual drawing that he showed with the CAYC (Figure 1). It is a proposal for the coloration of Iguazú

Falls, located on the border between Brazil and Argentina’s northern province of

Misiones. Uriburu’s selection of this particular site is notable for its monumental scale and as a contrast to his urban colorations. His attention to this remote, natural landmark aligns with his interest in the preservation of Latin America’s natural resources.28 Nature as object or subject is a theme that is interwoven into projects executed by the members of the Group of 13, which later became the CAYC Group. For example, Carlos Ginzburg,

Victor Grippo and Luis Benedit employed nature in some of their works to reflect on science, social issues, and ecology.29

Romero Brest and Glusberg both facilitated international exchange and an exploration of the major trends that were defining international avant-garde practices.

The cultural emphasis on systems, in conjunction with the growing popularity of dependency theory, also supported explorations of the geopolitics of natural resource distribution. These modes of inquiry continue to influence artists in Argentina. The

27 Luis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin America: Didactics of Liberation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 248. Camnitzer asserts that Glusberg’s selection of work was strategic and meant to capitalize on popular themes or trends in order to gain greater international visibility. Camnitzer interprets Glusberg’s actions, like those of Brest, as initially being tied to formalist considerations. Yet, regardless of Glusberg’s agenda, he showcased some works that addressed geopolitical issues and considered nature as part of a complex, social system.

28 Isabel Plante, “Consagración de los producciones visuales y critica institucional entre Paris y Buenos Aires (1962-1972),” 369. Plante states that Uriburu thought of Iguazú as an important natural reserve.

29 Ginzburg joined CAYC in 1971 and his work Tierra was exhibited in Arte de Sistemas, 1971. Alonso, Sistemas, Acciones y Procesos, 256. This group also maintained ties to such critics as Lucy Lippard and Pierre Restany who wrote on environmental works.

52 networks formed by CAYC buttressed Uriburu’s ecological activities.30 Furthermore, technology and international collaborations play an integral role in the work of ecologically conscious artists working after the 1990s.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the French art critic and curator Pierre Restany

(1930–2003) offered the only consistent attention to the ecologically conscious work of

Uriburu and Frans Krajcberg, a Polish born artist who re-located to Brazil in 1948.31

Restany is perhaps most known for his critical texts on New Realism.32 He began to write on Latin American art in the 1960s and soon became interested in ecological issues.

Beginning in 1961, Restany made regular trips to Latin America and developed lasting ties with artists in Argentina and Brazil.33 He later described the mid-1960s in Buenos

Aires as the “final moments of the golden age of its metropolitan culture.”34 The

“metropolitan culture” to which he refers is one defined by Argentine artist Marta

Minujín’s experiments, various adaptations of Pop Art, and works that utilized technology and the media as content and material.

The Brazilian Amazon intrigued Restany and, along with Krajcberg’s work, inspired his “Manifesto of Rio Negro.” Restany came to envision the Brazilian Amazon and Buenos Aires as two locales that represented opposite poles: pure nature and the

30 Uriburu participated in numerous exhibitions organized by Glusberg. Pierre Restany, Uriburu: Utopia of the South (Windsor: Electa, 2001), 75.

31 Around the time that the manifesto was drafted, Krajcberg’s art sought to fight for the protection of the Amazon. Roberta Lanese Walters, “Frans Krajcberg: Art in Defense of the Forest” (PhD diss., Texas Tech University, 1999), 3.

32 Michèle C. Cone, “Pierre Restany and the Nouveaux Réalistes,” Yale French Studies, no. 98, The French Fifties (2000): 50-65.

33 Plante, “Consagración de los producciones visuales y critica institucional entre Paris y Buenos Aires (1962-1972),” 17. He first traveled to Buenos Aires in December of 1969.

34 Restany, Uriburu, 16.

53 metropolis.35 In art historian Isabel Plante’s dissertation “Consagración de los

Producciones Visuales y Critica Institucional entre Paris y Buenos Aires (1962–1972),” she reflected that Restany’s “ . . . interés se desplazó de una metrópolis como Buenos

Aires, a la que veía vaciada por la violencia de Estado, a la Amazonia en tanto reserva natural.”36 She demonstrated the respite that this natural reserve represented from the violence of the city.

The political climate became more oppressive under the dictatorship of General

Juan Carlos Onganía (1966–1970) and some artists responded.37 The city’s limits also continued to expand as economic inflation rose. Artistic responses against the

38 government were sparked in 1968. Plante has asserted that “…la situación adversa del cono sur, avasallado por la represión militar, generaba en los artistas la urgencia ‘de elucubrar una cultura latinoamericana auténtica, una escala de sensibilidad a la vez realista y original.’”39 The interdisciplinary project Tucumán Arde was an overtly political act that exposed the disparity between the government’s sanctioned image of progress and the realities that many faced. A collective of artists from Buenos Aires and

35 Plante comments that “Hacia 1978 Brasil represntaba más bien un reservorio natural para Restany; y Argentina una cultura de diáspora.” Plante, “Consagración de los producciones visuales y critica institucional entre Paris y Buenos Aires (1962-1972),” 378.

36 Ibid., 35.

37 Fearing the possibility of revolution, General Onganía “[waged] campaigns against long hair, rock musicians, and the wearing of miniskirts, and to raid publishing houses (and hotels used for liaisons), seize books and censor movies.” The notorious closing of the exhibition of Experiences 68 at the Instituto Di Tella exhibits the growing conflict between artists, cultural institutions and the government. The government ordered that Roberto Plate’s installation El Baño be censored, which led to many artists withdrawing and publically destroying their works. Oscar Terán, “Culture, Intellectuals, and Politics in the 1960s,” in Listen, Here, Now!, 270.

38 Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art, 61.

39 Plante, “Consagración de los producciones visuales y critica institucional entre Paris y Buenos Aires (1962-1972),” 252.

54

Rosario explored the limits of conceptual production for a social cause through its production of Tucumán Arde.40 The collective’s goal was to inform the public of the negative impact that economic and development policies had on residents’ health and well being in this region, following a mass lay off of workers from sugar refineries. The reality of working conditions and the quality of life of these residents differed greatly from the propaganda that the government disbursed about this sugar-producing province, which it referred to as “the Garden of the Republic.”41 The collective briefly displayed their findings to the public through an installation that combined photographs, slide projections, sound and film. Their interdisciplinary installation countered the Onganía administration’s propaganda and actively situated art in the realm of politics.

This action relied on the distribution of information. It was organized as an event that diverged from other productions in its intended function as a more ethical, socially conscious art. Tucumán Arde was an iconic, interdisciplinary project that became a fulcrum for discussions about politics and art. While Tucumán Arde is not a direct point of origin for the focal works that I will analyze, it is an important example that illustrates an artistic experiment that sought to move beyond formalist bounds, that was based on interdisciplinary collaboration and used technology for social good. This project’s goal was to make known the realities of a region that were otherwise invisible. Its focus on an

40 Artists from Rosario and Buenos Aires first met to discuss the ethical potential of art at the “First National Meeting of Avant-garde Art” in Rosario in August, 1968. This discussion culminated in the production of Tucumán Arde. Juan Carlos Renzi, León Ferrari, and Roberto Jacoby were amongst the collective’s participants.

41 There are numerous texts on Tucumán Arde. As a starting point for more information on this project, see Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman’s Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde”: Vanguardia artística y política en el 68 argentino (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, Editorial de Buenos Aires, 2008) and Luis Camnitzer’s “Tucumán Arde: Politics in Art” in Conceptualism in Latin American Art, 60-72.

55 area in the provinces and exposure of the fiction of this national modernizing project aligns with the scope of many works that will be examined.

Many early texts and artistic projects illuminate the close ties between ecology and development in Argentina. Paris remained a particularly strong site of contact and exchange for Buenos Aires during these decades. Paris was considered to largely have been a scene of resistance to the United States, envisioning the U.S. as a mecca for capitalism and imperialism.42 Uriburu, Berni and Restany all had ties to Paris and contributed to intellectual ideas circulating in Europe.

The ecology movement emerged internationally in the 1970s, calling for a conceptual shift in societal views of nature, some of these were based on non-Western philosophical models and critiqued capitalism.43 Plante noted that 1972 was a key year when ecological texts were disbursed in France.44 The first Earth Day was celebrated in

1970, promoting a global, popular ecological consciousness. However, an environmental movement in Argentina didn’t arise until the 1980s, in a period of democratization after the military dictatorship of 1976–1983.45 Industrial contamination became the first major issue focused on by a greater public in Argentina. Resident actions against pollution have

42 See Plante’s “Consagración de los producciones visuales y critica institucional entre Paris y Buenos Aires (1962–1972).”

43 Arne Naess’s article “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement” (1972) initiated Deep Ecology. Ecofeminism was coined by Françoise d’Eaubinne in 1974 in her text “Feminism or Death.” Radical and Social Ecology also took shape. The West German Greens formed in the 1980s, centering on community issues, social justice, ecology and grassroots democracy. Other green political parties formed in Italy, France, Sweden and Canada in this decade. Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology: The Search for a Liveable World (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 85, 184, 134 and 168. Sustainable development further popularized environmentalism in the late 1980s.

44 Plante, “Consagración de los producciones visuales y critica institucional entre Paris y Buenos Aires (1962-1972),” 377-378.

45 Graciela S. Melitsko, “The Emergence of Environmental Activism in the City of Buenos Aires: Citizen’s Movement on Toxic Contamination” (master’s thesis, Tufts University, 2007), 1.

56 also risen since the late 1980s.46 Yet the art and texts discussed in this chapter evidence an engagement by some Argentine artists and intellectuals with the emerging international dialogue about ecology. Uriburu developed a trans-national, four-part coloration to coincide with the inauguration of Earth Day. Key treatises about urban planning such as “The Machu Picchu Charter” were also published in this decade.

Argentine artists like Uriburu exhibited and temporarily resided in New York City during these years. These artists preceded a national environmental movement, but participated in international environmental discourse and created significant production. Parallel to the work in the United States and Europe, these cultural producers adapted the principal concerns of the international movement to fit with the nation’s context and to address its particular challenges.

INDUSTRIALIZATION’S SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL VIOLENCE

In a climate of official denial of Buenos Aires’s informal growth and its negative outcomes, Antonio Berni used recycled materials to construct pictorial narratives about life in the villas miserias. Berni is known for his socially conscious paintings, which defined his production after his shift from Surrealism to New Realism in the 1930s.

Although Berni was principally concerned with social issues, I contend that his xilo- collages that were exhibited at the 31st Venice Biennial in 1962 present a dystopian vision of industrialization that also extended to its impact on the physical environment

(Figures 2 and 3). These scenes, like the rest of his Juanito Laguna series, display a

46 Ibid., 1-2. She has noted that those involved with environmental issues have used “protest in the street, [and] they lobby public officials, they file legal complaints against industries and the government to stop polluting activities or block facility constructions and educate the public in general.”

57 strong parallel between the dire physical conditions of the villas miserias and their residents’ quality of life. Berni conflates industrialization’s social and environmental violence.47 Berni’s five xilo-collages exhibited at the Venice Biennial provide a foundation for understanding the prominent place that the villas have assumed as part of a critique against development and a call for environmental protection.48

Berni’s invention of Juanito Laguna and his use of reciclaje in these collages symbolically unite the social and material elements of the impoverished sectors of Latin

American cities. Juanito’s portrait made its official debut in 1961 at the Witcomb Art

Gallery in Buenos Aires; his portrait and environment were modeled in oil paints and recycled industrial materials. It was first exhibited during the presidency of Arturo

Frondizi (1958–1962), who enacted a development policy that promoted a rapid increase in foreign investment and industrialization. He sought the unification and support of such opposing factions as the military, unions and elite.49 Despite his efforts, these years were defined by conflict. As Malosetti Costa asserted, Berni “empezo a trabajar sistematicamente en el problema que significaba tomar como sujeto de su producción la vida en las villas miserias, el cinturón de pobreza extrema que se expandía en los bordes

47 The performance artist Daniel Acosta has cited Berni’s collages and use of detritus as influential to his own consideration of the link between human rights and environmental abuse. Interview with Daniel Acosta, July 8, 2011.

48 Cecilia Rabossi, “Antonio Berni Tells The Story of Juanito Laguna,” in Antonio Berni: a 40 años del premio de la XXXI Bienal de Venecia, 1962–2002 (Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural Recoleta, 2002), 70. Berni won the First Prize for Foreign Etching and Drawing at the Venice Biennial. The exhibition marked the initial unveiling of Juanito to an international audience.

49 Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics, 65-66, 92-93, and 310. Frondizi’s negotiatiations with Perón led to his election. Frondizi conceded to national and popular interests. Although economic expansion occurred during his presidency, his term was defined by social and political unrest. Iron, steel, petrochemicals, cellulose, automobiles, energy and petroleum were seen as key sectors of development.

58 de la ciudad y nadie quería ver.”50 Berni’s invention of Juanito created an effective tie between the individual and societal. The material evidence included in his works served as evidence of urban transformations throughout Latin America.

Berni’s preliminary illustration of Juanito likely came from his excursions, which began in the 1950s, to the province of Santiago del Estero, located northwest of Buenos

Aires, and to the suburban shantytowns that surrounded Buenos Aires. Despite the specificity of Berni’s research and the fact that he envisioned Juanito as being from either

Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires, Berni described him as a generic boy who could be from any city.51 He thought of Juanito as an archetype that stood for all destitute children.

Art historian Marcelo E. Pacheco describes Berni’s imagery of the 1960s as a type of “social anthropology” that documents the unspoken negative effects of industrialization, including internal migration and underemployment.52 Images of two invented protagonists, Juanito Laguna and an adult female counterpart, the prostitute

Ramona Montiel, appeared separately in various works produced between the late 1950s and 1970s. The construction of their habitats with waste materials emphasized the status of the villas’ inhabitants as discarded and mimics the aesthetic of the areas in which marginalized populations lived. Berni’s first depiction of Juanito was found in a sketchbook years after its execution in 1956; the portrait was a watercolor of a frail boy

50 Malosetti Costa, Pampa, Ciudad y Suburbio, 60.

51 Antonio Berni, “Juanito Laguna [Johnny Lagoon],” in Cantos paralelos: La parodia plástica en el arte argentino contemporáneo [Visual Parody in Contemporary Argentine Art], eds. Mari Carmen Ramirez, Marcelo E. Pacheco and Andrea Giunta (Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin and the Fondo Nacional de las Artes Argentina, 1999), 190.

52 Marcelo E. Pacheco, “La parodia y los juegos de la verdad [Parody and Truth Games],” in Cantos paralelos: La parodia plástica en el arte argentino contemporáneo [Visual Parody in Contemporary Argentine Art], 94-95.

59 holding a pot and pail.53 This initial sketch was soon followed by three large, brightly colored oil paintings that some have described as “grotesque.”54

Berni’s Juanito Laguna series responded to the experimental fervor of the era, but he selected innovative materials to enhance the social content of the works. Berni’s

Marxist philosophy and his Social Realist production were at odds with the work Brest sponsored at the ITDT. Tension between the “artistic and political avant-garde” persisted throughout the 1960s.55 Berni’s interest in creating imagery that went against aesthetic norms is a continuation of the New Realist doctrine that he recorded in his manifesto of

1936, published in Forma. In Berni’s manifesto, he stressed the importance of avoiding

“cliché” and of using real imagery, like his photographs and newspaper clippings, as a foundation for his work. He thought that it was necessary to utilize modernist styles and media to convey a reality that was concurrent with the public’s lived experience. Berni envisioned New Realism as a critique of the Social Realism employed by the Mexican muralists; he sought to avoid empty “rhetoric” with a presentation of a “ . . . subjective mirror of the great social, political, economic, and spiritual reality of our century.”56

Berni’s comments suggest that while he sought to construct Juanito’s everyday life through snapshots that reference a specific time and locale, his art was also meant to address universal concepts.

53 Rabossi, “Antonio Berni Tells The Story of Juanito Laguna,” 68.

54 Jorge Glusberg, Antonio Berni (Buenos Aires: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1977), 100. The 1960 painting Carnaval de Juanito Laguna [Juanito Laguna’s Carnival] is considered the first painting in the series. See David Ellitot, “Antonio Berni: Art and Politics in the Avant-garde,” in Art from Argentina: Argentina 1920-1994, ed. David Elliot (Oxford: The Museum of Modern Art, 1995), 46.

55 Pacheco, “From the Modern to the Contemporary,” 25.

56 Marcelo E. Pacheco and Jon R. Snyder, “An Approach to Social Realism in Argentine Art: 1875–1945,” The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 18 (1992): 148 and 151.

60

Berni’s collages attracted contemporaneous criticism and recent scholarly attention for their use of experimental materials, but these interpretations did not focus on the tension between natural and urban space in this series of prints. Through the act of recycling, Berni imbued these five works with a sardonic edge that parallels the parody inherent in his Venice assemblages and his later work.57 Critics like Brest dismissed

Berni’s Juanito Laguna series as “folkloric” and too “local.”58 Berni documented the lives of the villa’s inhabitants through photographs and drawings.59 His interest in photography had developed in the 1930s and he began to use his Leica to record the people and conditions of Rosario’s brothels, labor demonstrations, unemployed, and shantytowns that were increasing as a result of Argentina’s economic depression and a series of military coups.60 Berni’s use of the camera demonstrates his interest in creating imagery that didn’t idealize the marginalized, but presented an approximation of their reality.

Berni’s anthropological or journalistic approach sought to confirm the authenticity of his images and to secure Juanito as an enduring symbol of survival.

Podalsky argued that Berni’s collages “challenged developmentalist visions of the city as

57 The most comprehensive analyses of Berni’s narrative pieces as parody were written by Marcelo Pacheco in his essay, “Parody and Truth Games,” and by Mari Carmen Ramirez in her essay “Parallelisms,” in Cantos paralelos: La parodia plástica en el arte argentino contemporáneo [Visual Parody in Contemporary Argentine Art].

58 Andrea Giunta Vanguardia, internacionalismo, y politica: Arte argentino en los años sesenta (Buenos Aires: Paidos, 2001), 262.

59 Rabossi, “Antonio Berni Tells The Story of Juanito Laguna,” 68.

60 Alejandro Anreus, “Adapting to Argentine Reality: The New Realism of Antonio Berni,” in The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere, eds. Alejandro Anreus, Diana L. Linden and Jonathan Weinberg (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 102 and 97.

61 cosmopolitan center.”61 Collages such as Inundación en el barrio de Juanito (1961) make the instability of this neighborhood apparent (Figure 4). Berni did not romanticize

Juanito’s life. Instead, the rough, corrugated texture of the metal pieces, the crude rendering of the figures and the muddy hue of the paint create a mood of hopelessness.

The image and by extension Juanito’s survival seem precarious. The figures are small in comparison to the dismal setting in which they float. A child clings to a woman wading beside the raft that a man is rowing. The two other children sitting in the small boat sadly stare at the viewer, forcing the audience to directly meet their gaze. Another girl balances a salvaged belonging on top of her head as she trudges through the waste-deep water. In the background, a sign reads “se venden terrenos. ” This representation of poverty reveals

Berni’s “renewed critical Marxist vision.”62

In such images as Inundación en el Barrio de Juanito, the site itself is represented as polluted and hostile. Detritus directly signifies the waste of consumption, alludes to pollution and reveals the realities of the villas miserias. Berni appropriated the materials that composed these quickly growing areas, bringing the marginal site into the privileged, cultural center.63 Berni asserted that the worker does not actually profit from the capitalist enterprise. The villas miserias serve as proof of the urban worker’s poor quality of life, despite the glitter of modernity’s promises. His Marxist critique and ethnographic approach serve as the foundation for images that are meant to have both local and global applicability.

61 Podalsky, Specular City, 101.

62 Anreus, “Adapting to Argentine Reality,” 112. This perspective shares some similarities with the expressionistic, anti-aesthetic work of the Argentine group Otra figuracion.

63 Podalsky also noted that Berni’s use of materials critiques consumerism and parallels ad-hoc, bricolage strategies employed by residents of the villas miserias. See Podalsky, Specular City, 111.

62

Berni’s xilo-collages exhibit compositional and thematic tension between urban and natural elements. The bright primary colors and textures and the depiction of Juanito contrast with other works. Berni’s technique for xilo-collages combines standard printing practices that use the press and engraving techniques, with assemblage and stenciling.

These examples also include metal and cloth scraps that were affixed to the surface and colored.64 His method relied on the reuse of unwanted materials and the arrangement of these recycled fragments according to their aesthetic properties and the thematic content of the work.65 The narrative tone individualizes Juanito’s experience and connects him to a specific location. The xilo-collages seem to, in part, document internal migration.

Recent immigration from a rural to an urban setting would account for the representation of Juanito in a rural setting and others in which the expanse of nature is only a portion of the composition.

The more rural scenes are interspersed with the urban ones, reinforcing the differences between the two types of spaces that Juanito inhabits. Juanito cazando pajaritos and Juanito bañándose, both from 1961, depict scenes of the young protagonist in a rural setting that is composed of brown and yellow hues (Figures 5 and 6). While each of the five prints seems to portray Juanito as a noble, childhood savage, Juanito cazando pajaritos is perhaps the most, in Brest’s words, “folkloric” picture in the set. In this piece, Juanito is fully clothed, has chubby cheeks, and is standing with his dog amidst a landscape of blooming foliage. Juanito holds a slingshot in one hand and a bird

64 Rabossi, “Antonio Berni Tells The Story of Juanito Laguna,” 70.

65 Antonio Berni, “Xylo-collages,” in Cantos paralelos: La parodia plástica en el arte argentino contemporáneo [Visual Parody in Contemporary Argentine Art], 192.

63 in the other. By itself, it would be easy to dismiss this work as an idealized vision of rural life. The fecund setting and Juanito’s clothing suggest plentitude.

However, when his work is viewed in a series as exhibited, Juanito’s life becomes less bucolic. At the Venice Biennial, Juanito cazando pajaritos was positioned between

Juanito pescando (1962) and Juanito Laguna pesca con red (1961) (Figures 7 and 8).

These images, like Juanito con pescado (1961), each depict the boy toiling for his food

(Figure 9). In Juanito con pescado and Juanito Laguna pesca con red, the collage of natural and industrial elements are uncomfortably juxtaposed in the crowded composition. In Juanito con pescado, clouds of smoke billow ominously in the background. Juanito has less clothing in these images and appears more haggard in

Juanito pescando. He is uncomfortably perched near the bright yellow river. The buildings and ships behind him document the environment and serve as symbols of industrialization. The anthropomorphic sun that peeks over the horizon line resembles the emblem of the sun on Argentina’s flag, which suggests Berni’s interest in directing national attention to the predicament of those living in the villas miserias.

In Juanito con pescado, there is a clear division between the natural space depicted in yellow hues in the foreground and the background, which consists of factories and a ship. The river divides these two spaces. Juanito stands in the foreground with no shoes and torn clothing, staring triumphantly at the viewer with a fish dangling from his hand. A sliver of yellow river defines the foreground of the other prints of Juanito fishing. He stands in the center of these expanses of industrial patterns and buildings that crowd much of the composition. The images speak to the human determination to survive, while also showing that industrialization is making Juanito’s life more difficult.

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These images, in conjunction with the assemblages paint a dismal image of industrialization and the outcomes of development. Berni’s representation of rural spaces and the juxtaposition of them against industrial cityscapes question the relationship between people and their environment. The images don’t offer resolution. They present the failings of modernity and the folkloric, romanticized visions equated with the rural.

Juanito Laguna, unlike most boys from the slum, rose from the debris of his shabby surroundings and became an iconic, popular symbol that was exhibited internationally.66 Berni’s works vacillate between popular and elite vocabularies, maybe never fully satisfying the expectations of either audience. His ongoing narratives are in their essence subjective, selective, and fragmented tales pieced together with found materials. Berni’s images tell an alternative tale of industrialization and shed light on the social construction of the environment.

Berni’s inclusion of the Pampa y Cielo prints in the Venice Biennial installation further drew attention to the periphery. They were created around the same time as the other works at the biennial. The national landscape draws to mind past conflicts.

Swirling, dark skies dominate these dynamic, monochrome prints (Figure 10 and 11).

The horizon line is low in each one, emphasizing the flat, arid landscape. A few species that inhabit this environment are included. Yet no sign of human intervention or figures are shown in these works. These monochromatic prints are distinct from the xilo-collages colorful, crowded compositions. The formal distinctions between the representation of

66 Gyula Kosice, “Argentinean Delegation to the Venice Biennial International Art Exhibition, 1962,” in Antonio Berni: A 40 años del premio de la XXXI Bienal de Venecia, 1962–2002, 72. Works from the Juanito Laguna series also increased in market value after their display and prestigious recognition at the Venice Biennial. For further discussion of the circulation of Berni’s works, see Plante, “Consagración de los producciones visuales y critica institucional entre Paris y Buenos Aires (1962-1972),” 261-320.

65 the Pampas and the villas miserias further distinguish the countryside from the city and, perhaps, the past from the present, representing the worth of the landscape as its own subject in visual art.

ECOLOGICAL ACTION FOR A “PLANETARY CONSCIOUSNESS”

Nicolás García Uriburu’s colorations were the first self-avowed ecological art actions to be performed in Argentina. Amidst student protests, he performed his first coloration, Coloration of the Grand Canal, at the Venice Biennial in 1968 (Figure 12).

He used the non-toxic substance fluorescein to temporarily dye the canal green.67 He has since re-enacted this action in various parts of the world. Uriburu exhibited an interest in nature early in his artistic career. He experimented with informalism in his Pampas series of 1962. Restany characterized these initial explorations of nature as expressing

Uriburu’s “organized vision of nature, the ultimate product of an organic and sensorial experience rendered in terms of visual symbols.”68 Between 1963 and 1964, Uriburu created figurative paintings of trees and ombúes. These early works are of iconic elements of Argentine nature. In 1968, Uriburu produced flat acetate and acrylic objects of such landscape features as the cow, clouds, and plants for Prototipos para un jardín artificial.69 This work demonstrates the artist’s early interest in the relationship between nature and culture, the natural and the artificial. Uriburu alternated his residency between

67 Fluorescein or fluorescent sodium is used by the U.S. Navy and by ophthalmologists. Uriburu selected this substance because it is non-toxic and its impact is temporary. The particular variant of fluorescein that the artist selected is a red substance that turns green when mixed with water. Restany, Uriburu, 43.

68 Ibid., 14. At this time, Uriburu also painted other quintessentially Argentine natural elements such as the ómbue and the Río de la Plata.

69 Ibid., 39-41. These were exhibited at the Galería Iris Clert in Paris in 1968.

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Buenos Aires, Paris and New York City in the 1960s.70 His response to the environment continued to evolve as part of the emerging ecological movement that was taking shape in the United States and Europe during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Uriburu’s colorations synthesized a number of artistic movements and trends, including Land and Conceptual Art and performance. This action temporarily inserted pure color into urban waterways, carrying symbolic weight through green’s associative meanings. Restany rightly alludes to the art historical, conceptual and ethical importance of these colorations. Uriburu’s ecological interests also extended to such activities as tree plantings and reforestation efforts.71 He periodically began to collaborate with

Greenpeace in the 1990s. Uriburu’s ecological efforts extend to both art and activism.

His ecological work and actions serve as a conduit that connects the initial wave of environmental concern with the present day, weaving between international and local circumstances.72

His global perspective centered on international waterways and a geopolitical consideration of the natural reserves of Latin America. His repetition of colorations throughout the world created a web of interconnected points, highlighting the idea of a global environment. Uriburu’s global perspective is most evident in his Intercontinental project of 1970. On May 25, one month after the first Earth Day was celebrated in New

York City, Uriburu dyed New York’s East River green. This coloration was followed by

70 Uriburu also studied architecture and befriended Luis Benedit in the 1960s, before moving to Paris. Uriburu resided in Paris between 1965 and1968. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1969 and then moved to New York City. He maintained residency there for eight months and then returned to Paris and then Buenos Aires.

71 Alonso, Sistemas, Acciones y Procesos, 256. For example, Uriburu was one of the founding members of Grupo Bosque, which led reforestation efforts in Uruguay.

72 Ibid., 158. He met and collaborated with the infamous German artist Joseph Beuys in 1981. Beuys is an influential figure for numerous contemporary artists who work on environmental themes.

67 one in the Río de la Plata in Buenos Aires, the Seine in Paris, and Venice’s Grand

Canal.73 The locations were strategically chosen, each representative of a cultural center.

The performance of the same action in multiple locations implies that nature, as signified by the color green, is able to function as a unified language, a sort of “universal” that transcends national borders.74

Uriburu thought of these sites as constituting a “conceptual quadrilateral,” the links of which were further solidified through media attention to his work.75

Documentation of Uriburu’s coloration served as a means to gain wider recognition.

Images of his colorations were included in specialized and popular media. For example,

The New York Times published a photograph of Uriburu’s coloration in the East River on

May 27, 1970 (Figure 13). His 1973 manifesto recorded his four-part intercontinental action along with maps of South America and records of other colorations.76 One page from his manifesto depicts the four sites through an image of the coloration and a fragment of the city’s map (Figure 14). The color-enhanced images merge landmark and waterway. Uriburu utilizes cartography, painting and photography in his manifesto to document the sites of his actions and to present them as part of an interconnected system.

73 The coloration in the Río de la Plata was executed in front of the company Italo-Argentina de Electricidad’s location in Puerto Nuevo. He did not receive prior permission or funding for this action, which increased its risk. Plante, “Consagración de los producciones visuales y critica institucional entre Paris y Buenos Aires (1962–1972),” 364.

74 Jorge Glusberg, “El Reino del Verde,” in Nicolás García Uriburu en el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1998), 10.

75 Restany, Uriburu, 66.

76 Uriburu’s manifesto includes the Venice coloration, views of the Grand Canal and Rialto Bridge, his “Space-Time Manifesto” (1968), his penis coloring in New York and his Vertical Coloration, a proposal for Iguazú Falls (1971). Restany, Uriburu, 69.

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Uriburu assumed the role of mediator between culture and nature, advocating for the protection of water as a natural resource. He expressed concern with the negative impact that development was having on natural resources, taking interest in waterways and the Amazon as symbols of Latin America’s natural reserves. His work explored connections between built and natural elements. The poetic nature of his work leaves his actions open to a variety of readings that are tied to the space in which they are executed.

Glusberg observed that Uriburu’s colorations represented an “interchange between natural and artificial signs” that pose a “conscious wish of apprehending the dynamism of our urban environment which reaches the art as well as the ethical field.”77 In sum,

Uriburu’s work highlights his negotiation of multiple, interconnecting realms and concern through one gesture. Uriburu’s colorations allude to, but do not unravel, the complex relationship between nature and the city, natural resources and policy.

Uriburu’s painted maps such as Latinoamérica reservas del futuro (1973) explicitly reveal his concern with geopolitics and the north’s exploitation of Latin

America’s natural resources (Figure 15). This example illustrates Latin America in varying shades of green and yellow. The title of the piece and the phrase “unida o sometida” are written in block letters across the bottom picture plane. It is a declaration to maintain regional autonomies and for the preservation of the region’s natural resources.78

Uriburu’s desire for continental unity and concern with the foreign-led industrialization

77 Jorge Glusberg, “Coloraciones y sistemas de Nicolás Garcia Uriburu,” 1970, 8-9, The Museum of Modern Art Library Artist File. Originally in De la figuración al arte de sistemas. Exh. Cat. (Buenos Aires: Centro de Arte y Comunicación, 1970). Also available through the International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston digital database.

78 Restany describes Uriburu’s position for a continental identity as one that is aligned with Simón Bolívar’s dream. Uriburu also presented the inverted map Mapamundi from 1981 at Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1982. Restany, Uriburu, 69. This gesture recalls Joaquín Torres-García’s earlier inverted map of 1936.

69 of Latin America continue to be important themes in the work of other artists examined in this dissertation. Uriburu’s transnational projects align with Restany’s hope for a

“planetary consciousness” of nature.

Restany’s “Manifesto of Rio Negro: On Integral Naturalism” proposed a new form of art production that responds to the essence of nature and is based upon an ecological sensibility. The critic drafted the “Manifesto of Rio Negro” on August 3, 1978, while floating on the Alto Rio Negro on a six-week journey with ecological artists Frans

Krajcberg and Sepp Baendereck.79 While Restany’s manifesto was not widely read or circulated within Argentina at this time, it is significant in this assessment of the ecologically conscious thinking of the time. Restany’s manifesto responded to

Krajcberg’s work and his experience in the Amazon. He later positioned Uriburu as an exemplar of his manifesto’s tenets. It reflects his rumination of the division between a pure or “integral” nature that he thought the Amazon represented and an industrial one, with which he was more familiar. Linda Weintraub noted “The manifesto describes the distinctive kind of art engendered by intense environmental awareness, and it declares its culture-shifting implications. Integral naturalism, he maintained, replaces humanity’s long standing lust for power with respect for the sovereign role of planet Earth.”80

Restany, Krajcberg and Baendereck participated in presentations that introduced integral naturalism to a critical audience in 1979. These forums were held in São Paulo,

79 Restany, Uriburu, 137. Baendereck and Krajcberg both signed the manifesto. The manifesto was also referred to as the “Manifesto of Integral Naturalism.” Walters, “Frans Krajcberg,” 101 and 136. The manifesto was reissued in 1991 as part of the Rio-MAM exhibition at the Bacno Real in São Paulo. An event Baendereck-Krajcberg was organized by Paulo Fernandes in honor of the late Baendereck on April 29-May 24. Parts of the manifesto were digitally projected. The manifesto was also included in Restany’s text Uriburu: Utopia of the South, published in Spanish and English in 2001.

80 Linda Weintraub, “Frans Krajcberg: Integral Naturalism,” in To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2012), 95.

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Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Rome and Milan. “The Manifesto of Rio Negro,” which was not received well in Brazil, was granted a favorable response in Europe.81 Its mixed reception evidences the varied political and cultural climates in these countries. At this time, modernizing projects in Brazil took precedence and public discussions of deforestation had not previously been held in the country.82 The Amazon, like the waterways of Argentina, had not yet popularly been viewed as a resource that needed to be protected. The pioneering work of Restany, Krajcberg and Uriburu were early incursions into environmental topics in regions where this theme still remained relatively invisible.

Restany, a self proclaimed “theorist on modern, industrial and urban nature,” was greatly impacted by his initial visit to the Amazon in 1978. He stated that “Today, the

Amazon is the last reserve-refuge of integral nature on our planet.”83 He argued for a change in discourse and a greater consciousness that reflected upon the “limits of human perception, with respect to a totality that is an end in itself”–“naturalism.”84 Restany argued that this new aesthetic, inspired by the Amazon, would lead to a rupture from abstract and media-based art and a renaissance of work that aesthetically and ethically responded to the essence of nature.

81 According to Walters, “A circular announced Manifesto presentations and exhibitions of films, slides and debates related to the new naturalism, the sensitivity to pollution of the environment and of the senses.” Presentations were organized in São Paulo at Arte Global, in Brasilía at Teatro Galpãozinho, and in Rio de Janeiro at the Hotel Meridien on July 3-5, 1979. Brazilian and French critics participated. Restany was accused of having an imperialistic stance. Walters, “Frans Krajcberg,” 105-107.

82 Ibid., 104-105.

83 Restany, Uriburu, 135.

84 Ibid.

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Restany espoused art’s potential to use representations of nature as a source for ethical reflection. He saw the Amazon as an embodiment of the immensity of nature and a place where nature’s essence was more tangible. In Uriburu: Utopia of the South

(2001), Restany reflected that the Amazon was a “natural system so coherent in itself that it struck me that it could be the basis of a moral order that rules the perspective conscience, starting, however, from an industrial ecosystem.”85 The Amazon represented a stark contrast to the Pampas and the villas miserias, symbolizing a pure nature that should be conserved. There have been decades of conflict over development projects in the Brazilian Amazon. It is a site that has evoked romantic visions based on desire and fear. It is also a region that remains the home to indigenous populations and thus represents an ongoing negotiation between different visions of land use and constructions of environment. Restany witnessed the destruction of the Amazon and the suffering of the indigenous peoples on his journey.86 Restany tied his ethical awakening to nature. He stated, “Ultimately, nature exists by itself and goes beyond our possibility to perceive its duration. But, in the space-time of a man’s lifespan, nature is the measure of his conscience and sensitivity.”87

Restany’s critical reading of Uriburu’s work offers examples of how his notion of integral naturalism would be achieved in art. Restany proposed “integral naturalism” as an answer to Uriburu’s dematerialization of the art object and shift toward conceptual practice in the 1960s. Restany proposed that “integral naturalism” was an “expression of

85 Ibid., 134.

86 Walters, “Frans Krajcberg,” 104.

87 Ibid., 135.

72 planetary conscience” that, like Uriburu’s use of the color green, revealed the global importance of nature and ecological awareness. Restany’s text also revealed an interest in moving beyond a superficial indictment of pollution to a discursive shift. Restany states in his manifesto that “the idea [as embraced by his description of naturalism] is to fight against subjective pollution rather than objective pollution, against the pollution of the senses and of thought instead of air and water” and that “the fight against pollution must start in the mind.”88 Restany’s pronouncements call for a subjective turn, for a critical awareness and understanding of nature.

EARLY TEXTS ON THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT

During the 1970s, Latin Americans published several important texts that challenged the modern tenets that drove local development projects and urban design.89

These foundational texts coincided with international discussions on ecological issues and addressed the maintenance of nature in the Latin American city. They included “The

Machu Picchu Charter,” 1977; Tomás Maldonado’s texts, including Design, Nature, and

Revolution: Toward A Critical Ecology, first published in Italian in 1970; and Jorge

Glusberg and Clorindo Testa’s Hacía una Arquitectura Topólogica, 1977. Each recommend a reconsideration of urban design and the treatment of the environment, offering various readings of the problems that arose due to the realities of a post- industrial age and potential solutions to an impending ecological crisis. They represented

88 Ibid., 136 and 134.

89 The Valparaíso School / Open City Group in Chile and Signo x Signo in Perú also responded to local circumstances in architectural projects and/or urban actions, seeking to incorporate a greater sensitivity or awareness to ecological issues.

73 the international nature of the dialogue and the role that Argentines played in addressing topics that had also been poetically addressed in the works of Berni and Uriburu. They focus on the particularities of the Latin American city and the impact of development in the region, considering the environment in terms of its local and global importance.

Tomás Maldonado was an active participant in discussions of ecology in relation to design and urbanism.90 At Princeton since 1965, he gave a series of seminars that were published as Design, Nature, and Revolution: Toward A Critical Ecology (1972)—a text that highlights his critical reflection on the idea of an ecological crisis and asked how designers should deal with the conditions imposed by late-capitalism and information technology.91 The essays focused on the role of design and urban planning in the current culture, defined by revolutionary fervor among youth, nihilism and what he describes a year later in his postscript to the English edition as the “ecological fashion.”92 Thus, while an ecological crisis was the text’s focus, there were few words included that specifically addressed the environment. Rather, most of his writing focused on these social and discursive issues that have inhibited a viable solution in environmental planning and design. Maldonado argued that the U.S. government most actively endorsed the “ecological fashion,” asserting that while this fad aided in the development of a

90 Tomás Maldonado also led the Asociación arte concreto-invención and taught at the National School of Fine Arts. He later became the director of Ulm’s Hochschule für Gestaltung (School of Design). He published Ambiente humano e ideología: notas para una ecología critica in 1972. This was published in French and Spanish and available in Buenos Aires. See Plante, “Consagración de los producciones visuales y critica institucional entre Paris y Buenos Aires (1962-1972),” 9-13.

91 Felicity D. Scott, “On the ‘Counter-Design’ of Institutions: Emilio Ambasz’s Universitas Symposium at MoMA,” Grey Room, no. 14 (Winter 2004): 58. Scott notes that Maldonado became a fellow in Princeton’s Council of the Humanities and then held the Class of 1913 Lecturship in Architecture at the university between 1967 and 1970. See footnote 41 and page 51.

92 Tomás Maldonado, Design, Nature, and Revolution: Toward A Critical Ecology (New York, Evanston, San Francisco and London: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1972), 70.

74 greater, global “ecological conscience,” it was an “inconsistent conscience, without roots,

[one that is] easily eradicable.”93 Maldonado further argued for a movement beyond the pure, superficial fad of environmental awareness toward a “critical ecological conscience—critical toward the scandal of society.”94

Maldonado called for critical awareness and a plan for the future. He understood the “human environment” as a subsystem within a larger environmental framework.”95

Maldonado noted in Design, Nature and Revolution that “in the last decades, the three basic components of our biotic system—air, water, and earth—have been mistreated atrociously, to the point where in many areas of our planet, especially in the great industrial and urban center, we can already see a substantial and irreversible rupture in the ecological equilibrium.96 Maldonado’s position was that architects and designers should take a socially responsible role in future development projects. His document presented an ecological vision of built environment as a revision to modernist paradigms.

“The Machu Picchu Charter” also addressed the importance of sustainable design.

Bruno Zevi drafted this revisionist charter after a conference in Cuzco and Lima on

December 12, 1977. It was signed by an international and interdisciplinary group, including Jorge Glusberg.97 The Charter represented an ecologically conscious amendment to the techno-modern paradigm espoused in “The Athens Charter.”

93 Maldonado, Design, Nature, and Revolution, 77.

94 Ibid.

95 Victor Maegolin, “Design, the Future and the Human Spirit,” Design Issues 23, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 5 and 8.

96 Maldonado, Design, Nature, and Revolution, 37.

97 Aldo Rossi, “The Charter of Machu Picchu, Twenty-Five Years On,” L’Architettura 48 (Dec. 2002): 798-99.

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Participants saw the document as a starting point for future discussions about the problems that had developed since the 1933 charter. The conference’s location was seen as symbolic, representing a shift from Western logic or Enlightenment ideals, to a more complicated, global perception of urban space: “Athens stood for the cradle of the western civilization. Machu Picchu symbolizes the independent cultural contribution of the other world.”98 The charter contains ninety-five points and is divided into twelve sections, including the introduction.99 These sections cover such themes as “Urban

Growth,” “Natural Resources and Environmental Pollution” and the “Defense and

Preservation of Cultural Values and of our Inheritance of Historic Landmarks.” It argued that steps to ensure healthy standards should be reflected in “urban and economic planning, in architectural design, in engineering standards and criteria, and in public development policy.”100 The charter also argued for the importance of the particularities of site, stating that planners should keep in mind the historical, cultural and sociological factors endemic to individual cities.

Rather than just creating artificial environments, the participants who signed “The

Machu Picchu Charter” encouraged designers to produce “planned environments in keeping with natural elements”101 Architect and theoretician Aldo Rossi described this charter as representing a shift from a mechanistic paradigm to an “ecological paradigm

(organic-holistic).”102 This sentiment was also emphasized in artist and architect Clorindo

98 “La Carta del Machu Picchu / The Machu Picchu Charter,” 800.

99 Rossi, “The Charter of Machu Picchu,” 798.

100 “La Carta del Machu Picchu / The Machu Picchu Charter,” 802.

101 Ibid.

102 Rossi, “The Charter of Machu Picchu,” 798-9.

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Testa and Jorge Glusberg’s Hacia una Arquitectura Topológica (1977), in which they defined “topological architecture.”103 This text similarly sought alternatives to formalist models through a reconsideration of how urban space is organized, its concern with ecological problems, and a sensitivity to the complex meanings and histories of particular sites. These texts on urban planning and design proposed the need to reconsider the layout of cities and respect the natural environment, especially in regions such as Latin

America, calling for a more socially and environmentally sensitive urban vision that considers the needs of specific sites. These accounts preceded the inception of sustainable development in the 1980s, which popularized a joint consideration of poverty and the natural environment.

The period described in this chapter marks the inception of a popular international awareness of an impending ecological crisis. These texts and actions represent initial attempts by Argentines and others closely associated with the nation to confront environmental challenges. Many of the initial preoccupations of these ecological vanguards set the stage for and reveal common themes that appear in the works of later artists. Issues such as the divide between capital and periphery, the invisibility of nature in Argentine culture, and the environmental problems associated with techno-modern development continue to be explored. In Argentina, nature gained significance as artists, intellectuals, and activists increasingly tied it to other local issues, integrating nature into an interconnected, cultural system.

103 This proposal was realized in connection with the “The Machu Picchu Charter.” They defined “topological architecture” as an architecture that was designed to suit its geographical environment, using local materials and building techniques, and addressing social needs. It also considered the significance of people’s relationship to specific places. Clorindo Testa and Jorge Glusberg, Hacia una Arquitectura Topológica (Buenos Aires: Espacio Editora, 1977).

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CHAPTER 2: ACTION ART FOR ENVIRONMENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS

The 1990s experienced a rise in both environmental movements in Buenos Aires and parallel artistic responses to urban ecological degradation. Greenpeace Argentina was established in the nation’s capital in 1987 and the United Nations Earth Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. These events highlighted the growth in institutional concern for the environment in the region, which led to a new popular awareness. Sustainable development became the motto for future modernization, which for the first time united the goal of alleviating poverty with that of environmental sustainability.1 Beginning in this decade, Nicolás García Uriburu (b. 1937), the La Plata-based collective Grupo

Escombros2 (active since 1988), and Buenos Aires-based artist Daniel Acosta (active since the 1980s) staged urban art actions on rivers or in public parks to raise environmental consciousness. These artists’ principal motivations were to engage a wider audience with ecological and human rights issues that were marginalized. Each project

1 The Brundtland Commission in 1983 first articulated the concept of sustainable development. In 1987, the United Nations issued the report Our Common Future.

2 Grupo Escombros will be referred to as Escombros throughout the rest of the chapter. The group was originally comprised of Horacio D’Alessandro, David Edward, Juan Carlos Romero, Luis Pazos and Héctor Puppo. Pazos and Puppo were active in the 1970s and were connected to the activities of the CAYC and the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella. The members of Escombros shifted over the years, but the core group of Pazos, Puppo, D’Alessandro, and Edwards remained the same. In addition to these core members, Héctor Ochoa signed the second manifesto in 1995 and the third in 2000. José Altuna, Claudia Castro, Adriana Fayad, Pazos, Puppo, Edward, and D’Alessandro signed the fourth manifesto in 2003.

78 was meant to stimulate a dialogue between the public and specific sites.3 The artists’ activation of public space through performance moved beyond an indirect call for environmental protection. Each project offered a means to access nature and focused on defining the Riachuelo, Río de La Plata, and public parks as integral components of the city.

Uriburu, Escombros, and Acosta independently selected public spaces to direct attention to urban pollution and to explore nature as a needed component of human existence. During the Dirty War, the democratic system was overturned and authoritarian regimes created an atmosphere of fear that defined public space as unsafe.4 In its aftermath, these artists presented environmental problems as emblematic of the state’s maltreatment of the nation’s citizens and as a result of poor economic policies and globalization. The performative use of public space after this period of dictatorial reign represented a reclamation of the city, a desire for a more diverse audience, and an interest in overcoming the limitations of institutional support. The economic crisis of 2001 further distanced artists from institutions and stimulated an increase in artistic activity in the street.5 The population’s general distrust of the government and the noticeable failure

3 The public that each sought differed by action and artist, sometimes including community members and other times catering to environmental and art specialists or media personnel.

4 Ana Longoni, “Action Art in Argentina from 1960: The Body (Ex) Posed,” Arte no es Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960–2000, ed. Deborah Cullen (New York: El Museo del Barrio, 2008), 85. An additional selection of relevant sources are as follows: Luis Camnitzer, “Art and Politics: The Aesthetics of Resistance,” NACLA Report on the Americas 28, no. 2 (September–October 1994): 38- 44; Luis Camnitzer, "The Tupamaros," “Tucumán Arde: Politics in Art," and "The Aftermath of Tucumán Arde," in Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 44-59, 60-72 and 73-92; Diana Taylor, “Making a Spectacle: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,” in Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology, ed. Jan Cohen-Cruz (New York: Routledge, 1998), 74-85; Eva Grinstein, “La acción urbana como forma de resistencia estético-política [Grupo de Arte Callejero],” ArteContexto, no. 1 (2004): 40-46.

5 Andrea Giunta, Poscrisis: Arte argentino después de 2001 (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2009) and Longoni, “Action Art in Argentina from 1960,” 99.

79 of economic, social and environmental agendas encouraged artists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to work in the margins, becoming part of local and international efforts to raise environmental consciousness. Abandoned sites and the natural environment, deemed a subordinate element within the city, were metaphors for the disregarded people and environmental conditions.

This chapter will demonstrate that Uriburu, Escombros and Acosta exposed environmental degradation through actions based on motifs that signaled nature and ecological crisis. It will examine in detail: Uriburu’s colorations, in which the color green acts as a universalizing signifier of nature; Acosta’s performances, which often allude to the four elements; and Escombros’s collaborative events, which unite social and environmental concerns. These artists repeated actions, demonstrating their commitment to expose urban environmental decay through sustained effort that, at times, directly intersected with the work of local environmentalists.

It will focus on Uriburu’s and Escombros’s unconnected collaborations with

Greenpeace, which began in the 1990s: Uriburu’s Basta de Contaminar (1999) and

Utopia del Bicentenario (2010) and Escombros’s Recuperar (1990) and Crimen Seriado

(1995).6 These partnerships with Greenpeace reinforced mutual goals and represented a confluence of strategies that included the use of symbolic motifs and promotional materials to publicize the consequences of urban industrial pollution. It will also focus on

Acosta’s actions that were motivated by a similar desire to bring greater visibility to

6 Escombros organized Crimen Seriado II on May 17, 1997 and La Asociación del Lago del Palermo reproduced Crimen Seriado III on June 8, 1997. See Zulema Moret, “Cronología de Escombros,” in Artistas de lo que queda: Las escrituras de Escombros (Madrid: Trama, 2006). Uriburu also collaborated with Greenpeace on Proyecto Yaguareté (1998), performed at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and No a la Basura Nuclear (2003) at the Palacio del Congreso in Buenos Aires. See Uriburu: Utopía del Bicentenario, 1810-–2010. 200 Años de Contaminación (Buenos Aires: Roldan, 2010), n.p.

80 nature within the city using community events and public action. Acosta collaborated with other artists and organizations—for example, he has coordinated SOS Tierra (begun

2005), an annual environmental art event that includes a collection of local and international participants. He envisions it as both a collective and an annual encuentro in honor of Earth Day.7 All these stimulated dialogue among artists within the region and local members of the community and aimed to provoke both popular and specialized critical discourse. Consequently, the actions of Uriburu, Escombros, and Acosta often strategically intersected with community activities and environmental campaigns, while also gaining critical recognition through their participation in exhibitions. Their efforts prompt a reconsideration of nature that is poetic and pragmatic.8 The projects’ ties to art and activism or education came together in a call for transformation.

THE RISE OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT AND ART’S INSERTION INTO PUBLIC SPACE

Authoritarian political rule and high inflation defined the late 1960s and 1970s.

The military regimes’ war against those perceived capable of inciting a revolution, escalated with General Jorge Rafaél Videla in 1976. In a tense environment of secrecy, fear, censorship and human rights abuses, artists created innovative means of superseding

7 It has been held at the Parque Ecológico y Cultural Guillermo Enrique Hudson for a number of years. The park was declared a natural reserve in December of 2000 under the provincial law 12.584. It is located between the cities of Buenos Aires and La Plata and is named after the naturalist Guillermo Enrique Hudson. The museum and protected land are intended to encourage public appreciation for nature through direct experience with the environment and reflection. The park hosts other events, educational activities and has a radio program. The current director Rubén Ravera uses the park’s blog and podcasts as a means to expand the park’s audience.

8 Escombros began to participate in biennials during the 1990s. See Moret, Artistas de lo que queda, 59. Uriburu exhibited internationally since the 1960s and Acosta’s work has been exhibited in principally local galleries.

81 the restrictions placed on them, developing such tactics as mail art and action art.9 The critical use of language, public space and methods of circulation defined conceptual practice. Edgardo Antonio Vigo (1927–1997) and Carlos Ginzburg (b. 1946) are notable examples of artists from this era whose experimental use of the street and circulation of works have been cited as inspiration for later artists such as Acosta.10 Vigo, who is perhaps most known as the initiator of mail art in Argentina, also founded and edited the journals Diagonal Cero and Hexágono ’71 and created experimental actions and poetry.11

Vigo led the group Diagonal Cero in the 1960s, of which Ginzburg joined in 1967.

Ginzburg also joined the Grupo de los Trece, part of the CAYC, in 1971.12 Ginzburg defined his works as “mass aesthetic experiences.” For example, during the exhibition

9 Performance is a term that is often used in a flexible manner, but that is tied to a specific Western art historical tradition. Deborah Cullen defines action art as “interactive events, taking place in the street or in another public space, in the museum, gallery, or privately, and they generally employ the body of the artist or his/her surrogate in a direct relationship to a live or removed—witting or unwitting audience.” See “Arte no es Vida: An Introduction to the Project,” Arte no es Vida, 12. While the distinction between these terms is not clearly defined, I have elected to use the term “action art” to refer to the projects of Uriburu, Escombros, and Acosta because they describe their own work as such and because it underscores the dual function of their work as art and as an action that communicates ecological awareness to a general public. However, I will also use the term “performance” to refer to the performative quality of these actions and, at times, to emphasize a dual connection to the term performance. For a discussion of the early manifestations of action art in Argentina, see Longoni, “Action Art in Argentina from 1960.”

10 Artists such as Daniel Acosta and Rafael Santos (former member of the collective Ala Plástica) have referenced these artists in discussions as influential models. Grupo Escombros includes a description of the Movimiento Diagonal Cero (of which Luis Pazos was a member) on its website, distinguishing it as an influential vanguard group of the 1960s. Hexágono’71, AR-FUNDACION ESPIGAS-KARDEX: HEXÁGONO ‘71/A, Fundación Espigas, Buenos Aires. Ginzburg created projects such as Flor, Hoguera hacia la aurora boreal and Hoguera nocturnas en la costa Patagonia in 1971. These were part of his Serie Analítica, which are housed in the Espigas Archive. Néstor García Canclini, “Vanguardias artísticas y cultura popular,” 1973, http://www.magicasruinas.com.ar/reducciones/vanguardias-artisticas-arte-urbano- 02.htm. This article was originally published by the Centro Editor de América Latina S.A. in 1973. In it, Canclini examines the expansion of art production into the streets and its diversification. He discusses the manifestation of “arte ecológico,” distinguishing two types that exist: one about nature and another that seeks to recreate the urban environment.

11 Rodrigo Alonso, “Edgardo Antonio Vigo,” Sistemas, Acciones y Procesos, 1965–1975 (Buenos Aires: Fundación Proa, 2011), 260.

12 Alonso, “Carlos Ginzburg,” Sistemas, Acciones y Procesos, 256. Luis Pazos, Juan Carlos Romero and Horacio Zabala were also part of the Grupo de los Trece.

82

Arte de Sistemas, held at the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1971, Ginzburg wrote the word

“Tierra” on the ground of an abandoned lot adjacent to the museum. As the scale of the text made it illegible from the ground, posted signs directed viewers to a window within the museum through which to see the text.13 The work forced a reassessment of the viewer’s surroundings.

Ginzburg believed that artists of this era were interested in exploring change and that “works are conceived as structures within the exchange of information, no longer experienced in private and secret terms. They are incorporated into the world of the audience they belong to and form a unity with it.”14 He stressed that the “total context” was essential. Néstor García Canclini elaborated on the importance of this idea in his article “Vanguardias artísticas y cultura popular” (1973). In this text, he noted that environmental degradation is not of particular concern to Argentines, but that nature entered into the works of artists from this era as part of their reconsideration of their relationships to the urban environment and as a response to social needs, geopolitics and an attempt to use art to create horizontal dialogue.15 These works were revolutionary in their ambition to initiate social transformation. Escombros, Acosta and Uriburu explored the concept of ecology in conjunction with social, economic, and political factors and nature as part of the urban fabric, adapting conceptual practices to express concern for the natural environment.16

13 Longoni, “Action Art in Argentina from 1960,” 96.

14 Carpeta Carlos Ginzburg, 1, 2450, Barcode: 09582, Fundación Espigas, Buenos Aires.

15 Canclini, “Vanguardias artísticas y cultural popular,” n.p.

16 Clemente Padín has noted the importance of Vigo’s work in the development of projects by artists affiliated with SOS Tierra. Clemente Padín, “S.O.S. Tierra II en el Parque Hudson,” Malabia: Arte,

83

Alongside these artistic innovations, Greenpeace’s campaigns in Argentina and the work of a smattering of local organizations, community members, artists and collectives inspired a burgeoning of greater ecological awareness.17 Environmental NGOs spread throughout Latin America during the 1980s.18 These organizations took shape in a tumultuous economic context, where social and environmental issues merged. This factor was especially significant for the work of Escombros. Geographer Marie Price differentiates between environmental NGOs in the United States and in Latin America, arguing that many in Latin America are defined by a vision of environment based less on preservationist ethos and more on notions of sustainability and stewardship.19 These models acknowledge the history and present circumstances of people and place, seeking to balance industrial goals with improved models of environmental protection and land use.

Environmental activism in Buenos Aires was endorsed and legitimized by regional events. The 1992 United Nations Earth Summit directed public attention to environmental issues in developing nations. The event’s location in the southern hemisphere “symbolically marked Brazil’s—and by extension the region’s—entry as a

Cultura y Sociedad (2007), http://www.revistamalabia.com.ar/web_06/web_32/notas/nota_15.htm (accessed 2012).

17 Jorge P. Mones Ruiz explains and critiques the organization’s mission in Argentina in his book Sin Destino?: Estudio Sobre las Nuevas Amenazas Globales (Buenos Aires: Editorial Santiago Apóstol, 2007), 151-166.

18 Marie Price, “Ecopolitics and Environmental Nongovernmental Organizations in Latin America,” Geographical Review 84, no. 1 (1994): 42.

19 Ibid., 42-44. Price argues that these organizations were integral in the formation of environmental and social policies. They spread throughout Latin America as international environmental awareness and funding increased. The link between social and environmental issues is an important aspect of many of these organizations.

84 main participant at the global level of ecopolitics.”20 The attention that international environmental groups paid to the Amazon basin directed public awareness to this site and attracted the response of artists such as Uriburu.21 The conference framed environmental degradation in terms of its ties to the consequences of geopolitics and economic policies in “underdeveloped” nations, centering on such topics as sustainable development, consumption, biological diversity, global warming, ozone destruction, and international cooperation.22 Environmental NGOs formed in response to the government’s negligent management of the natural environment and were intended to address citizens’ concerns.

The environmental movement in Argentina was marked by its heterogeneous and urban nature.23 Citizen actions against pollution in Buenos Aires rose in the late 1980s.

Graciela S. Melitsko, scholar of urban and environmental policy, affirms that in this era people began to “protest in the street, they [lobbied] public officials, they [filed] legal complaints against industries and the government to stop polluting activities or [blocked] facility constructions and they [educated] the public in general.”24 Uriburu, Escombros, and Acosta created works that were extensions of these efforts. Their actions inspired a metaphysical consideration of nature that often overlapped with a practical desire to

20 Ibid., 42.

21 Uriburu exhibited S.O.S. Brazil at the São Paulo Art Museum to coincide with Eco’92. The show opened on July 10, 1992. Pierre Restany, Uriburu: Utopia of the South (Buenos Aires: Nicolás García Uriburu Foundation, 2001), 230.

22 Ibid., 45. In addition, see the United Nation’s overview of the summit’s themes and discussion of it as a key turning point for a more complex consideration of environment: United Nations, “UN Conference on Environment and Development” (1992), revised May 23, 1997, http://www.un.org/geninfo/bp/enviro.html (accessed fall 2012).

23 Graciela S. Melitsko, “The Emergence of Environmental Activism in the City of Buenos Aires: Citizen’s Movement on Toxic Contamination” (Master’s Thesis, Tufts University, 2007), 20.

24 Ibid., 1.

85 inform people of environmental degradation and crisis. The physical aspect of their work temporarily disrupted the routine experience of the urban landscape, highlighting nature’s presence.

The Riachuelo assumed a prominent position in these artists’ reflections. This river has been transformed by urban pollution and is now one of the most polluted rivers in the world. Its condition is characterized by degradation, which has seeped into adjacent neighborhoods and caused numerous health issues for residents of these sectors.

Its decay began in 1810 when beef slating plants were built along the river’s banks.

Curator Joaquín Molina noted that this initial act of industrial pollution was followed by the First Triumvirate’s promise to clean the River Mantanza-Riachuelo Basin.25 The continued pollution of the river by industrial plants has been punctuated by the government’s promises to remediate the Riachuelo.26

The Argentine government enacted a number of environmental laws in the

1990s.27 The Argentine Secretary of the Environment, Maria Julia Alsogaray, under the direction of President Carlos Menem (1989–1999), announced in 1993 the infamous

1000-day plan to clean the Riachuelo. Alsogaray received a loan from the Inter-American

Development Bank for remediation efforts.28 However, this proposal had little affect.

25 Joaquin Molina, Uriburu: Utopía del Bicentenario, n.p. According to Molina, in 1987, the National Government, the Province of Buenos Aires, and the City of Buenos Aires invested approximately one billion dollars in a plan to help eliminate the river’s contamination in twenty years. The river was not remediated.

26 Ibid.

27 Melitsko, “The Emergence of Environmental Activism in the City of Buenos Aires,” 21. In 1991, the Secretaria de Recursos Naturales y Ambiente Humano (SERNAH) and the Consejo Federal de Medio Ambiente (COFEMA), which mediates between the federal government and the provinces, were created.

28 See Melitsko and Mones Ruiz, Argentina: Sin Destino?

86

Indeed, Alsogaray was later convicted of embezzling funds that were intended to reduce and remediate environmental contamination in Buenos Aires.29 The failure of this plan is emblematic of the government’s inability to enforce new environmental laws and of its refusal to follow-through with promises such as the 1,000-day plan. Escombros directly responded to the government’s ineffectiveness and corruption. The group created Agua del Riachuelo 1,000 Días Después, which represented a critique of the Menem administration’s pledge to cleanup the river. The group distributed a series of “objects of consciousness” on October 2, 1995 to remind the public of the river’s dire state and the continued need for remedial action.30 Uriburu’s earlier Coloration, Puerto Madero, Dock

3 (1992) also directed attention to industrial pollution, using the port as a means to gain greater visibility of this issue (Figure 16).31

More recently in 2008, the government received an approximately two billion- dollar loan from the World Bank to improve the river’s quality and conditions along its banks.32 Environmental problems persist due to industrialization and the growth of informal settlements that are not equipped with proper infrastructure and result in sewage and industrial waste being dumped into the river. The social and environmental cost of the contamination has been great. In 2010, Uriburu performed one of his notorious colorations in the Riachuelo to memorialize the history of the river’s contamination. It implicated the government and private companies in the pollution of the river and demise

29 Matthew Amengual, “Enforcement without Autonomy: The Politics of Labor and Environmental Regulation in Argentina” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, September 2011), 47. His text elaborates on the government’s failure to enforce new environmental laws.

30 Moret, Artistas de lo que queda, 137.

31 Restany, Uriburu: Utopia of the South, 276.

32 Ibid.

87 of surrounding neighborhoods. His work and collaboration with Greenpeace on this project represent a convergence of art and activism in the promotion of improved environmental conditions in Buenos Aires.

GRUPO ESCOMBROS: NATURE AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Escombros was founded in 1988, several years after democracy was reestablished in 1983. The group’s work responded to hyperinflation, human rights abuses and political corruption. Its original members were artists and poets who like other contemporary socially concerned artists sought to de-emphasize authorship in favor of collaborative expression in their actions, critiques, and projects. Escombros began its practice in the streets, utilizing abandoned public spaces that symbolically, like its name, represented the ruin that the structural inadequacies of the government and economic system had caused.

Escombros’s practice emphasized the importance of artistic, interdisciplinary, and community collaborations. They continue to be committed to the idea “todo juntos.”33

This motto stresses the importance of cooperation and the reality that many people within a community experience similar plights. Escombros’s work suggested the potential of a more inclusive vision of community and people’s collective capacity to contribute to the betterment of society.34 In particular, Escombros criticized consumerism, seeing it as an apathetic obsession. The group frequently used water and trash as materials in its

33 The collective’s website, which contains texts and images related to the group’s work, describes the importance of this concept in its work as a collective. Grupo Escombros, http://www.grupoescombros.com.ar/imgs/obras/convocatorias/recuperar/recuperar.html (accessed spring 2012).

34 Ibid.

88 works.35 Water stressed human reliance on this natural resource and society’s contamination of it. Trash was presented as the residue of consumerism and as a symbol of deterioration and neglect.

Escombros united its consideration of social and political rights with environmental work. On December 9, 1989, one thousand artists from varying disciplines gathered at an abandoned quarry in La Plata for La Ciudad del Arte, an interdisciplinary gathering they organized (Figure 17).36 The collective categorized this event, Recuperar, and Crimen Seriado as “convocatorias” and performed one of its first site-specific actions, Sutura, at La Ciudad del Arte (Figure 18). For Sutura, the collective’s members wove a rope back and forth across a ditch to make it appear as though the thirty-meter- long trench that stretched across the earth had been stitched back together. This recuperative act spoke to the group’s efforts to confront the social and ecological wounds of the nation and to heal them symbolically through art, interdisciplinary dialogue and community participation. This work approximated and inverted the methods of Land Art, which tended to create monumental structures in the landscape through the manipulation of natural materials. In this instance, however, the monumental mark was preexisting and the stitching connoted healing.

The group also distributed two thousand small bags filled with seeds as “objects of consciousness.” Entitled Siembra, each bag included a piece of paper with the

35 Moret, Artistas de lo que queda, 60.

36 Grupo Escombros, pamphlet, 1995. EXP COLECTIVA 1995.09.25, BARCODE 003843, Fundación Espigas, Buenos Aires. Sutura was featured on the cover of the group’s second manifesto La Estética de la Solidaridad (1995), in which the group includes the section “Sobre la Ecología.”

89 following inscription: “Para sembrar la nada y dar muerte a la muerte” (Figure 19).37 The dispersal of seeds to the public with the invitation to sow them invited others to participate in this process of growth and recuperation. “This and other actions of the group insisted on an ecological protest against damage effected on the planet.”38 It is clear from such actions that the group had an ecological agenda and intuited an affinity between the health of the environment and that of society.

The group clarified and strengthened its ecological agenda through collaborations with Greenpeace, and in relation to considerations of national social and political issues.

In 1990, Escombros collaborated with Greenpeace América Latina for the first time, working together to produce Recuperar (Figure 20). Escombros performed this work at the site of an abandoned fabric plant in the Ciudad de Avellaneda and led to the creation and sale of Agua SOS, an “object of consciousness.” Escombros also constructed

Pirámide, a monument created out of collected trash, at this site.39

Recuperar was the group’s first collaboration with an environmental organization and marked the collective’s explication of their ecological position and their commitment to produce works that sought to promote environmental protection and that embraced a poetic reflection on the significance of nature. In August 2011, Héctor Puppo noted that the group had always inherently been concerned with the environment as a multidimensional social, biological, and political space, but that these ideas crystallized after its first collaboration Agua S.O.S. with Greenpeace in 1990.40 The collective

37 Ibid., 8.

38 Longoni, “Action Art in Argentina from 1960,” 98.

39 This monument was 4 x 3 meters.

40 Héctor Puppo Discussion, August 2011, La Plata.

90 professed that they developed “. . . una ética de la reconstrucción, en una suerte de posición ‘femenina ecologista’ que reorganiza sus gestas prioritarias en torno a la tierra y a la vida” through their work with Greenpeace.41 The group’s vision of nature is holistic and centers on the concepts of freedom and need. Their collaborative work, public events, and circulation of serial objects made from everyday materials intended to defy the modern obsession with the market and individuality.

The goal of Recuperar was to draw attention to high unemployment rates and environmental abuse by temporarily occupying an abandoned factory as a performance site (Figure 21). Escombros extracted and bottled water from the Riachuelo and sold it as

Agua SOS. Funds raised from the sale of these “objects of consciousness” were then donated to the Pelota de Trapo, an organization that aids homeless children.42 The

Instituto de Arte Fotográfico de Avellaneda also participated in this event by calling on students to document it—“El tema debe testimoniar la problemática ambiental, la contaminación en la zona afectada al desarrollo del encuentro: fábricas, el Riachuelo, el entorno.”43 The institute then hosted a juried exhibition of works on August 1,1990.

Consequently, the multidimensional project facilitated varying levels of participant engagement.

Escombros’s La Estética de la Solidaridad: Segundo Manifesto (1995), outlined its ecological position, stating that “deforestar un bosque o talar irracionalmente los

árboles de la ciudad significa: atacar al indefenso; someter al más débil; ejercer la

41 Moret, Artistas de lo que queda, 60.

42 Grupo Escombros, pamphlet, 1995, 9.

43 Greenpeace flyers and forms, AR-FUNDACIÓN ESPIGAS: EXP COLECTIVA 1995.09.25, BARCODE 003843, Fundación Espigas, Buenos Aires.

91 impunidad; negar la prolongación de la vida; arrancar de cuajo el futuro; sumarse a un proyecto de muerte.”44 The group continued “toda forma de vida tiene derechos” and that

“la deforestación es un crimen seriado.”45 Deforestation is a key issue that has been a rallying activity for many artists and environmentalists.46 While deforestation has been an actual problem in Argentina,47 the symbolic act of tree planting within an urban landscape serves a symbolic purpose that links it more generally to the occurrence of the destruction of nature.

On Saturday, June 10, 1995, Escombros organized its first Crimen Seriado in a public, forested park in La Plata. The city’s residents, including students from primary and secondary schools, artists and ecologists, were invited to participate in the principal

“action of consciousness,” which was to affix bandages on more than seven hundred trees

(Figures 22 and 23). The group’s proposition for this event was aligned with its position, as outlined in its manifesto, that deforestation is an act against the “defenseless” and one that negatively impacts everyone. In the article “Homenaje al Árbol en La Plata para

Celebrar al Día del Medio Ambiente,” Escombros asserted, “ . . . y no podemos separar al hombre de la tierra porque son destinos comunes.”48 The group reiterated this belief in a pamphlet for the event, explaining that “Escombros, a través del arte solidario, intenta

44 Grupo Escombros, La Estética de la Solidaridad: Segundo Manifesto, July 1995, Manifestos de Escombros: 1989, 1995, 2000, 2003 (La Plata: Grupo Escombros), 28-29.

45 Ibid., 29.

46 Joseph Beuys planted trees in such notable actions as 7,000 Oaks, which began as part of Documenta 7 in 1982. Tree planting has also become a popular part of Earth Day celebrations.

47 For a brief historical discussion of deforestation in Argentina, see Sergio Federovisky, “Desmemoria,” El Medio Ambiente No Le Importa a Nadie. Bestialidades ecológicas de la Argentina: Del Riachuelo a las Papeleras (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2007).

48 “Homenaje al Árbol en La Plata para Celebrar al Día del Medio Ambiente,” El Día, La Plata, 21 de junio 1995, 11.

92 construir el camino contrario: cuidar la vida en toda sus formas.” The bandaging of the trees was an “act of consciousness” in which the viewer-participant was made to consider the implications of deforestation. The completion of the assigned action mandated collaboration and direct physical interaction with the trees. The action became more relevant through its insertion into a local context, inclusion of community and the institutional support of an environmental NGO.

The convocatoria was held on Earth Day, which magnified its symbolic impact and positioned it as being loosely part of a movement, rather than simply an isolated event. The collective act symbolically revealed an invisible wound: acts against nature such as deforestation affect areas that are not always seen first hand and the impact of which is often quickly forgotten. Crimen Seriado can be read as both a symbolic artistic gesture and activism. The group attested that “lo importante es la comunicación, la reflexión sobre una problemática como, en este caso, ecología, la calidad de vida de los platenses.”49 At the end of the event, a marble plaque with a poem was revealed. The poem was written from the perspective of the tree and thus metaphorically gave nature a voice (Figure 24). It ends with the phrase “Te pido justicia.” This declaration for rights is consistent with the group’s stance that all living things have rights and should be treated with respect.

Escombros’s collaboration with school children distanced their project from the realm of politics. The inclusion of a diverse set of community members was also indicative of the collective’s desire to raise consciousness in a pluralistic and horizontal manner. They did not promote a single didactic message, but left the event and their

49 “Homenaje al Árbol en La Plata para Celebrar al Día del Medio Ambiente,” 11.

93 words to catalyze the creation of a platform for the voiceless and a space to promote ethical considerations. The group stated, “ . . . el arte solidario es una de las formas de la nueva educación pública.”50 Escombros’s reiteration of its values in the form of published manifestos inserted and legitimized the group’s work within the art world, while the collective’s collaboration with community members and institutions increased its publicity and expanded its audience.

Among Greenpeace’s principal and, perhaps, most successful strategies were its media campaigns. The group meticulously planned their actions and actively sought media attention.51 Greenpeace’s affiliation with this project, and other later ones, likely granted the institution added cultural worth. Meanwhile, projects such as Escombros’s

Recuperar were granted additional media attention due to their collaboration with

Greenpeace; the organization funded the production of information sheets and other materials to accompany Recuperar (Figure 25). Like Greenpeace, Escombros produced and dispersed pamphlets, manifestos and other materials to inform the viewer of the action. Escombros signed all of its work in a specific font and included its motto “artistas de lo que queda” beneath its name, indicating both the struggles that many citizens faced and the group’s commitment to social change. The “objects of consciousness,” the inclusion of poetry, and the installation of multiple objects within a symbolic public space construct open-ended meanings for a highly specific local intervention.

Escombros’s collaboration with students and community members helped to tie metaphysical reflections of nature to the local context and to validate the works’

50 “En el día del medio ambiente, se ‘vendaron’ más de 650 árboles en el bosque platense,” El Día, La Plata, 11 de junio, 1995.

51 Mones Ruiz, Argentina: Sin Destino?, 166.

94 importance, while Greenpeace and Crimen Seriado’s connection to Earth Day linked the issue of deforestation to a global context. The poem, written from the perspective of the tree, also gave the action a universal tone.

URIBURU: GREEN ART FOR GREENPEACE

Nicolás García Uriburu noted his strong affinity with Greenpeace. Since the late

1990s, his collaborations with this organization include Proyecto Yaguareté (1998),

Basta de Contaminar (1999), No Nuclear Waste (2003), and Utopía del Bicentenario—

200 Años de Contaminación, 1810–2010 (2010).52 Uriburu’s performances demonstrate his concern with globalization’s impact and call for the enhanced protection of water.

Basta de Contaminar and Utopía del Bicentenario intended to publicize the incidence of industrial pollution and denounce the companies responsible for dumping toxic waste into the Riachuelo. The serial nature of the work and Uriburu’s collaboration with

Greenpeace drew popular public and critical artistic attention to the pollution of urban waterways.53

Uriburu’s paintings of maps and the Amazon’s waterways conceptually frame his colorations, situating individual actions within a broader international ecological and economic system. He often selected culturally and historically significant sites that

52 Molina, Uriburu: Utopía del Bicentenario, n.p. The jaguar project confronts the threat to this animal that has resulted from the construction of an oil pipeline in its habitat.

53 Uriburu has been incredibly effective in gaining public recognition for his work in Argentina and internationally. With the exception of his first coloration, he would announce his action in advance to ensure that it would receive coverage, often inviting important art critics. His colorations have been reported on in newspapers, in Greenpeace’s materials, and in public broadcasts. In specialized publications, he was presented as the preeminent ecological artist in Argentina. These laudatory articles assert the ethical and artistic importance of his work, positioning it as an extension of the Land Art movement and as parallel to the work of Joseph Beuys. Notably, Jorge Glusberg, Pierre Restany and Isabel Plante have offered critical readings of his work.

95 shaped the meaning of the color green and added layers of symbolism to his work. His visual construction of nation, like that of nature, is based on icons. He used Evita and the ombú, for example, as recognizable and evocative symbols. These representations buttress the artist’s Romantic drive to be a hero who tirelessly perseveres, fighting to salvage and protect Argentina’s and the region’s culture and ecological treasures. Restany equated Uriburu’s actions in the Río de la Plata with German artist Joseph Beuys’ projects in the Rhine River, seeing a similarity in each artist’s perception of the symbolic and literal importance of selected sites. In fact, Beuys invited Uriburu to collaborate with him on Green Rhine (1981) and in planting the first trees for 7,000 Oaks at Documenta 7 in 1982. These collaborations reveal the parallel strategies and concerns of each artist.

Between 1984 and 1988, Uriburu dedicated much energy into reforestation efforts in

Argentina and Uruguay.54 He was a founding member of Grupo Bosque, based in

Uruguay. Its mission centered on the reforestation of Maldonado, Uruguay.55 In 1987, he led efforts to plant a thousand trees along the Avenida de 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires

(Figure 26).56 Uriburu’s preoccupation with deforestation, however, was also framed in terms of geopolitics, Argentina’s cultural icons and Latin America’s need for regional cooperation. Restany and Uriburu himself have promoted his legacy as an environmental activist and preeminent ecological artist of Latin America—one of the few in Argentina who has exclusively self-identified as an ecological artist.

54 Restany, Uriburu: Utopia of the South, 187.

55 Alonso, “Nicolás García Uriburu,” Sistemas, Acciones y Procesos, 256.

56 Restany, Uriburu: Utopia of the South,187.

96

Uriburu directly targeted companies responsible for the industrial pollution of

Buenos Aires’s waterways. On June 20, 1999, he created Basta de Contaminar with the support of Greenpeace to reprimand a company for disposing of toxic waste in the

Riachuelo (Figure 27).57 For this action, a fifteen-by-ten-meter banner was hung from the

Puente Victorino de la Plaza, which crosses over the Riachuelo. “BASTA” was scrawled in large red letters across the upper-left portion of the canvas. The banner depicted a stream of yellowish-green water with floating red skulls, pouring from a pipeline into the

Riachuelo. Three jumping fish skeletons and a skull and crossbones were also pictured.

The location of the banner was strategically positioned to face a business known for polluting and television reporters were invited to film the action in order to publically castigate this industrial practice.58

Uriburu’s exhibition Empresas Contaminantes Auspician was held at the Museo

Nacional de Bellas Artes in 2000, during the First Biennial of Buenos Aires (Figure 28).59

This exhibition included colored digital photographs that reported on nine national businesses that were responsible for contaminating the local environment. Uriburu’s mission to improve the Riachuelo’s condition continued with his execution of another coloration in 2010, which was again executed with Greenpeace, which drafted a proposal for the Autoridad de Cuenca Matanza Riachuelo in April of 2009, demanding that they comply with the sentence dictated by the Supreme Court and ordering the State, including

57 Restany, Uriburu: Utopia of the South, 276.

58 Ibid. and María Dia Rodriguez, “Río Limpia Ya!” Greenpeace en Acción 23 (Spring 1999): 10- 11. Biblioteca Naciónal, colección 12432, Buenos Aires.

59 Uriburu first organized this exhibition for the ICI in 1999 and then repeated it for the opening of the Biennial in Buenos Aires. The show was censored after someone vandalized it during opening night. Restany, Uriburu: Utopia of the South, 276.

97 national, provincial and city officials, to clean and recuperate the river basin.60

Greenpeace published this plan in Uriburu’s catalogue, which accompanied his 2010 coloration.

The catalogue includes images of Uriburu’s ecological works produced since

1968, showing the history of his continued dedication to the environment.61 The catalogue, a mirror of Uriburu’s entire ecological production and activities, combines a call for poetic reflection and practical action. The symbolic potential and practical efficacy of his colorations and related art unite the artistic and the ethical dimensions of his quest for a greater, global ecological consciousness.

Uriburu asserted in 1999 that the improvement of environmental conditions and the remediation of the river were dependent on NGOs, as the Argentine government had done little to alleviate or solve these problems.62 When asked about his consideration of

Greenpeace, Uriburu replied, “lo he admirando siempre, lo he seguido siempre, y cuando pude contactarme con Greenpeace en Buenos Aires me pareció una maravilla porque fue como encontrar a mi hermano gemelo.”63 Uriburu further affirmed the positions of

Spanish scholars José Albelda and José Saborit that Greenpeace’s work was very similar to contemporary art production.64 Uriburu sees this organization’s work as having a poetic component, as well as a practical one, stating that “Greenpeace ha recorrido un

60 Greenpeace, “García Uriburu y Greenpeace tiñeron de verde las aguas del Riachuelo para exigir el saneamiento de la Cuenca,” March 22, 2010, www.greenpeace.org/argentina (accessed 2012).

61 Molina, Uriburu: Utopia del Bicentenario, n.p.

62 This statement is from María Dia Rodriquez’s interview with Uriburu, which is included in “Río Limpia Ya!”

63 Rodriquez, “Río Limpia Ya!” 12.

64 Ibid.

98 camino que está muy cerca del arte” y “porque el arte y la vida se confunden.”65 These observations recognize the continued expansion of art into everyday life and its fluctuating proximity to social activism.

On May 22, 2010, Uriburu and Greenpeace activists performed Utopía del

Bicentenario: 200 Años de Contaminación in La Boca (Figure 29). This coloration honored the international day for water, a commemoration established by the United

Nations in December 1993 to promote awareness of the environmental issues pertaining to water use. For this action, Uriburu dressed in his trademark green jumpsuit and steered through the port of the Riachuelo in a small rubber motorboat with a few other

Greenpeace activists.66 Uriburu and the other collaborators poured buckets of fluorescein into the river. Two boats carried a yellow banner that read Greenpeace and “Riachuelo

200 Años de Contaminación,” linking the action not only to Greenpeace, but also to the subject of the action. Another banner hung from the bridge, attracting even more visibility and framing the entire scene as one orchestrated by the environmental organization. Media personnel, a filming crew in another boat, and other bystanders gathered on shore to watch and document the coloration. The catalogue credited Uriburu with the action. The short video documentation of the event offered views from the other boat and an aerial perspective that allowed viewers to see the green spreading across the water in the harbor.

Uriburu’s colorations encourage a number of intuitive interpretations of the meaning of the color green, which are mediated by Greenpeace’s presence and the site.

65 Ibid.

66 This performance is documented in a video, which is included with the catalogue Uriburu: Utopía del Bicentenario, 1810-–2010. 200 Años de Contaminación and is available online.

99

Critics have explored the popular associations of the color green, illuminating its layers of meaning. At certain angles, the red liquid turned green when it mixed with the water.

In Uriburu: Utopia of the South, Restany assessed the alternating ways in which green reads as a signifier not only of an integral nature, but also of democracy in Uriburu’s colorations. Restany interpreted the chemical transformation of the red substance to green in relation to the opposition between the symbolic, popular associations of green and red.

For instances, Restany argued that red is associated with communism and revolution, while green implies a state of balance.67 The interpretation of the color varied slightly in accordance to the site in which the coloration was executed.68 In their interpretation of

Greenpeace’s construction of nature and how the group’s strategies parallel those used by contemporary artists and the popular media, Albelda and Saborit noted how the color green is often poised in opposition to red and its many associations: “El pacifismo verde debe imponerse a la violencia roja.”69 They deconstructed the modern coding of nature as an idealized, pristine entity through their analysis of the popular use of the color green to indicate a range of values. In Uriburu’s colorations, green represents the aspiration to achieve a utopian end countered by the reality of the physical, urban environment in which he performs.70

Nature and the environmental movement conventionally have been coded with the color green. Green, as many scholars and critics have conceded, is similar to Yves

67 Restany, Uriburu: Utopia of the South, 43 and 184.

68 Ibid., 183-184.

69 José Albelda and José Saborit, La construcción de la naturaleza (Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana, 1997), 294.

70 Restany, Uriburu: Utopia of the South, 158.

100

Klein’s use of blue in that it is meant to have a universal translation that opens the work up to multiple interpretations or reflections about the relationship between the urban infrastructure and natural environment.71 Green can function as a symbol that alludes to both aesthetic and ethical considerations of the environment. It is often associated with environmental organizations, is embraced as a referent for sustainable action, and has been used in numerous marketing campaigns that promote earth friendly products and sustainable goods. Albelda and Saborit also deconstruct the phrase “ser verde,” parsing out the connotations of the term green in relation to cultural constructions of nature and the color’s symbolic use in advertising. Green has popularly been used in marketing campaigns to express all that is good.72 They state that “verde significa fresco-natural, sano-natural o limpio-natural porque se entiende que algunas cosas de la Naturaleza vegetal son frescas, sanas o limpias.”73 Green is associated with purity and perpetuates an opposition between an idea of what is “natural” and all that is not. This discourse becomes tied to the work of Uriburu and Greenpeace, adding an ethical dimension to the work that is filtered through popular conceptions of green as good, balanced, and pure.

Uriburu mediates the divide between art and nature, the public and the environment, and modernization and its negative outcomes. However, Uriburu’s use of green can also be criticized as a mere aesthetic reduction of nature to a vague symbol that connects his work to the environmental movement without conveying the particularities of local issues. Uriburu believed that green was “closest to nature.”74 The artificial

71 Ibid., 17.

72 Albelda and Saborit, La construcción de la naturaleza, 294.

73 Ibid., 282.

74 Jorge Glusberg, “El Reino del Verde,” in Nicolás García Uriburu en el Museo Nacional

101 imposition of this synthetic color was intended to make people aware of the pollution that existed in these waterways, while also serving as a purification ritual. The nuances of the color green’s multiple meanings, however, can be modified in relation to the site. The coloration of the river, as Restany suggested, fused painting, performance, and sociological action, the synthesis of which the critic refers to as a “unified language system,” reliant on the assumption that “green includes all the semantic, physical and mythical characteristics of nature.”75 Restany’s semiotic reading of Uriburu’s colorations explores the ways that green functions linguistically and the layers of meaning that the color, an iconic and archetypal symbol, connote. Uriburu’s agenda exists between art and activism.

ACOSTA: ACTION ART, FROM LA BOCA TO THE PARQUE HUDSON

Daniel Acosta resides in Buenos Aires. He trained as a painter, but transitioned to the production of objects and action art in the 1990s. At this time, Acosta began to consider nature and ecological degradation in his work. His concern with the Riachuelo’s poor condition was ignited during the Menem administration, when urban pollution was being granted greater publicity. Acosta feels a personal connection to La Boca. He has executed a number of works such as the gathering Agua-Tierra (1998) in this neighborhood. His interest in this site was amplified due to its national and symbolic importance.76 His initial reflections on nature incorporated references to the four elements

de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1998), 7.

75 Restany, Uriburu: Utopia of the South, 56 and 67.

76 Daniel Acosta Interview, August 11, 2012, Buenos Aires.

102 in large-scale paintings, seeking to represent nature in its entirety. Acosta first addressed the Riachuelo’s contamination with a series of boxes and objects that he produced between 1997 and 1998 (Figure 30). He fabricated these objects out of recycled found and natural materials such as seeds; these works contained his abstract personal reflections of the river and its degradation.

Acosta’s performances vary, while all have incorporated the artist and his use of symbolic props in a selected site. Some offered general reflections on the cultural construction of nature, others created parallels between the ill treatment of nature and the desaparecidos, which parallels the work of Escombros, and others considered environmental problems caused by factors such as industrial contamination. Acosta teaches at the Instituto Universitario Nacional de Artes Visuales and has principally participated outside of the market, performing what he refers to as “acciones locos.”77

These performances are planned, rather than improvisational, and public audiences encounter them unexpectedly. Acosta works both alone and in collaboration with other artists. For instances, he was a founding member of the collective Grupo XI Ventanas

(1996–2002), which created actions to combat ecological apathy.78 He later organized

SOS Tierra, which was first held in La Boca, and has frequently collaborated with his daughter Paloma in the creation of such performances as Deriva (2005). Acosta has created local and regional networks between ecologically concerned performance artists.

77 Daniel Acosta Interview, July 8, 2011, Buenos Aires. While such critics as Rodrigo Alonso and Clemente Padín have written on Acosta’s work, his art has not gained as much critical attention as Uriburu or Escombros. Still, his connection with Parque Hudson and its Museo Histórico Provincial and director Rubén Ravera has brought SOS Tierra more public attention.

78 The collective’s members were as follows: Daniel Acosta, Paula Abalos, Betty Bosch, Javier del Olmo, Raquel Nannini and Javier Vazquez. Paula Abalos later participated in Acosta’s SOS Tierra.

103

Grupo XI Ventanas staged interventions in natural reserves and marginal public spaces that were removed from the mainstream art world. Through the group’s election of such spaces, the artists sought to expand the boundaries and the limits of art.79 The group’s work, however, attracted minimal critical attention. The Argentine curator

Rodrigo Alonso explained that XI Ventanas “En busca de los escenarios que encarnan de mejor manera sus preocupaciones sobre la memoria, la opresión, el abandonado, la desidia o la exclusión, los integrantes del grupo han reestructurado su labor creadora hasta fundirla con el compromiso político, social, cultural y ecológico.”80 Alonso’s assessment supports an analysis of these performances as parallel to Escombros convocatorias and actions. For both Grupo XI Ventanas and Escombros, the body and its relationship to the site hold symbolic weight. Pazos and Puppo, members of Escombros, have retroactively described the collective’s experimentation with performance as a

“catharsis” and the body as a metaphor for the nation.81 In Escombros’s work, the artist’s body has also been interpreted as a generic living being that exists within an ecosystem, represented by the street.82 Alonso has interpreted Grupo XI Ventana’s actions in relation to the symbolic relationship of body to site: “Cuerpos que son metáfora del cuerpo social, que encarnan los conflictos de la experiencia colectiva, y que los devuelven transformados en reflexión artística, en Mirada extrañada, en un llamado de atención, en

79 Rodrigo Alonso, “Épica para el Tercer Mundo,” Grupo XI Ventanas, Arte Acción: 1996–2002 (Buenos Aires: Parque Ecológico Cultural Guillermo E. Hudson and Red Global del Trueque, 2002), n.p.

80 Ibid., n.p.

81 Hemispheric Institute Interview with Héctor Puppo and Luis Pazos, 2007, http://hidvl.nyu.edu/video/000541097.html (accessed 2010).

82 Julián María Iturrería, “Obra que habla de la Argentina en ruinas. Escombros, artistas de lo que queda. Con una muestra en La Plata, el grupo festeja sus 20 años,” Diario de la Nación, July 23, 2008.

104 una apelación a la conciencia.”83 In Uriburu’s colorations, his body was masked by the green jumpsuit and has largely been omitted from critical readings. Generally, the body evidences the human dimension of the environmental and social issues that all of these artists explore and the significance of the metaphysical and literal dimensions of the environment as an ecosystem of interconnecting individual parts.

XI Ventanas executed Proyecto Ria-Chuelo (1997–1998) in La Boca. This collaborative and participatory work and street exhibition was a “gesto creativo” (Figure

31).84 The performance facilitated an interaction between site and a group of individuals.

The art action and its documentation mediated this interaction, which intended to inspire reflection on the connection between people and the urban environment. The group believed that critical reflection on this connection was nonexistent. The group also staged the intervention Quilmes Baja Temporada in Quilmes in 2001 to “expresar los limites que impone la ,” questioning social apathy and the pollution of the banks of the Río de la Plata (Figure 32).85 The group documented its members trying to enjoy this beach in its unkempt state. This performance drew attention to the poor condition of a natural, public space. The oddity and irony of this action and its documentation seems to further invite reflection on the tension that exists between consumption and the protection of nature.

In response to the pollution and decline of the La Boca neighborhood, Acosta and his daughter Paloma Acosta performed Deriva on July 8, 2005.86 This action was part of

83 Alonso, “Épica para el Tercer Mundo,” n.p.

84 Grupo XI Ventanas, Arte Acción: 1996–2002, n.p.

85 Ibid.

86 Daniel Acosta, “SOS Tierra/05 Arte Acción X la Vida del Riachuelo”

105 the initial gathering of SOS Tierra, which would later hold its encuentro in the Parque

Ecológico y Cultural Guillermo Enrique Hudson. Acosta envisioned the river as the

“protagonist” for all the actions, performances and interventions that were installed and executed in the historic neighborhood of La Boca on this day.87 They released thirty paper boats into the Riachuelo in front of the Museo Quinquela Martin and positioned

1,000 additional small boats along the sidewalk of the Vuelta de Rocha in La Boca

(Figures 33 and 34). More than 200 students from the Pedro de Mendoza School N9 assisted with the construction of the boats and the action was executed with the participation of artists Calixto Saucedo and the Grupo Presente Continuo.88 The ephemeral works that were part of this event temporarily intersected the neighborhood and its defining natural feature: the river.

This symbolic act drew attention to the cultural importance of this site and the river, calling for the protection of its residents’ quality of life and the need for recuperative actions to clean, preserve and protect the environment for future generations:

“Estar dentro del agua del Riachuelo, en la Boca, es una sensación que fuerte significado.

Sus calles y conventillos. Ya que la contaminación, tanto directa como indirecta, es fatal.

Y estábamos buscando protección para la tierra y reclamando un lugar para cada uno de nosotros.”89 Like other pronouncements, Acosta declared the fate of people to be

http://proyectosostierra.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2005-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated- max=2006-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=2 (accessed Fall 2012).

87 Ibid.

88 Daniel Acosta, Proyecto Terra: Arte Acción / Performances / Intervenciones, 1996–2010 (Buenos Aires: Fundación Electroingeniería, 2010), 23.

89 Daniel Acosta, “SOS Tierra/05: Sobre lo Efímero del Arte. O la Presentación de la Vida,” http://proyectosostierra.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2005-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated- max=2006-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=2 (accessed 2012).

106 contingent on that of the environment. His quote also alludes to the rich cultural importance of this area and its representation in art. Culture is tied to nature and the two become integrated concepts rather than separate ones during this event.

The title of the performance, Deriva, means drift. The title captures the fluidity of water, the movement of the boats through the river and references the passage of time. It also could be read to connote adrift, “a la deriva,” demonstrating the impact that time has had on this area and the need to find or institute a new direction. Acosta explains that, for him, “deriva,” “es un concepto general sobre la ausencia de ideas comunes sobre los caminos a seguir en la búsqueda de armonía y felicidad en el planeta.”90

Acosta’s continued use of the term “deriva” and the repetition of the action (the creation and release of white paper boats) in other locales suggests a connection between natural spaces or sites and gestures towards his broader, more general conception of nature and aspiration to find a more harmonious vision of the planet.91 The curator Juan

Pablo Pérez stated, “Las derivas de Daniel Acosta nos acercan a la experiencia de un viaje en barcos de papel, plagado de fragilidades, un periplo poético de tránsitos fructíferos que anhela la recuperación ancestral de un cuerpo social que restituya la memoria activadora de la naturaleza.”92 The white boat can be interpreted as a beacon,

90 Daniel Acosta, email correspondence, November 2012. He further stated that el “río en orden” is an ironic phrase about the river’s condition. According to Acosta, it references the phrase used by President Raúl Alfonsín (1983-1989), that “la casa en orden”—a statement made about the state of the nation before his resignation.

91 Acosta has also used “deriva” as part of the title of exhibitions such as Deriva: Poética de una naturaleza caída, which was organized by Juan Pablo Pérez and held at the Centro Cultural de la Cooperación Floreal Gorini. This exhibition included documentation of this action along with other works.

92 Juan Pablo Pérez, Deriva: Poética de una Naturaleza caída, exhibition pamphlet, Espacio Raúl Loza, Centro Cultural de la Cooperación Floreal Gorini, Buenos Aires, 2011.

107 calling for help. It is a precarious symbol of hope, a fragile human-made object that is fleetingly dependent on natural conditions.

Acosta’s use of public space in Deriva and the community’s participation add a horizontal dimension to the project. The collaborative production of small boats demonstrates a communal investment in the neighborhood and the Riachuelo. Similarly, the variety of projects installed or performed in La Boca in 2005 relayed a heterogeneous collection of reflections about the river and people’s interactions with the physical site.

These actions and objects were not meant to elicit a single response, but rather to encourage reflection and a feeling of empowerment amongst the population. Uruguayan artist and art critic Clemente Padín’s essay “SOS Tierra II/05. Parque Hudson” offered a critical analysis of Acosta’s work and SOS Tierra. He noted Acosta’s consistent concentration on human rights and ecology in his work. In relation to SOS Tierra, Padín argued, “estas acciones artísticas se insertan en la realidad y no solo intentan corregir los desaciertos en relación al medio ambiente sino de reubicar al hombre y a la sociedad en el medio ambiente.”93 The critic drew attention to Acosta’s desire to use the body, marks, or objects in site-specific actions to help to reorient the viewer and to make the entangled connection between humans and nature, society and the environment more apparent and more pressing of an issue.

The Riachuelo was the site of other actions by SOS Tierra. On April 26, 2008, they performed the first “ecobicicletada y arte acción.” A group of cyclists departed from the Boedo neighborhood and biked to the Parque Hudson in Florencio Varela. They

93 Clemente Padín, “SOS Tierra II / Parque Hudson,” May 2006, http://proyectosostierra.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2005-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated- max=2006-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=2 (accessed Fall 2012).

108 stopped in La Boca, Avellaneda, Quilmes, and Varela. In each neighborhood, they planted native trees and performed other art actions.94 The second “ecobicicleta y arte acción” was repeated on April 25, 2009, during the fifth annual SOS Tierra.95 The group of artists and residents biked between Avenida Boedo and San Juan in the neighborhood of Boedo to La Boca. They thus traversed working and middle-class neighborhoods that represent close links to the port. The stated goal was as follows: “Esta acción por el medio ambiente se propone marchar por defender nuestros ríos y el agua, nuestro aire; solicitando medidas concretas por la tierra.”96 The movement from the city through outlying neighborhoods to a natural reserve beyond the city’s center functions as a means of conceptually linking these areas together. The bike ride is an eco-friendly means of travelling from one point to another and emphasizes the number of participants. It also communicates a journey from the city to nature and a reforestation of neglected neighborhoods through the planting of trees.

STEREOTYPES AND CELEBRATIONS OF NATURE: STRATEGIES FOR RAISING CONSCIOUSNESS

In the past several decades, environmental NGOs and contemporary artists began to utilize similar strategies and to collaborate with one another in order to gain the public’s attention and to spur engagement with ecological issues.97 In La construcción de

94 SOS Tierra, 4th encuentro, www.proyectosostierra.blogspot.com (accessed 2012).

95 SOS Tierra: Arte acción, 5 encuentro ’09, catalogue (Buenos Aires, 2009).

96 SOS Tierra: Arte acción, 4 encuentro ’08, catalogue (Buenos Aires, 2008).

97 This trend is evidenced by Escombros’s and Uriburu’s collaborations with Greenpeace and will be explored in the following chapter in relation to Ala Plástica’s consideration of its organization as an NGO and art collective.

109 la naturaleza, Albelda and Saborit analyze the development of an ecological aesthetic and Greenpeace’s use of images and the media to promote ecological causes. They argued that Greenpeace generally reduces nature to its popular stereotypes, casting an image of it as a martyr that needs protection. The “estética de la catástrofe” is constituted through a representation of nature as a victim.98 This image of catastrophe or of helplessness is conveyed in such images as the polar bear, stranded on an ice floe, its existence threatened by global warming and oil extraction.99 Greenpeace’s media campaigns are defined by “una inevitable simplificación que suele aliarse con la estrategia enfrentada y alternante a la que antes aludíamos: estética de la destrucción- espacios devastados, mareas negras, vertidos contaminantes . . . equilibrada con imágenes

épicas de acción directa, explicitas en su mensaje de lucha y reivindicación.”100 Albelda and Saborit describe the group’s frequent use of video clips and montages of images in its publicity campaigns, arguing that while these images may captivate the viewer, they also create an image of “uniformity” that does not aid in informing the audience of actual facts behind the problems and even, at times, have become sources of misinformation.101

In other words, they critique the group’s work for mimicking the homogenizing forces of

98 Albelda and Saborit, La construcción de la naturaleza, 127 - 130.

99 The ubiquity of the polar bear image is discussed by Finis Dunaway, “Seeing Global Warming: Contemporary Art and the Fate of the Planet,” Environmental History 14 (January 2009): 9 and Michael Ziser and Julie Sze, “Climate Change, Environmental Aesthetics and Global Environmental Justice Cultural Studies,” Discourse 29, no. 2 and 3 (Spring and Fall 2007): 387-388.

100 Albelda and Saborit, La construcción de la naturaleza,135.

101 Ibid., 135-136. Mones Ruiz has also analyzed Greenpeace’s methods in Sin Destino? Estudio Sobre las Nuevas Amenazas Globales, arguing that the psychological messages used by the organization to promote its agenda often are misinformed and that they do not think of the environment in a multidimensional manner that accounts for the particular circumstances faced by those living in Argentina as opposed to other nations. Thus, he supports Albelda and Saborit’s claims that the group often creates an overly homogenizing representation of nature and promotes an agenda based on a particular global orientation. La construcción de la naturaleza, 151-166.

110 globalization that it espouses to fight against. Greenpeace has been accused of not understanding the local context and as applying one model of action in many distinct locales throughout the world. This problem is endemic to the tension between environmentalists’ tendencies to stress nature as a universal concept and the realities of local ecological circumstances.

This tension is evident in the work of Uriburu, Escombros, and Acosta.

Greenpeace’s “epic” battle against the practices of multinational corporations and government policy for nature recalls certain aspects of Romanticism.102 Uriburu centered on the protection of the Amazon and endangered species, the remediation of urban rivers, and reforestation in his work. These issues were also popular rallying causes for the international environmental movement. Uriburu’s colorations, which he has performed throughout the world, are intentionally meant to speak to the universality of nature. While the site specificity of the coloration inherently adds a dimension of local applicability to his colorations and the rest of his work situates his practice amidst more specific

Argentine concerns and culture, the performances nonetheless exist within a generalizing, international framework that he has constructed through the repetition of his action.

Uriburu fights for the protection of nature as an all-encompassing term for social, ecological and cultural survival.

Albelda and Saborit interpret Greenpeace’s images as “una fusión entre estética e ideología”103 and that “la estrategia mediática incluye a la estética propia del grupo,

102 Ibid., 129.

103 Ibid., 132.

111 comenzando por un nombre atractivo y una imagen colectiva bien definida.”104 Likewise,

Uriburu’s actions, while recognizable as affiliates of the environmental movement, are also distinguishable because of the consistent repetition of his colorations, which have become his trademark. His green jumpsuits and continued production of the same types of paintings, actions, and objects—often documents of his colorations—also make his work quickly recognizable as are the publicity materials of Greenpeace. Escombros’s insignia is also clearly emblazoned on its pamphlets, flyers, manifestos and “objects of consciousness,” making the collective author of the work apparent. The authorship of works by SOS Tierra and Acosta are less evident in their public performances and interventions and the documentation of these events is distributed on a smaller scale.

Acosta’s and Escombros’s works similarly rely on a universalizing conception of nature, while simultaneously seeking horizontal dialogue within the community. The engagement of individuals as a means to affect a more horizontal mode of reflection is facilitated by Escombros’s convocatorias. These events have the potential to promote a more heterogeneous consideration of nature and the individual’s relation to it, representing a shift away from Uriburu’s colorations, which could be read as more vertical in its didactic, though still poetic, approach.

Acosta frequently refers to the elements—land, earth, air and fire—in his work.

He has directed attention to the elements in such performances as Agua-Tierra (1998) and Aire (2007) (Figure 35). The elements are represented as symbols of balance and a means to represent nature in its entirety.105 Similar to the color green, the elements are

104 Ibid., 134-135.

105 Daniel Acosta Interview, Buenos Aires, July 25, 2011.

112 archetypes meant to have universal appeal.106 Acosta makes the air visible in his performance Aire through his use of balloons and the title of the piece, which he wrote in white letters across the ground. During this performance he moves between the earth and the water, including these elements in his action. He also draws a white circle on the ground, further alluding to the concept of unity.

According to Acosta, SOS Tierra is a response to the following questions: “Cómo el arte puede contribuir al cambio social y medioambiental? De qué manera los artistas están dirigiéndose a este campo actualmente?”107 The works presented at SOS Tierra propose various responses to the second question, demonstrating the diversity of ecological performance art. Nonetheless, “how can art contribute to social and environmental change?”

SOS Tierra facilitates international exchange and dialogue; artists from other

Latin American and European countries have participated.108 This decision is both practical, as there are a limited number of Argentine performance artists who confront environmental issues in their work, and symbolic, as it gives the event added international significance and makes clear the global importance of nature and ecological health. Many of the same artists and environmental specialists participate in SOS Tierra

106 Soledad Obeid, SOS Tierra, catalogue, 2009, 7. “En SOS Tierra, Arte Acción, el hombre-artista no solo es el protagonista, sino que toma al hombre-espectador como parte de la acción, involucrándolo en SOS Tierra. La naturaleza en su conjunto con todos sus componentes: el hombre, la tierra, el agua, el aire, las plantas y los animales son los protagonistas. El artista es el mediador entre los elementos e interactúa con ellos para dejar su mensaje.” Soledad Obeid has linked people and animals to the elements, seeing the art action as one that should be read as mediation more than intervention.

107 The catalogue SOS Tierra from 2008 includes excerpts about each of the previous iterations of SOS Tierra.

108 Artists from other European and Latin American nations such as Mexico, Chile and Spain have participated.

113 every year.109 The annual gathering is held in the Parque Hudson, but members from the group have also produced projects in other locations. SOS Tierra was originally scheduled to coincide with Earth Day,110 which, like Escombros’s Crimen Seriado, inserts the action into a larger, recognized day of environmental consciousness in which public activities and performances are offered as symbolic gestures to protect the planet.

The title of the event is meant to play with “SOS” as the Morse code distress signal.111 The name is meant to be read as a call for help that is answered through collective work. In the event’s mission statement, Acosta affirmed that people need to work together to alter present environmental conditions. This transformation is sought through a change of consciousness. The poetic and diverse nature of the works performed contrast with the more singular representation of nature and ecological crisis by such environmentalist groups as Greenpeace or by artists such as Uriburu. Rather than attacking a single problem, most of the work more generally reflects on the relationship between people and the land and the general notion of the existence of an environmental crisis, which is invisible and ignored by much of the urban population.112

SOS Tierra is held in a public reserve, which serves as an opportunity for artists to perform in nature in honor of Earth Day and to allow for the possibility of public viewership, engaging with the park’s visitors. In some instances, community members are invited to participate, but in many other works such as those that are part of SOS

Tierra, the public is exposed to works without an introduction. According to Rubén

109 Daniel Acosta, Interview, Buenos Aires, July 25, 2011.

110 In recent years, the date has fluctuated.

111 Daniel Acosta Interview, Buenos Aires, July 8, 2011.

112 Daniel Acosta Interview, Buenos Aires, July 8, 2011.

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Ravera, director of the Parque Hudson, the area was made a national nature reserve in order to conserve this tract of land for public use and to prevent its development. The park and museum also have an educational purpose and are intended to serve as a means for people to connect physically with nature and to learn more about it.113 Ravera informed me that he has collaborated with artists for some time and thinks that the arts are incredibly important in encouraging individuals to consider nature and its social and cultural importance. In 2011, Ravera stated that he believes that art is an intrinsic part of what it means to be human and that the potential of art to shock the viewer can be effective. Similarly, Albelda and Saborit argued that Greenpeace’s strategies approximate those of the artistic avant-garde, capitalizing on the power of shock and innovation in gaining support for its missions.114 The artists that participate in SOS Tierra, however, perform out of the media spotlight and the interaction between community and performer is more intimate and less mediated by publicity. Ravera believes that most people don’t understand what a natural reserve is and do not comprehend the art that’s produced at such events as SOS Tierra, but that part of art’s power is to evoke feeling or thinking about the space and the relationship between artist and environment. Ravera sees art as a remedy and as being more accessible than science because it can evoke emotion and create the means for more direct interaction between people and the physical landscape.

Ravera’s sentiment argues for the recuperative potential of art. The critical equation of performance as an act of purification speaks to a vision of art’s recuperative potential. Padín argued that Acosta’s Deriva in La Boca functioned as both a direct and indirect act of “purification” that is tantamount to the intention of SOS Tierra in the

113 Discussion with Rubén Ravera, Buenos Aires, August 2011.

114 Albelda and Saborit, La construcción de la naturaleza, 130.

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Parque Hudson. Glusberg analyzed Uriburu’s colorations as symbolic acts of purification, stating that they serve as a “ritual act of purifying nature.”115 Restany also alluded to

Uriburu’s colorations as “hygienic-poetic environment[s],” which highlights the symbolic, ritualistic, ethical and aesthetic implications of his work.116 While the paper boats and non-toxic substance added to the water do not actually aid in the recovery of the water, and in some sense could appear to be pollution to an unknowing bystander, the works’ potential for recovery is based upon the dialogue and reflection that they could inspire by drawing attention to sites, issues, and nature itself. Still, I consider these works to be more effective in directing attention to ecological degradation than in framing deeper considerations of the human-nature connection. While each project invites a humanitarian consideration of nature and an abstract consideration of its importance, these reflections often rely on symbols that seem outmoded or limited.

The projects analyzed in this chapter demonstrate parallel paths that Uriburu,

Escombros, and Acosta have travelled. Despite the continuity of themes explored and methods used by these artists, they have not worked together. Their works developed around the same time in Buenos Aires and La Plata and represented a range of motivations and values that intersect with those of the environmental movement locally and regionally. In all of these works, nature is viewed as a resource that needs to be protected. Nature is considered an integral, though often ignored, component of the city.

Communication about nature is incited through the artists’ incorporation of universal symbols and archetypes that abstractly illuminate its importance.

115 Glusberg, “El Reino del Verde,” 8.

116 Restany, Uriburu: Utopia of the South, 67.

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The notion of disequilibrium and the desire to restore balance through the modification of societal connections with nature is apparent in the works of the artists and collectives in this chapter. The actions represent an interaction between nature and human. Bystanders or participants are asked to reflect and reconsider nature as a concept and physical site. Reflection is active and thereby can be seen as a method by which people could feel empowered to confront problems like the Riachuelo’s contamination that have been ongoing and seem without a foreseeable outcome.

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CHAPTER 3: CREATIVE RESPONSES TO ECOLOGICAL CRISES: DIALOGUE AND COMMUNITY

In the early 1990s, another strand of ecological art emerged in Argentina in response to the national government’s implementation of stronger neoliberal policies and amidst the international swell in artistic attention to this theme. The rise of environmentalism in Argentina was linked to social movements and fueled by grassroots efforts that began to spread throughout Latin America in the 1980s.1 Due to economic and political instability and pressure to modernize according to international development standards, Ala Plástica chose interdisciplinary methods to integrate the poetics of art with practical action and community involvement. Grupo Escombros offered a more general poetic critique of neoliberalism, consumerism and society’s neglect of nature, similarly creating projects that centered on facilitating community dialogue as a means to bestow nature with a higher social value. Both groups currently stress the apolitical nature of their work, which facilitates open dialogue and community participation rather than centering on a didactic, activist agenda.

Ala Plástica and Escombros formed autonomously in La Plata in response to perceived crises that were negatively impacting Argentina’s social, political, and

1 Graciela S. Melitsko, “The Emergence of Environmental Activism in the city of Buenos Aires: Citizens’ Movement on Toxic Contamination” (MA Thesis, Tuft’s University, 1997), 1.

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2 ecological landscape. Ala Plástica, like Uriburu and Escombros, created projects that dealt with the pollution of Argentine waterways. Ala Plástica noted that Buenos Aires is

“one of the most polluted urban areas in the world” and that the Río de la Plata estuary is the primary source of fresh water for approximately seventeen million people.3

Escombros used the Riachuelo as a site and material in Recuperar and Agua S.O.S.

(1990) to direct attention to its prominence as an urban resource that has faced excessive deterioration. Since the early 1990s, Ala Plástica has created an array of projects that engage with the land and communities along the Paraná Delta and Río de la Plata estuary.

These activities demonstrate the group’s long-term commitment to environmental issues that have impacted the region. Ala Plástica’s work represents an expansion beyond

Escombros’s, Acosta’s, and Uriburu’s efforts to raise environmental awareness. Ala

Plástica’s goal is to initiate long-term changes by fostering and expanding regional and international networks. The collective’s projects integrate rural and community perspectives on land use, facilitating open dialogue that leads to nuanced ways of thinking about the natural environment and actual change. The art is the transformation that the group’s projects initiate.

This chapter continues the analysis of ecologically conscious art produced in

Argentina. Its goal is to demonstrate how Escombros and Ala Plástica adopted approaches that, despite their distinct qualities, overlapped in their emphasis on open,

2 Grupo Escombros formed in La Plata in 1988 and Ala Plástica in 1991.

3 Ala Plástica, “Ingbrief,” www.alaplastica.org.ar/grafica/ingbrief.pdf and Alejandro Meitín, “Artistic Initiatives in Community Organizing, and their Metaphorical Juridical-Social Dimension,” Hemispheric Institute Encuentro, Bogotá, Colombia, August 23, 2009, http://hemi.nyu.edu/hemi/en/keynote-lectures/item/276-09-alejandro-meitin. The essay “Urbanismo crítico, intervención bioregional y especies emergentes” can be found at http://hemi.nyu.edu/hemi/en/e-misferica- 62/meitin.

119 recuperative measures over the reliance on archetypes or metaphysical reflections on nature. Ala Plástica and Escombros both highly value community and dialogue and envision open discussion and deliberation as a means to instill positive change on an individual and local level. Ala Plástica’s Magdalena Project (1999–2009) and

Escombros’s inclusion of poetry in Agua S.O.S. (1990) demonstrate the importance of horizontal exchange, while Escombros’s El bosque de los sueños perdidos (2002), El

Sembrador de Soles (2002), Árbol de la vida (2010), and Lluvia de Pájaros (2010) serve as complimentary examples to illuminate the collective’s use of nature as a metaphor for life, freedom and hope. These examples also demonstrate the group’s organization of gatherings in which people are invited to share their reflections on life. By incorporating nature into the project’s design, they draw attention to nature as a component of one’s existence.

Escombros’s projects represent an intermediary between Uriburu’s and Acosta’s approaches to rising urban, environmental awareness, and the group’s emphasis on incorporating community member’s voices and open dialogue as a means for positive transformation. Escombros’s projects centered on environmental degradation in urban areas and frequently incorporated poetry, often asking individuals to transcribe and display their thoughts in a public space. Ala Plástica’s work represents another mode of ecological engagement. The group’s self-identification as an environmental nongovernmental and arts organization demonstrates its members alternate vision of the artist’s role as a social and creative agent. Ala Plástica mediates discussions that openly assess the value of nature and critically consider political, historical, and economic factors that influence how people interact with the land and the value they attach to it.

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The group’s projects are frequently based in rural areas and some center on sustained community involvement. Ala Plástica induces rumination on land use policies, while also influencing long-term legal or discursive changes. This endeavor reveals an ethical intent that resembles the mission of many other international artists,4 while it also offers a specific critique of the circumstances under which industrialization has and is currently being implemented in Argentina.5 Their work demonstrates how community is defined and constructed, as well as how dialogue is initiated, sustained, and functions as a creative action. Escombros and Ala Plástica have developed projects that support individuals in sharing perspectives on local issues and participating in collaborative activities. Through their art, more expansive definitions of environment are created and more dynamic land use practices are imagined and enacted.

Reinaldo Laddaga’s scholarship on contemporary artists’ development of temporary trans-national communities in Estética de la emergencia marks an important trend of which, as he noted, Ala Plástica is a part. Grant Kester’s theorizing of dialogical aesthetic has informed Ala Plástica’s own theoretical understanding and explanation of the collective’s work. Ala Plástica’s conception of the environment reflects paradigm shifts that correspond to those held by other art and environmental organizations based in

4 Amanda Boetzkes, The Ethics of Earth Art (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 1-24.

5 As discussed in the introduction, sociologist and historian Ramachandra Guha argued that “underdeveloped” nations generated an alternate mode of environmentalism that privileged the creation of new models of development over preservation. Ramachandra Guha, “Radical Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application, 5th ed., eds. Louis P. Pojman and Paul Pojman (Belomnt, CA: Thomas Wadsworth, 2008), 340-344.

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Europe and the United States.6 These changes are linked to theoretical transformations that have impacted both art and ecological discourse.

Ala Plástica’s and Grupo Escombros’s projects reflect recent conceptions of community, nature, and art.7 These groups explore ecological issues on both a macro- and micro-level, critiquing past international development projects, while aiding in the creation of a more pluralistic understanding of environment. The collectives have utilized the potential of art actions and a variety of visual materials to further a mode of environmental consciousness that is multifaceted. Their projects offer a means through which more people can engage in an assessment of social – ecological relations and consider how these might be improved. Individual projects highlight the complexity of how these concepts (community, nature and art) are imagined and the spectrum in which they intersect.

GRUPO ESCOMBROS: POETRY AND COMMUNITY

Escombros has used poetry, “objects of consciousness,” public space, and group activities to promote contemplation of nature’s health as a fundamental aspect of people’s welfare and environment. The group equates apathy for the natural environment with a disregard for human rights and alludes to the economic and social issues that are tied to the state of one’s surroundings. Escombros first articulated its ecological agenda in its second manifesto “La Estética de la Solidaridad,” published in July of 1995. The section

6 LITTORAL, PLATFORM and Huit Facettes-Interaction are some of the art organizations whose methodologies are premised on the interconnection between these different systems. This poststructualist shift is also evident in other disciplinary theories such as political ecology.

7 See Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) and The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

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“Sobre la Ecología,” outlined the group’s commitment to promote greater awareness and concern for the environment, as well as art’s potential to aid in this cause. Escombros stated that “el hombre debe ser el pastor del mundo: su misión no es someterlo, sino cuidarlo. Como el pastor y su rebaño, son inseparables.”8 The group’s appeal for people to act as “shepherd” to the planet supports a position for environmental stewardship.

Escombros expressed a holistic vision aligned with the ecology movement and poststructuralist thinking that rejects previous modernist models in which the environment is conceived as a resource and entity to be controlled.9 The group highlights the interconnected relationship between human beings and nature.

Escombros’s Recuperar and the “object of consciousness” it produced, Agua

S.O.S. (1990), are critical examples of the group’s early use of public space, collaborative action, and poetry. In Agua S.O.S., the collective combined text and object to venerate water and to ask people to assist with its remediation (Figures 36 and 37). On June 9,

1990, Escombros convened an interdisciplinary group of six hundred artists and ecologists from Argentina and Uruguay at an abandoned warehouse in Avellaneda, near the Riachuelo. According to Escombros, approximately 5,000 people attended.10 Artist

Teresa Volco described Recuperar to the press: “Se reunían tres elementos: el puente clausurado que no comunica a nada, el Riachuelo que está polucionado y una fábrica

8 Grupo Escombros, La Estética de la Solidaridad: Segundo Manifesto, July 1995, Manifestos de Escombros: 1989, 1995, 2000, 2003 (La Plata: Grupo Escombros), 28-29.

9 Wolfgang Sachs, ed., Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2009) and Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) reflect on these models of development. See my discussion of their texts in the introduction.

10 Grupo Escombros, http://www.grupoescombros.com.ar/curriculumlargo90.html (accessed 2010).

123 abandonada y en ruinas.”11 Escombros used recycling as a strategy, producing “lo Nuevo

‘con lo que queda.’”12 They constructed Pirámide out of recovered plastic bottles on this site as part of the project. This pyramid of detritus was intended to function as a monument to past civilizations and to draw awareness to the contemporary consumer society’s waste. The group’s project engages with a single site as an exemplar of the proliferation of abandoned peoples and environments.

As part of the event, members of the group extracted water from the river and brought it to the factory to be processed and bottled. The bottles were labeled with the following poem:

Agua… Como líquido amniótico Es el hábitat del hombre antes de nacer. Como lágrima expresas sus penas y alegrías más profundas. Como mar lo alimentaron sus peces. Como manantial calma su sed. Como catarata produce la energía Que ilumina sus ciudades y Hace funcionar sus fábricas. Como río conduce sus barcos a explorar, Descubrir y comerciar. Contaminada por el hombre, Como el agua de esta botella, Muere. S.O.S.

This poem affirms people’s need for water, while also blaming them for its pollution: living beings need clean water to drink, but water is “contaminated by man.” The poem

11 See Zulema Moret, Artistas de lo que queda: Las escrituras de Escombros (Madrid: Trama, 2006), 62.

12 Cesar Barros Arteaga, "La Obra De Arte Frente Al (Super) Mercado: Ética, Estética, Política y Consumo En El Cono Sur" (Ph.D. Dissertation, Washington University in St. Louis, 2010), 174-175.

124 concludes, asking for help, “like the water in this bottle, it dies. S.O.S.” The text was a declaration against the contamination of the Riachuelo, denouncing careless treatment of the environment.

The “object of consciousness” held market value and philanthropic importance.

The bottles were sold and the money donated to the Pelota de Trapo, a homeless shelter for children in Avellaneda. The objects were meant to “mobilize political consciousness through art,”13 while also critiquing consumerism and the victimization that has occurred as a result of an unequal society.14 The donation critiques capitalism by not only imbuing the art object with the capacity to spur reflection, but also reversing the art object’s function from that of a good that is solely meant to benefit an individual to one that’s sale has a social purpose.

Recuperar was intended to incite environmental awareness, while also temporarily restoring the site through performance. The action reactivated an abandoned factory. The river water, a natural resource rendered unusable by industrial contamination, was made into a functional product through the group’s labor. The performance and “object of consciousness” created a dialogue about poverty, economic instability, and pollution. Escombros insisted that “Todo forma de vida tiene derrechos,” linking human rights and environmentalism.15 This project united concern for nature (the

Riachuelo), the worker (the poor), and the cityscape (the factory), which had all been abandoned and abused.

13 Ibid., 179.

14 Ibid., 184.

15 Grupo Escombros, La Estética de la Solidaridad, 29.

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This collaboration united artists and ecologists, showing the potential of cross- disciplinary efforts. This performance and resulting object clearly revealed the group’s stated belief that “toda obra de arte solidario es un acto de conciencia.”16 Other convocatorias such as Árbol de la Vida (organized in San Juan’s Plaza 25 de Mayo on

November 4, 2010) and El Bosque de los Sueños Perdidos (2002) highlight the importance of self-expression and horizontal dialogue. During each of these actions, community members were also asked to participate, expanding the collaboration beyond specialized participation.

During Árbol de la Vida, residents of San Juan recorded their thoughts about life in their province on white paper cutouts of apples that were affixed to colored sheets of paper and hung in the public plaza, amidst its living trees (Figure 38). Life, according to

Escombros, was considered “en síntesis, su historia. Una historia, presente o pasada, escrita por todos.”17 The group chose the tree of life because it is a symbol recognized by many cultures. The apple similarly carries symbolic weight through its reconcilability and cultural associations. In El Bosque de los Sueños Perdidos, people were asked to record their lost or “stolen” dreams on white circles or squares of cardboard that were hung in strands between the park’s trees. This gathering critiqued the government’s continued injustices against the population and sought to restore freedom through public expression.

The inclusion of the tree and forest in these instances incorporates nature as an integral part of urban space and a component of society’s collective past and future. Árbol de la

Vida and El Bosque de los Sueños Perdidos facilitated the transcription and sharing of

16 Ibid., 20.

17 Grupo Escombros, “Árbol de la Vida,” www.grupoescombros.com.ar (accessed 2011).

126 community members’ thoughts. The projects directed attention to the presence of nature in the city through the address of social issues. The uncensored conversation and creation produced during these events destabilized essentialist views of nature and permitted open reflections on life. These simple, creative activities created a sense of public solidarity and agency in local parks.

Many of Escombros’s recent projects are organized with schools and center on such ends as increasing environmental sensitivity. The collective’s interest in reflection and education over politics is confirmed by their frequent collaborations with school children. Lluvia de Pájaros (2010) is a recent example of a project in which students were asked to reflect on their environment, considered in an open sense.18 The collective asked college students to record their thoughts on paper silhouettes of birds that were thrown from the roof of Teatro Argentino. La Plata residents then collected these forms.

By having residents record and share their thoughts with others in the community, the collective facilitated connectedness through dialogue. The action bestowed legitimacy on individual thoughts and personal values.

Escombros stated that the bird is “a metaphor for liberty, which is the origin and destination of all human actions.”19 The project created a symbolic link between bird and human. The collective’s earlier installation Pájaros (1999) directly expressed

Escombros’s value of animals and nature, using the bird as the focal symbol. Pájaros consisted of sixteen metal silhouettes of birds, each suspended on top of a pole that was

18 Lluvia de pájaros was held at the Teatro Argentino de La Plata in honor of its centennial.

19 Grupo Escombros, “Lluvia de Pájaros” announcement, November 6, 2010, www. grupoescombros.com.ar (accessed 2012). The group explained “. . . El pájaro es una metáfora de la libertad, que es origen y destino de todas las acciones humanas.”

127 six-meters in-height. It was installed in the Parque Ecológico Municipal de La Plata.20

The installation included a plaque that was inscribed with a poem addressed to “el hombre” from “el pájaro.” Similar to the poem from the tree in Crimen Seriado or the poem about water in Agua S.O.S., this text reinforces the idea that nature has rights.

The bird’s legibility as a symbol of liberty in Lluvia de Pájaros supports the group’s assertion of nature and humans as having a common destiny and by extension the ties between human and environmental rights.

Escombros’s gatherings and performances reinforce communal bonds amongst those who are already united by geographic location or who possess membership to the same institution such as a school. The group has often asked local residents, including regional artists and specialists, to unite temporarily through the occupation of a public space and dialogue about a certain issue. For example, in El Sembrador de Soles, an action which was held in the Plaza Islas Malvinas de La Plata on November 30, 2002,

Escombros invited poets from La Plata and Ensenada to transcribe poems on circles of golden yellow cardstock that were one-meter in diameter (Figure 39). Children from the homeless shelter Pantalón Corito and students from the school San Cayetano also participated. Five hundred of these “suns,” inscribed with four hundred and twenty-four poems, were arranged on the lawn and fifty yellow balloons were released into the air as part of the final performance. In this instance, Escombros used the sun as a metaphor for life.21 The group temporarily took control of the public space and infused it with poetry

20 Grupo Escombros, Curriculum 1988/2005 (La Plata: Grupo Escombros, n.d.), 21-22. The piece was installed on October 1, 1999.

21 Moret, Artistas de lo que queda, 68. Escombros commented “el sol, símbolo de vida, junto a la imagen.” The event was accompanied by the performance Soles al sol. The group produced a second

128 that encouraged people to consider the poetics of life and, by extension, nature. By equating the sun with life, the group further emphasized the human reliance on the natural environment. Conversely, by having poets transcribe their thoughts on these cutout suns, the group asserted the importance of the human voice and creativity in sustaining life. The cooption of local public spaces is a thread that runs through the corpus of the group’s work and carries social and political weight.

Escombros used public parks and plazas in Crimen Seriado (2003), El Sembrador de Soles (2002), and El Árbol de la Vida (2010). Each of these actions relied on a degree of chance. Their outcomes depended on participant interaction and their revelations. The result of these projects is a series of individual expressions that are shared within a community and later with a broader audience through publications, scholarship, and exhibitions. These projects facilitate a pluralistic consideration of environment as a hybrid of culture and nature. The individual is given freedom to reflect and temporary communities are created.

Escombros’s value of nature is tied to its denunciation of internationally controlled development projects and attention to the ill consequences that industrialization has often had on the local environment. In December of 1990,

Escombros created Proyecto para el desarrollo de los países bananeros según las grandes potencias, a book of twenty drawings that used the banana as a symbol of neocolonialism. The humorous illustrations, such as Rascacielos, critique the economic and political relations between the first and third world (Figure 40).22 Rascacielo

version on September 18, 2004 at the Escuela N41 de Berazateguí in association with Chicos Discapacitados. Escombros, Curriculum 1998/2005, 26-27.

22 See Moret, “Cronología de Escombros,” Artistas de lo que queda.

129 graphically melds a banana and skyscraper, merging an architectural symbol of modernization with an agricultural product whose industry was notoriously corrupt. As the banana industry does not reference Argentina’s own economic history, this project is clearly seeking to offer a broader, geopolitical critique of development and international trade. The banana industry is meant to be synonymous with the continued impact that multinational corporations have on nations throughout the world.

In the book’s introduction, Escombros states “Argentina is the mirror in which

Latin America can see this tragedy most sharply reflected.”23 By “tragedy,” the group means the cost of the nation’s efforts to achieve technological and industrial advancement. Escombros’s sculpture Gift / Regalo (2000), which was shown at the

Seventh Havana Biennial, consists of a shipping crate covered with a yellow ribbon and cards that explain that the package contains toxic residue. The following message was transcribed on the card:

Cada día los países ricos envían de regalo de países pobres produciendo la desaparición de la industria nacional, el desempleo, la deculturalización. Cada día, los países ricos, sistemáticamente, envían de ‘regalo” a los países pobres la muerte.24

This piece draws attention to the imbalance of industrialization’s benefit and to the uneven distribution of environmental waste.

Escombros uses a range of tactics that intersect with Ala Plástica’s objectives.

Escombros encourages others to reflect on local circumstances while in “nature” or using symbols of nature, which reinforces the union between nature and everyday life and

23 Grupo Escombros, “Introducción,” Proyecto para el desarrollo de los países bananeros según las grandes potencias (La Plata: Grupo Escombros, 1990).

24 Moret, Artistas de lo que queda, 72.

130 nature and freedom. The terms of these associations are left open to participants. The projects thus become a collection of records. The final outcome could exist beyond the project’s creation, encouraging future dialogue and a greater sensitivity to one’s surroundings. Escombros used humor and irony as critical tactics in Gift / Regalo to offer an explicit critique of development; these projects raise international awareness. The group’s position is similar to Ala Plástica, but Ala Plástica has also sought more direct, practical action to remedy the issues that Escombros presents.

ALA PLÁSTICA: CREATIVE APPROACHES TO EXPAND LOCAL DISCUSSION OF THE LAND

Ala Plástica formed in 1991 in opposition to the nation’s neoliberal policies and the negative consequences that development projects were having on rural communities.

It was originally comprised of Alejandro Meitín, Silvina Babich, and Rafael Santos.25

Meitín’s background is in law, Santos’s in horticulture and science, and Babich’s in art education. Meitín explained that his past environmental and legal experience greatly influenced the group’s direction.26 Ala Plástica now consists of Meitín and his wife

Babich. Santos is still based in La Plata and works individually on related themes. Meitín and Babich elect to function as a collective, which symbolically demonstrates the value

25 Rafael Santos left Ala Plástica in order to focus on his own initiatives. However, his interest is still rooted in the same methodological practice that addresses social and environmental concerns. Rafael Santos Discussion, April 11, 2009, New Orleans.

26 Melitsko, “The Emergence of Environmental Activism in the City of Buenos Aires.” Ala Plástica situated its practice within the context of these historical events. Both the dictatorship and disappearances, 1976–1983, and the political corruption and economic turmoil of the 1990s informed the group’s practice. These events encouraged Ala Plástica to find new modes for recovering healthy human- nature systems. See Meitín, “Urbanismo crítico, intervención bioregional y especies emergentes,” and “Ingbrief.”

131 they attach to heterogeneous, collaborative processes. Ala Plástica regularly participates in regional and international artist residency programs that explore ties between specific environments and communities and are meant to strengthen networks that help foster these connections.27 They frequently collaborate with a variety of local and international environmental and art specialists. They envision friends and colleagues as fluctuating extensions of their collective. Ala Plástica began discussions with other interdisciplinary arts organizations like Littoral that developed in the late 1980s and drew inspiration from the work of such artists as Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison.28 In 1995, Ian Hunter and

Cecila Larner, directors of Littoral/Projects Environment, collaborated with Ala Plástica in the creation and implementation of the Emergent Species project, which targeted Punta

Lara in the Río de la Plata area (Figure 41). Ala Plástica sought collaborations with ecologically concerned professionals abroad, as there were only a minimal number of environmental organizations in Argentina at this time.29 Ala Plástica also worked with such local environmental specialists as Matilde Zúcaro and Marcelo Miranda, biologists at the University of Buenos Aires who specialize in the study of native plants on the

27 Ala Plástica has participated on such international collaborations as Project Rio Wandse in Hamburg, Germany, 2004; Kultur/Natur in Hamburg, 2008; and Solo con natura, in Puerto el Morro, Ecuador, 2009.

28 This organization is an art trust founded in 1989/1990 that is based in the United Kingdom. Its members consist of curators, artists, critics and scholars who seek new artistic practices and critical theories. LITTORAL, http://www.littoral.org.uk/HTML01/ (accessed Spring 2009). Alejandro Meitin has been a member of this group since 1994. Escombros participated with the second Littoral conference Critical Sites in Dublin, Ireland, September 9-12, 1998. It was organized by Projects Environment and Critical Access. See Zulema, “Cronología de Escombros,” Artistas de lo que queda.

29 Melitsko, “The Emergence of Environmental Activism in the City of Buenos Aires.” The national environmental organization Secretaria de Recursos Naturales y Ambiente Humano (SERNAH) was formed in 1991. This department reports directly to the president and the Consejo Federal de Medio Ambiente (COFEMA) deals with provincial relations. This thesis describes the relatively weak environmental movement in Argentina, explaining the difficulties that this movement has faced due to political and economic circumstances.

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Emergent Species project. These collaborations reveal an early interest in accumulating scientific data related to environmental issues and in initiating multidisciplinary exchange. The international and regional network that Ala Plástica continues to grow promotes the notion that the health of the natural world is a shared, global concern. It also advocates for local grassroots actions that support more conscious, responsible, and pluralistic land use policies.

In 1995, during the Emergent Species project, Ala Plástica began to consider the rhizome as a conceptual model, metaphorically imagining their work as similar to the native junco’s root structure.30 Emergent Species consisted of the organization of a local forum and the systematic plantation of junco, which acts as a natural water purifier. The rhizome highlights the group’s dedication to creating connections between different sites, peoples, and concepts and the continued transformative process that ensues their actions.

Interdisciplinary dialogue and community interactions support reconsiderations of ecology and ecological health. These projects conceive of community and environment as entities that interact on regional and global scales.

Ala Plástica uses visual and textual documentation, the Internet, public forums and questions to promote a sustained, open-dialogue about the relationship between the terrain, individuals, and institutions. The collective’s direct actions support the development of two interlocking types of community—one united by shared ecological concern and common praxis; the other united by geographic location, shared historical experience, and opposition to environmental conflict. Ala Plástica’s projects consist of the ideas, dialogue, and networks that are formed and expressed through visual and

30 Ala Plástica began to use the rhizome system of the native junco as a metaphor for its practice, during the implementation of the Emergent Species project in 1995.

133 textual documentation. Their projects have the potential to lead to physical alterations of the landscape and discursive changes in how people envision and express their connection to the natural environment.

Ala Plástica’s status as a non-governmental organization (NGO), continued legal efforts and increasing interaction with artists and critics, positions its practice at the border between the increasingly ambiguous division between art and non-art. As one of the collective’s key goals is to create an expansive network and horizontal dialogue, it is savvy to utilize the symbolic potential of art and its cultural worth. Ala Plástica does not operate with a fixed agenda. Rather, as Meitín, has explained, the collective’s goal is not to enact a project or to stage a political protest, but to create an alternate reality through a creative process of dialogue between a variety of regional and international actors.

Ala Plástica’s methodology is based on the idea that “the artist’s way of thinking and working” can advantageously be used to address environmental and social concerns particular to specific communities.31 The artist’s role is defined by the creative process of working, as defined by a series of actions. Text and image are integrated as catalysts and documents of contemplation, dialogue, and change. Despite the fact that the collective employs strategies commonly used by other environmental NGOs and activists, the group has also chosen to designate its projects as art. This hybrid identity is a strategic choice.

This designation has expanded the group’s network of participants and audience. It has led to discourse with innovative artists, curators, and art historians who envision a proactive social and ecological role for art that exists outside of the constraints of the market.

31 “Ala Plástica,” Groundworks: Environmental Collaboration in Contemporary Art (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon, 2005), 179.

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The fundamental characteristics that define Ala Plástica’s activities as art are its generative capacity and conceptual foundation. Actions develop in response to events, residencies, sustained research, and dialogue. The group promotes change through open considerations of the varying personal connections that people have to the region. The critical attention granted to Ala Plástica’s projects reveals a growing deliberation of art’s global and transformative dimensions.

Ala Plástica uses questions as a means to propel conversation about the land. This tactic is evidenced in the gallery exhibition at the Sala mircoespacio del Museo del Bellas

Artes in La Plata (Figure 42). “Who designs territories?” and “For whom are these territories designed?” were inscribed on a glass partition in the gallery. These broad questions are central to the group’s mission to inspire critical evaluations of the politics involved in constructions of territory. These inquiries also serve as a means to initiate discussion that will serve as the foundation for activities that engage with a site, local peoples, and members of international environmental organizations. The group’s work has been exhibited with other ecologically and politically engaged art in recent shows such as Arrhythmias of Counter-Production: Engaged Art in Argentina, 1995–2011

(Figure 43).32 The curator Jennifer Flores Sternad centered this exhibition on the art of socially and politically conscious Argentine artists.

Ala Plástica has created projects in urban centers such as La Plata and with rural communities. In its video for Proyecto AA, Ala Plástica informed viewers, “since 1988,

103,000 small farms have disappeared and every year thousands of families migrate from

32 The exhibition was held at the University of California, San Diego’s University Art Gallery, October 6, 2011–January 20, 2012. It surveyed the work of Argentine artists that engaged with the public sphere. Collectives such as Grupo de Arte Callejero and Etcétera were also represented.

135 the countryside to the urban periphery.”33 This statistic confirms the changes that economic and political factors have had on both urban and rural areas. Throughout the mid-1980s and 1990s, Argentina struggled with unemployment and inflation. Many of its citizens sought justice after years of human rights abuses. The government shifted to neoliberal policies under such presidents as Menem. While agricultural production remains important to the Argentine economy and even helped to alleviate the economic crisis in 2001, foreigners purchased pastures and forested lands in the 1990s.34 Ala

Plástica demonstrated in its video for Proyecto AA that rural environments and communities are frequently shaped by decisions made by multinational corporations and government personnel who are based in cities.35 The group claims that nearly one- hundred percent of soybean cultivation in Argentina is genetically engineered and that the acquisition of property for these crops is often accomplished “through violent expulsion of rural families and originary communities’ people.”36 Ala Plástica’s video accounts for the dismissal of rural voices in making decisions about land use. The group strives to empower individuals to decide how local terrain is used, taking its history into account.

33 Ala Plástica, AAProject, http://vimeo.com/45389234 (accessed 2012). The video was part of the collective’s installation for Groundworks: Environmental Collaboration in Contemporary Art in 2005.

34 Jonathan C. Brown, Argentina: A Brief History, 2nd ed. (Austin: University of Texas at Austin, 2010), 275 and 271.

35 Guha discusses this issue in his article “Radical Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique.” He focuses on ethics and the alternate perspectives of the land and nature in non- first world countries.

36 Proyecto AA is an ongoing project that was initiated in November 2004 in the Río de la Plata basin. It attempts to raise awareness and to create cultural solutions to problems posed by development projects supported by IIRSA (Initiative of Regional Integration for South America), including the displacement of people due to flooding. The informative video provided information about the Río de la Plata basin. “Ala Plástica,” Groundworks: Environmental Collaboration in Contemporary Art, 90-91.

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Ala Plástica’s holistic vision of individual sites as part of a larger regional and global ecosystem mirrors the postdevelopment position articulated by Arturo Escobar.37

Ala Plástica describes its practice as responding to the “need of new visions that could fortify the debate from the socio/ecological point of view against the one-sided techno- political conceptions . . . ”38 The group has espoused “the right for communities to reach more sensitive visions of their situations,” considering site and community as dynamic entities that should be given opportunities to participate in the process of environmental change.39

Ala Plástica’s pragmatic community efforts are evidenced by its recent cooperation with other non-art factions to prevent the company Colony Park’s real estate development project in the Tigre Delta (Figure 44).40 Ala Plástica and other NGOs organized public forums as a means to draw attention to the environmental destruction and displacement caused by development in this area. In a discussion about activities related to this conflict, Meitín stated that Ala Plástica’s goal is to create legislation that would grant local residents an opportunity to participate in land use decisions and to facilitate public forums that honor diverse positions.41 The organization of forums and

37 Arturo Escobar defined postdevelopment in his book Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World and it is discussed in this dissertation’s introduction. While Ala Plástica has not referenced Escobar’s scholarship, it aligns with the type of grassroots practice that he described. This parallel evidences the group’s position as part of a growing trend in changing perspectives on development. These projects are similar to the community interactions that form the basis of Ala Plástica’s work.

38 Ala Plástica, “Ingbrief.” Sachs, “Environment,” Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, 24-37.

39 Ala Plástica, “Ingbrief.”

40 “Colonial Urbanization,” Radio Mundo Real, http://www.radiomundoreal.fm/Colonial- Urbanization?lang=en (accessed fall 2011).

41 Alejandro Meitín Interview, August 2011, La Plata.

137 valuation of multiple voices relinquishes control over the outcome of particular actions and emphasizes the power of active participation. Ala Plástica’s projects are aligned with the goals of postdevelopment theories and are similar to the approaches of some ecological NGOs in the region that challenge conventional paradigms aligned with national development policies.42

ALA PLÁSTICA AND RAFAEL SANTOS’S MAGDALENA PROJECT43

Ala Plástica’s Magdalena Project is emblematic of its sustained multidimensional efforts to aid in the recuperation of local environments. On January 15, 1999, a Shell oil tanker collided with a German cargo ship in the Río de la Plata. By the following week, oil had spread down the river, polluting the water system, Magdalena shoreline and nearby Parque Costero del Sur, which is part of an UNESCO biosphere reserve.44

According to reports, 5,000 tons of oil had covered sixteen kilometers of riverbank by

January 20.45 Shell was reluctant to take responsibility for the spill and only began clean- up efforts after a court case was filed against the company.46 Three weeks of recovery

42 Melitsko, “The Emergence of Environmental Activism in the city of Buenos Aires,” 1-28.

43 Although Santos began work on this project as a member of Ala Plástica, his later projects have been executed independently. He would like to be credited individually for his photographs and the video.

44 Rafael Santos and Ala Plástica, “Magdalena Oil Spill, 1999,” www.artsitesgallery.com/files/Download/Ala%20Plastica.doc (accessed 2011). This publicity brief reflects the same information that Santos included in a handout for the community during his Studio in the Woods residency in February 2009. Santos’s discussion of Ala Plástica’s interventions and the film also document this information.

45 Rafael Santos/Ala Plástica, “Magdalena Oil Spill,” video, 1999.

46 Lisa Rimmer, “The Other Shell Report: Failing the Challenge,” 2002 (Friends of the Earth, 2003) www.h-net.org/~esati/sdcea/shellfailingchallenge.pdf (accessed 2010), 18. The town council filed charges against the former Shell chairman in Argentina Jorge Brea and the current one David Breer.

138 efforts ensued, which were criticized by community members and NGOs as being superficial and merely an attempt to assuage public ridicule.47 Some of the company’s tactics, such as the use of bulldozers, were even argued to have caused additional environmental harm.

Disparate views on environment and development underlie conflicts between multinational corporations, the state, and residents. Local anecdotes suggest that rural resident’s perceive city officials and corporations as detached from nature and insensitive to local concerns.48Ala Plástica’s response to the oil spill in Magdalena exhibits the collective’s interest in expanding networks of communication through fieldwork, publication of reports, public forums, and the circulation of materials through such avenues as the Internet and art exhibitions. Amidst the lack of a sustained or thorough investigation of the spill, Ala Plástica initiated a qualitative study that was accomplished through coordination with local government and UNESCO personnel. It resulted in a series of reports that included visual documentation. In order to acquire a pluralistic impact survey, the group organized “a survey team including local riverside actors (reed harvesters, fishermen, scientists), a fauna rescue group (linked to La Plata City Zoo) and an information team which released public documents about the oil spill on a daily

47 Rafael Santos Interview, email correspondence, August 2011.

48 During my visit to Magdalena in 2011, a journalist recounted his impression of a government official’s initial visit to Magdalena, Argentina in 1999 to survey damage caused by an oil spill. He informed me that a government sanctioned biologist arrived in Magdalena via helicopter to survey the damage. Stepping out of the aircraft in a dress and high heels, she teetered across the marshy landscape. As a representative of the state, she seemed neither prepared nor interested in fully understanding the damage caused to this sensitive ecosystem. According to this anecdotal account, the disjunction between the state’s representative and the environment, like Shell’s resistance to take responsibility for the accident and subpar clean-up efforts, demonstrate a long felt disconnection between urban centers and rural communities in Argentina.

139 basis.”49 Rafael Santos documented the site and the recovery process. In 2007, he compiled these photographs in a video that was meant to function as a “memory exercise.”50

Three major reports were produced between the immediate aftermath of the spill and 2009, revealing Ala Plástica’s interest in “[evaluating] the consequences on the ecosystem from different points of view” over an extended period of time.51 The collective documented and circulated scientific data that was intended to demonstrate the immediate and long-term impact of the spill on this ecosystem. These documents provided data that could be used for institutional purposes and legislative measures such as the enacting of stronger regulations. The first substantial report “Derrame de crudo en el Río de la Plata: Informe de Situación” documented the measurable damage to the flora and fauna between January 18 and February 10, 1999.52 It accounted for the measures that the collective were taking such as documenting the site and meeting with different organizations, including the junqueros. It also recorded the immediate ecological impact.53 The second report “Seguimiento del impacto del derrame de petróleo propiedad de la empresa Shell en la vegetación de la faja costera de Magdalena a partir de trabajo de campo y utilización de censores remotos y SIG” documented the measurable impact of

49 Ala Plástica, “Ingbrief.”

50 Santos, email correspondence, August 2011.

51 Rafael Santos/Ala Plástica, “Magdalena Oil Spill, 1999.”

52 Ala Plástica, “Informe II,” 1999, http://www.alaplastica.org.ar/informe99.pdf (accessed 2010).

53 The report identifies zones of high, medium and low impact, measuring the oil spill’s negative impact on certain flora and fauna. The following people worked on the report: Dr. Alejandro Meitin, Lic. Marcelo Miranda, Prof. Silvina Babich, Sr. Rafael Santos, Prof. Jorge D. Williams, Presidente del Grupo Especialista en Reptiles y Anfibios Sudamericanos, Unión Internacional de Conservación de la Naturaleza UICN, Lic. Matilde Zúcaro Vivero experimental «El Albardón.»

140 the spill between January 15, 1999 and January 15, 2009.54 The third report explored additional changes between 1997 and 2009.55 These documents demonstrate the foundation’s long-term commitment to this region, the importance of collaboration, science, and qualitative and quantitative data in deciding how to respond to an environmental crisis.

Other reports were produced in collaboration with Ala Plástica. “Failing the

Challenge: The Other Shell Report, 2002” was researched and written by Lisa Rimmer with the support of Friends of the Earth.56 It compiles a series of reports on the detrimental impact of Shell’s operations throughout the world, including in such areas as

Louisiana, Nigeria, and the Philippines. It also contains a section on Magdalena, called

“Destroying Biodiversity in Argentina” that was written in consultation with Ala Plástica.

The document records small town residents’ struggle to seek legal action against Shell.

The town lobbied for compensation for the loss of industry, trade and tourism and five hundred citizens of Magdalena filed for loss of livelihood.57 The company appealed charges that its clean-up efforts were not sufficient. This document highlights the importance of Ala Plástica’s efforts in providing evidence that has been used in court cases and keeping the public informed. The inclusion of this information in Rimmer’s report expands the audience of Ala Plástica’s findings and situates the local incident within a broader, global context that highlights the fact that multiple communities have

54 Dr. Marcel Achkar, Professor of Geography at the Universidad de Montevideo and member of REDES-AT.

55 “Informe III,” 2009, www.alaplastica.org.ar/informe09.pdf (accessed 2010). This document was a collaboration between Dr. Ana Domínquez, Dr. Marcel Achkar of REDES (Red de Ecologia Social), Amigos de la Tierra, Uruguay and Lic. Lauce Freyre, Lic. Marcelo Miranda and Dr. Alejandro Meitin.

56 Rimmer, “The Other Shell Report: Failing the Challenge.”

57 Ibid., 18. The local government sought US$20 million.

141 struggled with ecological and social damage due to the company’s practices. In this case, the transportation of crude oil is noted as being dangerous and the company was targeted for not taking responsibility for the spilling of its product into Argentine waters. Ala

Plástica stated that its documentation of this event also “helped inspire” the company to actively engage in the recovery process.58

Ala Plástica also sought to understand the spill and to document it through visual tools such as photographs and maps of the area. The group recorded satellite, aerial, and ground level images of the region, during and after the spill. Additionally, a map was drawn of the area, which is revealing of the group’s conceptual approach to this ecological crisis (Figure 45). This conceptual map includes a drawing of the landscape, sketches of figures working, the river system, Shell’s logo, notes, plants and a rhizome- like root structure in the bottom right corner. This sketch includes a diagram of the group’s multifaceted approach that expressed their social, biological, and economic considerations of this ecosystem.

Santos, as a member of Ala Plástica, created a video that was designed as part of the “creative” solution. A journalist from Magdalena observed that people are frequently disconnected from the environment that surrounds them and commented that while such a crisis as an oil spill initiates a brief, heightened consideration of the environment, this concern soon dwindles.59 Ala Plástica responded to this concern through the dispersal of information and organization of a public viewing of the film, which was intended to encourage continued reflection and remediation. The film was meant to initiate a philosophical discussion about the relationship between technology, industry,

58 Santos/Ala Plástica, “Magdalena Oil Spill, 1999.”

59 Discussion with a journalist, Summer 2011, Magdalena.

142 community, and landscape. The film aired on the public cable station channel 4 in 2007.

It’s believed to have been well received by the community and was discussed in local schools.60 The film was intended for a local audience and has since been modified and shown to international audiences. For example, the film was shown during Rafael

Santos’s residency at A Studio in the Woods in New Orleans, Louisiana, as a means of drawing parallels between problems that are caused by the oil industry and the importance of water systems in these two distant locales.

Santos explained that his intention was to create a video that would “provoke critical reflection about this type of event, and possibly influence a range of decisions that the public and individuals make” such as regulations, prevention and consumption.61 The photographs were taken during the thirty-day period directly after the spill and during the company’s initial intervention. Some years later text and instrumental music were added to his selection of photographs. The photos included in the video show the topography from an aerial and a ground-level view. The photos were divided into the following three sections: The Spill, The Damage and The Ultimate Damage. Shell’s logo is also included a couple of times, referencing the company responsible for the damage. Such questions as

“What kind of facts make possible the following?” and “Can technology heal technological wounds?” are inserted between stills. The question “Can technology heal technological wounds” is followed by Shell’s logo and then an image of flatbed trucks with oil soaked boom and men in blue jumpsuits toiling in a sullied landscape (Figures

60 Santos, email correspondence, August 2011.

61 Ibid.. “El video lo defino como un “Ejercicio de Memoria,” por lo tanto su intencion es ejercitar la memoria para provocar reflexión critica acerca de este tipo de episodios, y en lo posible influenciar un amplio rango de decisiones, tanto publicas colectivas como individuales (regulaciónes, prevención, consumo, etc).”

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46-48). These photographs include people, unlike many of the initial images, which solely document the landscape. These three photographs demonstrate different perspectives––scales that mimic the satellite, aerial, and ground level views that were included in the official reports. The film’s broad questions operate as catalysts for thought and discussion about what environment means, land use, and the role of technology in this process. These questions were employed as a conceptual tactic meant to provide a critical consideration of the event as re-imagined through the displayed images.

The Magdalena project can be further understood within the framework of Ala

Plástica’s regional projects and commitment to partnering with the diverse peoples who comprise the delta community. One of the collective’s primary goals is to create an outlet for target communities to express their relation to the land and perspectives on the changes that are impacting the environment in which they live. This agenda is evident in the collective’s recent video that consists of interviews with a variety of people who live along the delta.62 Together, these interviews offer a complex account of the environment’s local significance. It is educational, but not didactic. Such works document marginalized perspectives and inspire discussion about important ecosystems.

Ala Plástica facilitates the construction of extended communities of peoples who are connected regionally and by common concerns.

62 I previewed this video with Ala Plástica in 2011. See Ala Plástica and Centro Experimental Oído Salvaje, Territorio y Radialidad: Laboratorio Punta Lara, Punta Lara, October 7–12, 2012, http://vimeo.com/56734704 (accessed 2012) for a comparative example that explores diverse perspectives and collaborative efforts in this region.

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COMMUNITY AND DIALOGUE

Recent theories by such scholars as Reinaldo Laddaga and Grant Kester developed in response to the art produced by collectives such as Ala Plástica. Laddaga’s book Estética de la Emergencia (2006), argued that contemporary art production has shifted to a new phase. His text explored a trend in which artists seek to engage diverse communities in addressing local socially engaged issues. Laddaga noted that a number of recent artists and writers focus less on the creation of objects than the formation of

“‘ecologías culturales.’”63 He observed that artists now enact concrete projects that interact with communities, forming a temporary community. There are also other types of communities that have developed across different geographic areas that are maintained through residencies and virtual communication. Such trans-national networks are comprised of a variety of specialists who are united by common concerns. Laddaga stated, “if community today is not something that is established a priori, but is in constant need of assembling, we might say that an act of creation would be involved whenever a community is brought into being.”64 Laddaga’s statement stresses the act of community formation itself as one of creation, which is a fundamental component of Ala Plástica’s and Escombros’s creative work. Ala Plástica continues to develop networks between people in order to catalyze dialogue about specific environmental issues that over time could lead to new regulations and a transformation of values. The group’s “community” fluctuates from project to project, while a core network remains in place.

63 Reinaldo Laddaga, Estética de la emergencía (Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2006): 9.

64 Santiago García Navarro, “Interview with Reinaldo Laddaga on Art of Emergency. The Formation of Another Culture of the Arts: Part 1,” LatinArt.com (August 21, 2007). In this review of Estética de la emergencia, as Argentine writer Santiago García Navarro observed “some of the cases that Laddaga observes might be defined as communities of resistance, and others, as forms of exchange that in no way can be set apart from the vast inventiveness of the marketplace.” García Navarro, 1.

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Laddaga’s analysis of contemporary formations of communities in the name of art theoretically contextualizes Ala Plástica’s organization of “ecologías culturales.”65 This act of building communities stresses art’s continued appropriation of interdisciplinary methods. Meitín described Ala Plástica’s creation of “comunidades experimentales” or

“micro-communidades” that favor social creativity over self-expression as part of the group’s activities in the Cuenca del Plata area.66 Meitín argued that much local and national power has been forfeited to multinational companies. He focused particularly on the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South American Nations

(IIRSA) transnational development projects that are designed to expand the industrial and transportation infrastructure in the region and provide easier access to natural resources, which have had a negative economic, social, and environmental impact on many local areas since the mid-1990s.67 Meitín insisted that “the use of dialogue, narrative photographs, cartography, satellite images, drawings, texts, and maps that include the insights of residents who face actions that damage the environment or social fabric, shapes [Ala Plástica’s] experimental work that has mobilized new forms of collective action and creativity.”68 Meitín’s comment illustrates Ala Plástica’s exploration of the meaning attached to one’s natural surroundings and its use through a variety of visual and

65 Meitín,“Urbanismo Crítico, Intervención Bioregional y Especies Emergentes,”

66 Meitín, “Artistic Initiatives in Community Organizing, and their Metaphorical Juridical-Social Dimension.”

67 Ibid. and Kester, The One and the Many, 140.

68 Meitín, “Artistic Initiatives in Community Organizing, and their Metaphorical Juridical-Social Dimension.” He stated, “A través del dialogo, narraciones fotográficas, cartografía, imágenes satelitales, dibujos, textos y mapeos que incluyen los insights de los residentes frente a acciones que damnifican el ambiente o el tejido social, esta forma de trabajo altamente experimental movilizó nuevas formas de acción colectiva y de creatividad.”

146 oratory means. By centering on social activity and community as creative acts, it is possible to approach questions such as land rights and values from a more dynamic perspective. As artists, the group is more readily able to balance philosophical discussions with pragmatic conversations, to create usable reports and endorse legal measures, while simultaneously seeking experimental activities that are centered in collective cultural activity.

Escombros’s projects also support community formation. The collective is less involved with creating international networks supported by a common goal than Ala

Plástica. In other words, while Ala Plástica seeks out other environmentally concerned individuals and groups to collaborate with, Escombros functions more autonomously as an art collective. Escombros engages heterogeneous, temporary communities of people about national circumstances that impact human welfare and the health of the local environment through collective self-expression.69 While some of its actions address specific local issues, like Ala Plástica, the poetic nature of the group’s practice and manifestos appeal to the universal and ethical importance of human rights and ecology.70

Escombros’s practice relies on text, which is published in manifestos and recorded in poems that are embedded into art objects and temporarily integrated into public space.

These texts accompany the collective mobilization of people who are united through a common activity, clarifying the group’s values and intention of organized events.

69 Like Ala Plástica, Escombros has participated in a number of national and international exchanges such as biennials since the 1990s. However, its participation in international events seems more about sharing work and thoughts about Argentina and its situation than forming international networks. Moret, Artistas de lo que queda, 59.

70 César López Osornio, “Escombros: Artistas de lo que queda,” A través de los Escombros: Una incursión en el MACLA (La Plata: Grupo Escombros, 2005), 12. César López Osornio, the Director of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo latinoamericano en La Plata (MACLA), has commented that each of Escombros’s projects “has a rigorous, expressive treatise: ethical, aesthetic, and artistic.”

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Ala Plástica’s and Escombros’s visual materials have been examined relative to conceptual art practice and contemporary trends such as their interdisciplinary methods.

These groups’ visual materials have been exhibited, written about by art historians and curators, and shared on the Internet via Ala Plástica’s Facebook page and each collective’s website. Escombros’s website includes extensive documentation, including text from its manifestos and descriptions of some of its projects. Its creation of Net Art reveals a further interest in appealing (and seeking to engage) a younger, more technologically savvy audience.71 In recent years, the group has more rigorously inserted itself into the art world, circulating objects through art museums and galleries, participating in international art biennials and in dialogue with critics and historians.

Each collective’s projects have also, at times, been integrated into more mainstream discussions of art criticism and exhibition. Despite each collective’s strategic engagement with art institutions and specialists working within this field, each maintains autonomy from the art market.

Both collectives notably expand networks through continued actual and virtual dialogue about environmental issues. They have used the Internet as an additional resource that aids in the circulation of each group’s visual materials, expanding the reach of each collective’s advocacy. Local community involvement, the construction of virtually connected regional and international communities, interdisciplinary collaboration, and multifaceted actions that combine practical and creative measures reveal each collective’s consideration of ecology.

71 Interview with Grupo Escombros (Luis Pazos & Héctor Puppo), Hemispheric Institute Sixth Encuentro: Corpolíticas / Body Politics in the Americas: Formations of Race, Class and Gender (2007: Buenos Aires, Argentina). http://hidvl.nyu.edu/video/000541097.html (accessed 2011).

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The idea of communities as networks that are further buttressed by the Internet defines Ala Plástica’s bioregional approach. Ala Plástica’s “bioregional” model conceives of the environment as part of a complex matrix of systems that intersect with social, economic, political, and cultural spheres.72 Its members perceive of art as a

“social-strategy” and their practice is intended to exhibit a “ . . . rhizomatic linking of ecological, social, and artistic methodology, combining direct interventions and precisely defined concepts to a parallel universe without giving up the symbolic potential of art.”73

The artists thus act as theoretically informed mediators, negotiating between different scales of abstraction and specificity, communities of people, cultural spheres, and ecosystems.

Ala Plástica and Escombros have proposed horizontal methodologies and sought public spaces and virtual platforms outside the art market as sites for creative, socially engaged action and dialogue. Its documentation of specific events, issues and conceptions of environment in local areas is integral to its mode of practical advocacy-based practice.

Ala Plástica acts as a link between a variety of locales within the region and beyond, using scientific and narrative documentation to create a larger community that is united based on common interests and struggles. Escombros, however, relies on poetry and events that, much like residencies, bring a group of local residents together temporarily to openly address social and ecological issues through creative thought and action.

72 Ala Plástica, www.alaplastica.org.ar (accessed Spring 2009). A discussion of this term is also found in Alejandro Meitín, “A Bioregional Perspective: The Place Vocation,” The Green Museum, http://www.greenmuseum.org/generic_content.php?ct_id=258 (accessed Spring 2009).

73 “Ala Plástica,” LatinArt.com: An Online Journal of Art and Culture, http://www.latinart.com/faview.cfm?id=957 (accessed Spring 2009).

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The conception of community and collective as dynamic entities further permits consideration of the environment as a complex space in which desires and preoccupations are enacted.74 It is a space that is regulated by political and economic forces and one in which power relations are revealed.75 Ala Plástica’s and Escombros’s interventions reveal a complex interweaving of action art, social and environmental practices. Ala Plástica’s projects do not comfortably fit in categories of “art” or “activism,”76 but, rather, as Meitín has pointed out, exist between these categories.77 Artist and director of Littoral, Ian

Hunter has asserted that this “ . . . genre [of which Ala Plástica’s work is deemed a part,] contributes to a spectrum of critical activity operating outside or in parallel with mainstream art world institutions and systems. There are overlaps and new interfaces . . . constantly developing between the two areas, but most of the artists would regard themselves as occupying an independent zone, outside the art world.”78 In a discussion with Meitín, he stated that his work was not overtly activist or political, suggesting his disinterest in promoting a single, didactic message. In an interview in 2007, Ala Plástica stated that their projects do not reflect “ . . . a simple change in scale or perspective. It is the possibility of developing a different objectivity, a different way of perceiving

74 Laura Malosetti Costa, “Politics, Desire and Memory in the Construction of Landscape in the Argentine Pampas,” Journal of Visual Art Practice 5, no. 1 and 2 (2006): 107-119.

75 Escobar, Encountering Development, 225-226. Ala Plástica’s activities seem to be founded on Escobar’s suggestion that the center/periphery model has evolved into a consideration of a globalized system of interconnected nodes and that cultural development is the “root” of postdevelopment strategies that are seen as being “transformed and transformative.” Escobar has also stated “postdevelopment and cyberculture thus become parallel and interrelated processes in the cultural politics of the late-twentieth century.”

76 Grant Kester, “Theories and Methods of Collaborative Art Practice,” Groundworks, 31.

77 Meitin, “Urbanismo Crítico, Intervención Bioregional y Especies Emergentes.”

78 Ian Hunter, “More Questions Than Answers,” Ala Plástica, http://www.alaplastica.org.ar/text/ian_hunter.pdf, 12.

150 ourselves, in connection with ‘what is Other.’”79 Ala Plástica negotiates difference through encounter and communication.80 Their art is tied to contemporary work that elects to produce a more “ethical, socially responsive and politically efficacious art.”81

Ala Plástica uses dialogue to mediate the unstable interfaces that exist in the world. The group theoretically considers their use of dialogue in relation to Grant

Kester’s dialogical aesthetic and his writing on labor, which permeate traditional disciplinary and discursive borders. Kester defines dialogical aesthetic as operating

“through its function as a more or less open space within contemporary culture: a space in which certain questions can be asked, certain critical analysis articulated, that would not be accepted elsewhere.”82 This theory accounts for the creative nature by which dialogue about the environment has been initiated by Ala Plástica. His theory legitimizes the group’s status as an art collective and its own emphasis on the preeminent role of dialogue as a means to enact transformation.

Kester asserted that community-based art organizations that interact with nature reveal another deviation from the modern perception of land as private property and the

79 Jennifer Flores Sternad, “Ala Plástica,” LatinArt.com: An Online Journal of Art and Culture (July 1, 2007), http://www.latinart.com/faview.cfm?id=957 (accessed Spring 2009).

80 Alejandro Meitín Interview, August 2011, La Plata.

81 Bruce Barber, “Littoralist Art Practice and Communicative Action,” Ala Plástica, www.alaplastica.org.

82 Kester, Conversation Pieces, 68 and 111. This space seems to represent what Nicolás Bourriaud called a “social interstice” in his discussion of relational aesthetics. This term centers on artworks’ position within the capitalist system. He explained Marx’s conception of the interstice as “trading communities” that exist outside of the main capitalist system and then extends this idea to his own discussion of art as a “social interstice” centered on human interactions. He argued that the rise of technology and the mechanization of daily life have led to the decline in direct human interactions, which relational art, in particular, seems to encourage. Kester described this “open” or privileged space as also existing beyond museum walls and asserts that it is grounded in a “level of collective interaction.” Thus, both intellectuals see art as occupying a privileged discursive space.

151 traditional notion of labor as a means of extraction. He stated, “its [the art’s] productivity lies in the transformative effect of labor on the identity of those who share it.”83 Ala

Plástica’s interventions exhibit the member’s own efforts to promote education, conservation, and remediation. Labor is used for recuperative and transformative ends that change the social and physical landscape over time. Escombros’s projects and art objects also belie an ethical interest in using art to explore and help remedy destructive measures against people and the environment in which they live. Their production, however, remains rooted in the symbolic realm.

Ala Plástica uses the site itself and a network of other locales that are united through the use of the Internet, dialogue and exhibition. The media, as a portal for communication, and education are integral to the collective’s work. Thus, this group takes advantage of the tools available in this post-industrial age of technology and communication. However, the artists state that their use of technology “ . . . [defies] institutional authority or the ‘techno-political’ way of thinking that the governmental and corporate agencies, responsible for these issues” exhibit and that they “mobilize new forms of collective action and of creativity that challenge the unidirectional mode of perceiving reality.”84 In other words, they seek to harness technology to promote its own ends, while critiquing past irresponsible uses of technology as part of industrialization and a glorified aspect of modern development. The artists seek to mediate between different levels of institutions and geographic locations, using technology, science and

83 Kester, “Theories and Methods of Collaborative Art Practice,” Groundworks, 22.

84 Flores Sternad, “Ala Plástica.”

152 aesthetics as a means to bridge traditional communicative barriers such as those between large institutions and community members.

Escombros produces work that exists between “el arte y la realidad, la estética y la ética . . .” and has adapted “la actitud reflexiva y la toma de conciencia.”85 Escombros also sought to create a new type of reality that is built upon the complex relationships among individual participants. While the group does not seek to institute legal changes directly, a key goal of its projects is to transform passive spectators into active participants who have the power to collectively change present circumstances. In particular, Escombros capitalizes on the ability of writing, performance, and “objects of consciousness” to cause discursive changes on ecology and human rights that shape our reality. Escmobros expressed its vision of art’s transformative capacity, stating that “El artista solidario no contempla al mundo: lo construye.”86 Many of Escombros actions are denunciations that are followed by reflection, a sort of cathartic experience in which one can openly and anonymously express one’s hopes and fears.87

Escombros seeks to overcome barriers imposed by the art world and social inequality by organizing groups in public spaces and helping them to create as a means to instigate change. Language is essential to the work of both Ala Plástica and Escombros.

Ala Plástica often uses language for documentary purposes. The texts that Ala Plástica produced as part of the Magdalena project served legal, scientific and advocacy purposes.

The group records the stress that the ecosystem underwent after the oil spill—an endeavor that was not undertaken by other non-art groups at the time. Its organization of

85 “A través de los Escombros: Una incursión en el MACLA,” 23.

86 Escombros, Manifestos de Escombros: 1989, 1995, 2000, 2003, 22.

87 “A través de los Escombros: Una incursión en el MACLA,” 26.

153 forums to discuss the Magdalena spill or, more recently, the development of Colony Park promotes dialogue about ecological issues. These discussions, in general, are about people’s connection to the land and the dynamic ways in which social, economic, political and environmental issues are united and rooted to historical circumstance. The collective creates narratives about places through the production of videos that record interviews with people who live in the region and discussions with local residents.

Escombros primarily employs language in poetry, pamphlets and manifestos. The pamphlets document specific events. The manifestos clarify the group’s position and act as declarations for more socially and ecological practice and awareness. Poetry is produced by the group to grant community participants a moment for self-reflection and reaction to the performance’s theme. Escombros’s actions, like Ala Plástica’s conservation efforts, participation in residencies and organization of forums, also create discussion that is never recorded and is beyond the control of either collective.

The methodology behind such interventions as those in Magdalena or Recuperar reveals that community perspective and participation are integral to the design and execution of such projects. Through the documentation of various perspectives on the impact of the Magdalena oil spill, Ala Plástica seems to acknowledge environmental pollution or degradation as impacting an entire ecosystem, including its human members.

Recuperar and Agua S.O.S. similarly point to the overlap between poverty and environmental degradation. The projects incorporate labor, consumption and art as symbolic critiques of existing realities and are used as a means to provide aid to those in need and raise awareness of the river’s pollution. Collaborative “creative work” supports the notion of communal relationships with the land, rather than of individual ownership.

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A person’s identity is thus conceived as contingent and relational to one’s experience and connections with the habitat in which he/she lives. In this instance, art functions as “a social strategy” that seeks to mediate multiple conflicting goals and interests. While some of Ala Plástica’s and Escombros’s activities have a finite end product, its corpus of work can be understood as a rhizome of interconnected nodes whose growth we are still monitoring.

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CHAPTER 4: POETICS OF PLACE: MATERIALS, MEMORIES AND RITUALS

The majority of Argentina’s population resides in cities. The nation, like many countries in Latin America, is increasingly defined by its urban centers and people’s experiences in these expanding cities.1 As evidenced in the first two chapters, the environmental movement in Argentina developed amongst the urban middle-class and centered principally on issues of pollution within Buenos Aires. Artistic responses varied from calls for awareness of the environment itself to considerations of the environment against social and political inequalities. Ala Plástica’s work since 1991 extended beyond urban borders, engaging with communities in rural areas, exposing the shortcomings of neoliberal policies, calling for multinational corporations to take responsibility for environmental damage and creating a platform for more individuals to participate in decisions on land use. This chapter continues to explore rural areas. Its main concern, however, shifts from consideration of works that center on nature in relation to social, political and economic terms to work that foregrounds cultural ones, demonstrating the continued cultural, religious or personal importance of the land to each artist and, in some instances, to rural communities. This chapter’s focal works do not respond directly to

1 J. Timmons Roberts and Nikki Demetria Thanos, “Hazards of an Urban Continent,” in Trouble in Paradise: Globalization and Environmental Crises in Latin America (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 98 and 99. The authors discussed how major cities are defining contemporary experience and ecological discourse, particularly in Latin America. They focused on how ecological issues are tied to class, race, gender and uneven levels of accessibility to water, land and hygiene in major cities.

156 issues of environmental degradation, but they do assert that nature is a valuable cultural resource that is significant to contemporary society. Their works also respond, purposely in the case of Teresa Pereda and obliquely in the case of Mónica Millán, to another ecological crisis: a general, societal detachment from nature beyond its material ends that is endorsed by the imposition of neoliberal economic policies and globalization’s tendency to obfuscate rural areas’ particular histories and the changes that many places are undergoing. Their works do not communicate the value of place primarily through conversation, as in the works of Ala Plástica, but through visual and experiential expressions of personal experience, layered or fragmented representations of nature and series of works that do not offer closure.

Visual artists Teresa Pereda (b. 1956) and Mónica Millán (b. 1960) each represent nature and rural places in Argentina or in other parts of Latin America. Each artist values nature and aesthetic inclinations, which is demonstrated in their art and statements about their work. Their individual approaches expose place as an important part of identity.

Each artist’s work also represents nature beyond the confines of Western pictorial conventions that have shaped traditional views of landscape painting since the seventeenth century to a more expansive address of place.2 Landscape and Power, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell, explores the conventions that have shaped academic studies of landscape and the role that these works of art have served as cultural objects. He insists

2 See further discussion of the definition of and growing attention to place in the introduction. This term is increasingly being considered in new terms that create an expansive vision of place and value of diverse locations. Nature is examined in a myriad of places, rather than just in targeted reserves. See Andrew Light, “Environmental Art and the Recovery of Place,” in GroundWorks: Environmental Collaboration in Contemporary Art (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University, 2005), 48-57. Light examined the increased critical attention to the concept of place. In these considerations, nature is an integrated part of social and cultural life, rather than a separate entity.

157 that landscapes be considered as active and dynamic, rather than static entities, advocating for scholars to interpret landscapes as images that communicate more than pictorial pleasure. Landscape paintings have functioned as part of national discourses and imperial ideologies: “…we [now] think of landscape, not as an object to be seen or a text to be read, but as a process by which social and subjective identities are formed.”3

Representations of landscapes are infused with economic, political, and cultural values that impact transformations of the land itself. Pereda and Millán consciously reveal nature as an important aspect of cultures, identities, and sites. This chapter examines their representations of nature as a dynamic component of places. It explores the potential of their works’ positive tone and validation of nature as recuperative.

The land, earth and nature are three significant, overlapping concepts that describe the subjects of each artist’s work. Pereda’s art focuses on the earth as physical material that is integrated into some works and as a broader concept that references the world in its entirety. Horacio Zabala commented that Pereda’s use of soil brings to mind the dialectical manner in which the viewer is asked to consider the fragment and its whole, the earth as material and concept, people’s environmental needs and cultural constructions of nature. Zabala suggested, “Let’s think of the Earth with a capital ‘E,’ a spherical planet that is slightly squashed at the poles, one that belongs to a solar system lost in space and inhabited by human beings with a history.”4 Pereda seeks to maintain the local integrity and specificity of places within a broader national, regional or

3 W.J.T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1.

4 Horacio Zabala, “Books Without Literature,” in Teresa Pereda. Tierra, eds. Mercedes Casanegra and Horacio Zabala (Buenos Aires: El Ateno, 2008), 63.

158 universal whole. Pereda simultaneously focuses on land in her work, underscoring the earth as physical space that is divided into political units and that is occupied and cultivated. Parcels of land are palimpsests of histories and present circumstances.

Pereda’s Páginas de artista (2000) juxtaposes soil and text, revealing the conceptual layers that construct understandings of the land. Páginas de artista consists of four wood and glass boxes that contain soils from distinct regions. The soil partially obfuscates the text, sweeping over the enclosed page and creating the impression of a landscape (Figure 49).5 The words “tierra – cultivo – cultura – tierra” were printed on the first Página; its formation forming a square of text in the center of the paper. The second one includes a larger square of text formed by the words “tierra” and “patria.” “Patria” appears in red. The third includes “tierra,” “cultivo” and “cultura”; each word followed by its definition. Each term is highlighted once in red. A vertical line of text composed of the repetition of the term “tierra” runs down the center of the final object, installed at the far left. Together, Pereda’s framed pages, invite the viewer to consider the relationship between the physical world and culture, agriculture and the changing discursive expressions of land as part of national identity. The variations of text, soil and composition suggest the limits of her selected terms and reinforce the openness of her proposal. The Páginas’ spatial, textual and material differences insinuate the possibility of reconfiguration or mutation.

Pereda’s recuperative ambition centers on bridging the divisions between different locales and overcoming urbanites’ apathy towards nature. Technology and the control of nature in urban environments, according to Pereda, has created a divide between the earth and people, concealing the direct interaction or sense of dependency

5 Casanegra and Zabala, Teresa Pereda. Tierra, 78.

159 that is felt by many who live in rural areas, especially agricultural workers.6 Her perspective parallels German Romanticism’s transcendental vision of nature and echoes the intent of deep and spiritual ecologies.7 In deep ecology, nature is conceptualized as a socially constructed concept and “recognizes that science is enmeshed in socially negotiated relationships with nature.”8 Nonwestern philosophies serve as models that offer alternate ways to consider and relate to the land, also taking feminism and postclassical sciences into account. Spiritual ecology considers people’s attitudes and values towards the land, advocating more ethical relationships between people and nature. Change is thus sought through a “transformation of consciousness.”9 This approach centers on the relationships with nature that religions support, including both practical and theoretical components. Pereda’s art reveals and seeks to strengthen bonds between humans and nature, in part drawing inspiration from indigenous religions and documenting ceremonies and myths that explain aspects of these connections.10

6 Teresa Pereda Interview, July 13, 2011, Buenos Aires. This section is paraphrased from notes that I took during my interview. Pereda is aware of the many ecological problems that people throughout the world face and recognizes the importance of increasing awareness of these issues. However, she also has stated that transformation is slow and that changes in environmental regulation or action is difficult and dependent on numerous economic and political factors.

7 Deep Ecology’s name and methodology were derived from Arne Naess’s article “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement” (1972). Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World (New York: Routledge, 1992), 85-86. Deep ecology advocates for a more holistic view of nature and sustainable actions, arguing for “transformation [to begin] at the level of consciousness.”

8 Ibid., 107-108.

9 Ibid., 111.

10 Casanegra, “The Potentials of the Earth,” Teresa Pereda. Tierra, 36. Art historian Mercedes Casanegra explained, “This need [which] involves recovering the awareness of how human beings are inextricably related to nature and to another universal principle that exceeds the dimensions of the human domain: the relation between the heavenly sphere and the human one, be it in the figure of Christ or of Nguenechen, the Mapuche god.”

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Pereda’s sentiment that urban life has disconnected people from nature parallels geographer Maria Kaika’s assertion that the process of modernization has increasingly compartmentalized and sanitized nature within the urban context. Kaika assessed the construction of nature and people’s interaction with it in an urban context from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, finding that the addition of urban infrastructure has further distanced people from direct contact with nature and natural processes.11 Kaika stated that the city’s infrastructure and modern lifestyles have removed people from nature, while also constructing nature as something that is “other.”12

In Argentina, Puerto Madero is often cited as an indicator of the long estranged relationship that the residents of Buenos Aires have with nature, implying that even within the city limits, the river is often dismissed. Puerto Madero was built in 1898 and redeveloped from its derelict state in the early 1990s.13 The transformation of the port area drew more attention to the river through the construction of architectural features such as a walkway. This development was believed to signify “progress” after years of economic and political struggles and to mark the nation’s important transition to neo- liberal globalization.14 Yet, the pollution of the Riachuelo still persists and the historical

11 Maria Kaika, City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and City (Routledge: New York, 2004). Her focus was on Western cities.

12 In the article “The End of ‘Pre-Modernity’: Nature as Progress’s Frontier,” Kaika further argued that nature was “constructed not only as ‘the other’ to human civilization, but also as ‘the other’ to human settlements or cities.” She analyzed the “double coding of nature” that constitutes the foundation of past and contemporary constructions, considering it as a model for “superior moral and ecological order” and as “barbarian, wild and uncivilized.” Kaika, “The End of ‘Pre-Modernity’: Nature as Progress’s Frontier,” GroundWorks, 58-67.

13 Arnd Schneider, Appropriation as Practice: Art and Identity in Argentina (Palgrave Macmillan: Buenos Aires, 2006), 13.

14 Ibid.

161 detachment from rural areas is reinforced by the city’s own infrastructure and its residents’ persistent inward gaze.

Millán’s work, however, centers on nature as it connotes the countryside, flora and fauna. She represents nature through textiles, drawings, and recorded sounds that are culled principally from her journeys into the rural areas of Misiones, her native province, her time spent in Yataity, Paraguay and other found documentations of nature. Her work does not divorce nature from culture. Rather, nature is positioned as an integral and informative part of human experience. Her approach to nature is flexible and expresses an idea of the landscape as something that is changing and dynamic. Millán described her considerations of nature and its expression in her art for the exhibition Jardín de

Resonancias (2002), which was held at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires.

She stated “De chica caminaba por el monte y sentía que había algo allí, debajo de la tierra, misterioso, religioso, secreto.”15 Her discussion of nature focused on a gap that exists between observation or experience and knowing and the processes through which nature changes. She declared that “El sur humano tiene una relación ambigua con la

Naturaleza. Es fuente de peligro y atracción al mismo tiempo. Estoy interesada en este espacio de tensión y ambigüedad.”16 Millán’s art reflects her own complex consideration of nature and encourages others to meditate on this theme. Her works are inventive reconsiderations of landscape as place and genre.

15 Mónica Millán, Jardín de Resonancias, web version of the catalogue (Buenos Aires: Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, 2002), n.p.

16 Ibid. As Ticio Escobar noted in his discussion of Millán’s El Río Bord(e)ado, her work is suggestive of the Kantian sublime more than a simple expression of beauty. “El Río Bordeado,” (Asunción, 2007). Text for Millán’s exhibition El Río Bordeado.

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Beyond their common interest in rural locales and areas outside of Buenos Aires,

Pereda and Millán have adopted divergent approaches to the representation of places and expectations of the role of art in bridging geographical and temporal divides. Millán engages with her audience through her art on an individual basis. Her work is informed by her journeys through rural areas such as relatively undeveloped forests in Misiones, appropriation, and in some instances, fieldwork. The works selected for this chapter demonstrate her experimentation with ways of representing nature and the significance of the ties between her experience and creation. Her installation Picnic a Orillas del Paraná

(2007) offers a fanciful representation of nature that recalls her past experiences. El

Vértigo de lo lento (2002–2012) interrogates the importance of traditional craft in the indigenous community of weavers in Yataity, Paraguay. In the drawings that she produced as part of this series, local Ao Poi weavers are seamlessly integrated with the surrounding landscape, poetically united through the reduction of each to the expression of light and shadow achieved through the drawn line. Millán’s series El Río Bord(e)ado

(2004–2007) consists of drawings and sounds from photographs and recordings that she took on a journey along the Río Paraná. Millán’s series El Vértigo de lo lento and El Río

Bord(e)ado were informed by observation, self-reflection and, for El Vértigo de lo lento, an ethnographic approach.17 Her work is not didactic. Millán reinforces an understanding of nature centered on layered experiences and memories.

Pereda’s art responds to the earth in relation to regional fragmentation and rural / urban polarities. She addresses the lenses through which earth is understood: myth, tradition, religion and livelihood. Pereda’s artistic process is informed by her

17 Millán conducted fieldwork in Yataity, Paraguay, beginning in 2002. The Rockefeller Foundation and the Museo del Barro in Asunción, Paraguay funded her project. She continues to produce pieces and exhibitions related to her investigation in Yataity.

163 ethnographic approach, which she has come to define in relation to Arnd Schneider’s scholarship on art and anthropology. Her videos and books document places beyond urban environs, successively building a broader network that extends further from

Buenos Aires: El libro de las cuatro tierras (1996–1998), Itinerario de un país (1996–

2006; published as an e-book in 2008), and series Recolección / Restitución (2007–2008) present loose narratives or symbols of the land in national or regional frameworks. The distance from urban to rural sites is temporarily bridged through her travel, exhibitions and interactive performances. Pereda creates works that are mediated through her interaction with communities beyond Buenos Aires’s confines, as well as with groups of gallery visitors. Her art validates people’s diverse cultural connections with the land. She stated:

There is a rupture but not, in my view, in terms of ecology, but rather the desire for a connection with the Jungian archaic man, that primitive man that we all have inside, who in a way is at stake in terms of what you say about nature. Build what we may, one day we will die and become dust. We return to nature, our bodies are degradable and, in a way, working with natural material means assimilating that.18

Pereda’s work expresses a desire for a primordial nature. She presents an elemental visage of nature as a utopian suggestion or goal that is suspended against a fragmentary and multifaceted representation of place.

PAST REPRESENTATIONS OF RURAL PLACES AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

This crisis of geographical fragmentation and detachment has ecological and cultural implications. It is tied to Argentina’s history and exacerbated by the processes of globalization and neoliberalism. Anthropologist Arnd Schneider traveled with and

18 Ana María Battistozzi, “Passages: In Pursuit of the Puzzle that Represents Us,” in Teresa Pereda. Recolección/Restitución. Citas por América (Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural Recoleta, 2010), 92.

164 interviewed Pereda as part of his research. He wrote about her work in Appropriation as

Practice: Art and Identity in Argentina (2006). In this book, he focused on the interests of some contemporary Argentine artists’ appropriation of indigenous cultural elements in relation to the homogenizing effects of globalization. In his analysis of Pereda’s Bajo el

Nombre de San Juan (1999–2000), he argued that many artists, including Pereda idealize indigenous cultures, which is expressed as a deep “respect” that is often accompanied by the act of appropriation.19 Pereda’s appropriation occurs in her approximation of

Pachamama ceremonial rights, in which offerings are made to the earth. Her act is meant to legitimize this practice, along with the other myths, ceremonies and agricultural acts that she documents or alludes to in her work. Schneider asserted that the inclusion of indigenous elements in such works is indicative of a broader crisis of national identity and the rejection of Western culture for alternate “sources of inspiration.” He stated that

“This repeats somehow the pattern that a crisis, be it political (Malvinas War and discrediting of the military dictatorship), economic (hyper-inflation), or cultural

(fragmentation of national identity) will trigger or usher forth a search for new identities.”20 Both the military dictatorship and the economic situation (the rampant unemployment of the 1980s, the renewed sense of economic hope that some felt through the institution of neoliberal policies of the 1990s and the struggles that continued for

19 Schneider, Appropriation as Practice, 133-162, 154 and 166. His chapter “Practices of Artistic Fieldwork and Representation: The Case of Teresa Pereda’s Bajo el Nombre de San Juan” focused on Pereda’s art production in relation to her ethnographic process. He centers on her fieldwork and collection of stories: “Teresa’s intention was to find a ‘protagonist,’ somebody who, through his or her life-story, could not only illuminate the meaning of the fiesta but also the social and economic conditions of the area.” He further explained that “respect means for these artists to appreciate and accept cultural others and their artifacts, yet such appreciation and acceptance is intrinsically linked to the technologies of appropriation, and does not exist for its own sake.”

20 Ibid., 171.

165 many others, as well as the economic turmoil following the crash of 2001) have altered the ways in which artists in Argentina utilize space and respond to environmental factors.

Numerous Argentine artists have favored themes centered on modernity, technology, and industrialization in their works, which has overshadowed the nation’s indigenous heritage and rural areas. Visual representations of rural places and indigenous peoples or culture in Argentina are relatively infrequent. In order to understand the work of Pereda and Millán within an art historical trajectory, it is informative to briefly consider how these themes have been visually represented since the 1960s and to offer a historical synopsis of indigenous conflict and an examination of increasing recognition of native groups.

The semi-sedentary indigenous populations were smaller in Argentina than in other nations such as Mexico and Peru; these populations were reduced further after military campaigns in the Pampas and after remaining indigenous peoples were confined to reservations. Schneider argued that a “pattern of part-friendly, part-hostile coexistence” continued between indigenous and urban political and economic institutions until the national government initiated “The Campaign of the Desert,” which was led by

General Julio A. Roca.21 These military campaigns, as well as later ones in the 1880s, ceded territory and power from the Ranquel and Mapuche groups of the Pampas and

Neuquén.22 Schneider located this historical moment as a turning point in which a

21 Ibid., 93-95.

22 Gastón Gordillo and Silvia Hirsch, “Indigenous Struggles and Contested Identities in Argentina: Histories of Invisibilization and Reemergence,” The Journal of Latin American Anthropology 8, no. 3 (2003): 10.

166 national precedent for the marginalization of indigenous populations was set.23 This marginalization coincided with the nation’s consolidation and the elite construction of an official national identity that was poised as the antithesis to “el desierto,” a term that referenced the areas of indigenous opposition: the Pampas, Patagonia and the Gran

Chaco. Anthropologists Gastón Gordillo and Silvia Hirsch explained that the term

“desert” “captures the dialectic of civilization and barbarism that mobilized the emergence of the nation-state, for what defined these geographies was no their physical landscape or lack of human populations but their absence of state control, capitalism, and civilization.”24 Thus, while the landscape and indigenous were documented and constructed as part of national identities in other parts of Latin America, in Argentina, the indigenous population, like the Pampas, was visually ignored or represented as an obstacle in the pursuit of modern civilization.25

Argentina’s history of immigration and industrialization strengthened a divide between urban constructions of national identity, centered on Buenos Aires, the surrounding territory, and indigenous populations. Néstor García Canclini noted that structural changes in Argentina between the 1950s and 1970s ignited the process of economic modernization.26 He argued that social scientists, in collaboration with social movements and industrial institutions, advocated the benefits of the urban, capitalist

23 Schneider, Appropriation as Practice, 93-95.

24 Gordillo and Hirsch, “Indigenous Struggles and Contested Identities in Argentina,” 4.

25 Ibid., 175.

26 Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 55. He stated that this change in turn “transformed the relations between cultural modernism and social modernization, and between the autonomy and dependency of symbolic practices.”

167 enterprise over rural, archaic values: “Developmentalist policy promoted this ideological and scientific turn and used it to create a consensus among new generations of politicians, professionals, and students for their modernizing project.”27 This mindset turned the focus away from rural areas, and even from the unplanned expansion of Buenos Aires’s limits, in favor of the city center.

The urban core became the dominant site of cultural production. Artistic reflections on biological systems, ecological problems, and remote regions were poised against reflections on modern, urban life and national identity. Some projects by Luis

Benedit (1937–2011), Grete Stern (1904–1999), and Nicolás García Uriburu centered on rural landscapes and populations, including, in some instances, indigenous peoples, beginning in the 1960s.28 Benedit created insular, greenhouse-like environments such as

Fitotrón (1972) in the late 1960s and 1970s and later created works on historical themes related to the gaucho, indigenous populations and rural themes since the 1980s, considering these subjects against considerations of national histories and identities.29

Uriburu’s paintings of the ombú or the Pampas from the 1960s reduce the Argentine landscape to basic components: an endemic species and the terrain’s planar quality.

These paintings highlight the national significance of the Pampas, while abstracting it to symbols that neutralize conflict. Uriburu also established the Fundación Nicolás García

27 Ibid., 56.

28 For example, Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-Garcia looked to indigenous cultural production and archaic symbols as inspiration for the new aesthetic paradigm, constructive universalism that he outlined in his publication “Universalismo Constructivo” in 1944.

29 Casanegra, “The Potentials of the Earth,” 32. In contextualizing Pereda’s work, Casanegra stated that prior examples of artistic explorations of these themes can be seen in the work of Luis Benedit “who imagined an encounter between local cultures and the first European travelers and who also illustrated the customs of the countryside as part of his scientific observations [and] Nicolás García Uriburu, who highlighted national landscape icons, such as the ombú tree.”

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Uriburu, which houses collections of indigenous arts of the Americas and his own work.

The collection includes featherwork by indigenous Amazonian peoples, Pre-Columbian and Mapuche objects. His dedication to preserving and showcasing cultural artifacts reveals his fervent interest in indigenous cultures. His collection’s dual emphases on the artist’s own ecological production and the work of indigenous artists, construct links between the region’s historical and current cultural fabric, as well as with its present ecological circumstances.30 It implies that he is concerned with preserving marginalized peoples and environments, which positions him in a paternal role, and suggests an inherent association between his mission and indigenous connections to the land, which conflates the two.31 However, it is important to recognize that both the natural environment and indigenous peoples have often been trivialized and been negatively impacted by political and economic initiatives for modernization.

In 1958, prior to the establishment of Uriburu’s foundation, the Universidad

Nacional del Nordeste commissioned photographer Grete Stern to photograph the indigenous peoples of the Gran Chaco.32 She returned to this area in 1963 and created

30 Uriburu began collecting objects produced by indigenous cultures from the Americas in the early 1970s with Joaquín Molina. The Nicolás Garcia Uriburu foundation was founded later with the intent to “…make known the cultural manifestations of the aboriginal peoples of Latin America, past and present, as well as to promote the ideas of an artist who has made Nature the leitmotiv of his work.” Las Culturas Verdes: Arte Plumario de los Pueblos de la Selva: Colecciones de la Fundación Nicolás García Uriburu y de su Museo de Arte Precolombino (Buenos Aires: Fundación Nicolás García Uriburu), 94.

31 During the nineteenth century travel writers established a precedent for conflating the natural environment with indigenous peoples of other parts of Latin America, which was impacted by national and imperial discourse. See, for example, Drew Jean Propson, "Seeing Green: Modern Ecology in Nineteenth Century Latin American Literature and Visual Arts" (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2007).

32 Luis Priamo, “Grete Stern y los paisanos del Gran Chaco,” Aborígenes del Gran Chaco: Fotografías de Grete Stern, 1958–1964 (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Fundación Antorchas, 2005), 35. Stern immigrated to Buenos Aires with her husband Horacio Coppola in 1936. Most of her oeuvre consists of cityscapes, portraits of the city’s intellectual and cultural elite and photomontages.

169 portraits, landscapes and images of people at work or engaged in daily activities. Stern’s photographs were intended to function as anthropological documents that would be exhibited in a proposed university museum dedicated to indigenous culture.33 Stern’s documentary photographs and Uriburu’s collection of indigenous works both unite the land and indigenous cultures, recognizing both as important, often overlooked, parts of the nation’s history. However, their approaches also reinforce these populations and territories as separate. The small, diverse indigenous populations that reside in various parts of Argentina have gained more official and popular recognition since the mid-1980s when laws for indigenous rights were passed.34

Pereda began to focus on earth and land in the 1990s, also researching indigenous cultures. Her work decisively shifted to its current focus with El libro de las cuatro tierras. Her work, in particular, loosely adopts an anthropological approach. She conducts fieldwork, during which she records her observations and interviews and produces visual documentation of places and peoples. Her projects such as El libro de las cuatro tierras and Itinerario de un país employed a similar typology as Stern, including portraits, soil (instead of landscapes) and a statement of her subject’s livelihood (instead of images of the person at work) to represent a distant place (Figures 50 and 51). Pereda emphasizes the presence and traditions of indigenous peoples and strives to bring greater

33 Ibid., 36.

34 According to Paul B. Goodwin’s Global Studies: Latin America and the Caribbean, 3% of Argentina’s population are categorized as Mestizo, Indian or others. Global Studies: Latin America and the Caribbean, 15th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013). Gordillo and Hirsch outline the history of indigenous conflict and “reemergence” since the colonial era. They list the following indigenous groups as residing in Argentina, stating that some of these groups were previously thought to be “extinct”: Wichi, Iyojwaja- Chorote, Nivaclé-Chulupí, Toba, Mocoví, Pilagá, Guaraní-Chiriguano, Tapiete, Chané, Mapuche, Tehuelche, Rankülche-Ranquel, Selk’nam, Mbyá-Guaraní, Kollas, Diaguita-Calchaquí and Huarpes.

170 visibility to the nation’s exterior provinces and to their ecological diversity.35 She continues to expand her series and to complicate her visual representations of place, from an artist book (El libro de las cuatro tierras) comprised of layers of personal reflection and classificatory data to video installations (Recolección / Restitución) in which the artist is included as participant and actor, not solely observer.

Millán’s work has incorporated plants and animals since her early paintings of the

1980s. Nature has increasingly become the focal subject of her work.36 Her drawings in

Vértigo de lo lento likewise center on people in the midst of daily activities, acting as interpretive visual documents and records of interviews of her research: the study of Ao

Poi, a traditional weaving technique (Figure 52). In her initial drawings for El Vértigo de lo lento, she transcribed fragments of interviews in her drawings, beneath the portraits.

However, these materials re-enter into later works and are joined with other documented or found imagery, constructing dense, composite views of nature. The series thus develops an open-ended framework.

35 Casanegra described the complexity of Pereda’s works since 1998, stating that the artist has “addressed a number of questions, including the identity of Argentina, the relationships between Argentina’s and America’s native communities and European immigration, individual and collective memories, matters related to urban and rural life and the concepts of nature and civilization, and many others.” Casanegra, “The Potentials of the Earth: The Itineraries of Teresa Pereda,” 31. The quote was transcribed directly from the English translation that was provided in the catalogue.

36 Before 2002, Millán created paintings and embroidered gardens. Nature was a strong element of each.

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PEREDA: EARTH / LAND

Pereda’s childhood experience, living on a sheep farm in the western province of

Neuquén, informed her impression of the earth.37 Neuquén is located in the northern region of Patagonia and bordered by the Andes Mountains. The province contains national parks and its economy is dominated by agricultural production, principally the commercial cultivation of fruit and sheep farming, as well as the extraction of petroleum and natural gas. Pereda incorporated wool into her series Recolección / Restitución. Citas por América as an offering and a reference to this region and her youth. She currently resides on a farm in the district of Lincoln, which is located in the province of Buenos

Aires, while maintaining a studio in the nation’s capital.38 Her value of nature is shaped by her family’s agricultural-based livelihood.

Pereda has often cited the importance of her early interactions with indigenous peoples living in Patagonia. Her validation of indigenous cultures and rural areas has a potential benefit as conflict over land and its use has persisted between small communities, the national government and large corporations. Pereda has researched the

Mapuche’s culture and is drawn to their understanding of the land as a living and active entity.39 Nature is envisioned as something that is not only acted upon, but that is also an active and dynamic agent that possesses a spiritual force that people should respect.

37 Ana María Battistozzi, “Earth: Rites of Restitution” Recollection/Restitution: Encounters with America,” Teresa Pereda, Exhibition pamphlet (Miami: AVH Gallery, 2011). The fact that she was born in Buenos Aires, but lived in Neuquén as a child is cited in numerous sources about her works and Pereda emphasized the importance of her youth in shaping her perceptions of the land. The domestication of sheep began in the early 1900s.

38 Pereda received her BA in Art History at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras UBA and then studied at the workshops of Estela Pereda and Ana Eckell.

39 In Argentina, the Mapuche communities are concentrated in the Pampas and Patagonia.

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Pereda stressed the importance of respect and gratitude for the earth and its productive capacity.40 She communicates this reverence for the earth through her continued treatment of it as a subject.

Pereda’s El libro de las cuatro tierras marks her initial systematic consideration of the land, as political territory and earth, which is characterized by distinct environments and cultures (Figure 50). Her artist book documents “four journeys, four stories, four lands.”41 The Pampas, the Littoral, the Desert and the Andes serve as the four cardinal points of Argentina in Cuatro Tierras. The union of sections that represent each of these regions symbolizes a reunification of a fragmented nation that is comprised of diverse ecosystems. The material contained in the book reflects her research, travel, fieldwork, collection of soil samples and poetic reflection. Each section includes a map, her brief description of the territory, a short story or thoughts by a person from each region, Pereda’s poetic reflection of her experience in each location, her small drawings, and a geometric icon.42 Each chapter’s handmade pages were created from natural fibers and dyed with soil from the represented region.43 The original version of Cuatro Tierras consists of a wooden box in which the book and four tubes of soil are stored. Her

40 Teresa Pereda, Studio Visit, July 13, 2011, Buenos Aires.

41 Casanegra, “The Potentials of the Earth,” 38. There are a limited edition of artist books and facsimiles. According to Pereda, she spent two years preparing for and working on this book. She wrote to each selected protagonist before she began her travel to the area, explaining her project and asking the individual if he or she would like to participate. This trip was personal in many ways, creating an opportunity for her to travel to other regions of her country and to learn of the histories and cultures of people living in the four distinct ecosystems that she chose for her project. Teresa Pereda, excerpt from a letter to N. Rubio, included in an email correspondence, 2012 and in El libro de las cuatro tierras. Libro de artista, facsimile, introduction insert.

42 Teresa Pereda Interview, July 13, 2011, Buenos Aires. Pereda used portions taken from a historical, official map of Argentina.

43 Ibid.

173 integration of earth, as a material, into her book is bound to her reflection on the land as a subject and her recuperative enterprise. The texts combine an official informative tone about these areas with brief personalized reflections about the land.

Pereda described the book as “a concept” that represented not only an interpretation of the land, but also a proposed method of approaching the earth and its inhabitants. Her goal was to begin a process of interpretation and reflection upon the connections between different places and peoples.44 She extends this concept and exploration in Itinerario de un país and her ongoing series Recolección / Restitución.

Citas por América. Her method emphasizes the importance of her process over the product as a singular or reductive presentation of earth as land and nature. Pereda included art historian and critic Nelly Perazzo’s commentary as an insert in Cuatro

Tierras. In this critical text, Perazzo stated “es el registro de un recorrido, el itinerario inédito y virgen de una memoria, animada por la voluntad de una artista que sabe de las culturas marginales, porque aprendió a amarlas.”45 Pereda’s reflections and the local participants’ stories that she recorded are transcribed on the book’s pages, made from the earth, symbolizing the unification of culture and nature. The book reveals the complexity of the ties that bind culture and nature, people and places.46 Its format and content

44 Casanegra, “The Potentials of the Earth,” 36. Casanegra reflected on the spiritual importance of Pereda’s works: “Both the painting and the intentions that lay behind the journeys reveal a religious understanding of the concept of reconnecting, of connecting between heaven and earth once again; by bringing them closer together, the human being who lives between one and the other becomes more aware of his or her location between the two and his or her relation with them.”

45 Nelly Perazzo, “Apostillas a el libro de las cuatro tierras,” in El libro de las cuatro tierras. Libro de artista, facsimile, introduction insert (Instituto Nacional de Asuntos Indígenas and Fondo Nacional de las Artes: Buenos Aires, 1998), n.p

46 Ibid. Perazzo stated that Pereda’s work is meant for “A nosotros, con los ojos opacados por la vida urbana con sus solicitaciones y sus urgencias, la autora nos ofrece tomar conciencia de la variedad de nuestra geografía, de nuestra complejidad multicultural.”

174 intersects with traditions of books as art objects, anthropologists’ published ethnographies and travel writing.

Pereda’s concept for Cuatro Tierras expanded into Itinerario de un país, which she transformed into an e-book in 2008.47 In this digital adaptation, a rectangle of eight different images of soils appears on the screen. Her transformation of this project to an e- book has the potential to broaden its public and changes the viewer’s experience, making the experience seem both modern and immediate. Pereda provides a minimal amount of information about person, place, and environment for each location. The rectangle appears like a quilt comprised of photographs of Argentine soil samples. A link to the prologue, which describes the project, is included in the center. The prologue states that the premise of her work is “la recolección de tierras que solicito a personas que habitan nuestro territorio (mestizos, indígenas, inmigrantes).”48 Pereda emphasizes the diversity of the people who live in rural areas throughout the nation.

When the cursor is placed over one of the soil images, a place name appears. For example, the first chapter is about Yavi, a village located in the northwestern Province of

Jujuy. The soil from this location is reddish and fine. A fragment of a map with yellow outlines and a point demarcating the village’s location is superimposed over the image of the soil. When one selects Yavi, two options appear, “Itinerarios” and “Lugareños.” The former includes photographs of the town and Pereda’s travel to this location, including landscapes, buildings, the earth, and the artist interacting with site and local people. A couple of images of the vehicle that she traveled in are shown, which evidences the importance of the journey, her exploration of the nation’s small towns and excursions

47 This version is available in a CD format and on her website.

48 Teresa Pereda, “Prólogo: Los Viajes,” Itinerario de un país, e-book (2008).

175 through the rural landscape, as an integral aspect of the project. The viewer is able to scroll through these documents of her trip. The multiple views that are offered and the organization of these materials present a temporal dimension to the project.

The artist’s role as ethnographer-artist was underscored. Her routes served as physical paths and conceptual links between distinct locales. She stated that “al emprender los viajes de recolección recorro distancias geográficas pero también distancias sociales, económicas y culturales.”49 “Lugareños” includes portraits of her subjects. The photographs are closely cropped around each person’s face, which are presented in the same format to create continuity between the otherwise distinct people represented. In some instances, a child or single adult denotes the human dimension of place, in others a couple is presented as a community representative. The profession or affiliation of each person is listed beneath his or her name. For Yavi, portraits of Serapio

Benitez and Seriovia Churkina appear with a caption that identifies them as shepherds.

Their identification as shepherds is significant in that it draws attention to their reliance of the land due to their livelihood, but does not classify them based on ethnicity. It also includes the statement “Me entregaron tierra de su casa cuando los visité en junio de

2000. Yavi, provincia de Jujuy,” which documents the time and location that Pereda collected the sample of earth. The statement emphasizes the bond between their house and the earth that they give to Pereda. The earth thus represents not only a specific place, but a family’s land. Additionally, Pereda did not take the earth, rather it was willing given to her. Together, the earth, portraits, maps and text are meant to communicate the ethnic, linguistic, ecological diversity that exists in Argentina.

49 Ibid.

176

The viewer is made aware of the geographic separation of the sites through documents, while Pereda’s records of her travel create pathways between these points.50

The roots of Pereda’s work emerge from the land and the dislocation that has occurred due to immigration, the eradication and marginalization of indigenous populations, and the disconnection between rural and urban areas, the capital and the provinces. Pereda’s recuperative aim is to symbolically unite political and economic fissures between places, as well as to strengthen individual bonds to the earth itself. Pereda’s subject and agenda are ambitious and earnest. However, there is an underlying tension in her work between her stated intention against exclusionary national and imperial discourse and the classificatory system that she adopts, which alludes to diversity, but does not offer a means to access the nuances of the current situations that define place and people’s experience as members of local communities, citizens of the nation or the ways that the landscape is changing. Still, livelihood is presented as an important component of one’s identity and perception of the land. She present’s the individual, which contrasts with the dehumanizing, homogenizing capacity of globalization’s processes.

Pereda again expanded the geographical parameters with her series Recolección /

Restitución. Citas por América. The first project in the series was an interactive performance that was held in Tierra del Fuego in 2007. She continued this series with the execution of a project in Brazil and one in Bolivia.51 These were created with the technical and logistical support of artists Charly Nijensohn and Juan Pablo Ferlat. Her videos record local rituals and stage myths or performances against views of the

50 Schneider, Appropriation as Practice, 183. Schneider elucidated the importance of the act of traveling, which “involves physical and temporal displacement, underscoring the cultural (and temporal) difference perceived and created through appropriation.”

51 She spent approximately three weeks at each site. Teresa Pereda, email correspondence, 2012.

177 landscape. While Pereda outlines each project’s basic premise before she begins, the actual performances or the specifics of the piece are improvised based on her interaction with community participants and reaction to the land. Before beginning each project, she performed a ritual burial of four soil samples at each site (the soils represented the four quadrants of Argentina, as delineated in Cuatro Tierras) with local participants and donated Patagonian wool to each of the three communities.52 Pereda offered the essential, recurring elements of her work: wool and earth. The wool symbolized a link between

Pereda’s personal connection to the land and one in another locale that is based on tradition and ties to a particular place.53

Video creates a more encompassing sensorial experience than Cuatro Tierras or

Itinerario de un país due to its inclusion of moving images and sound. The video installation for each site was presented as a triptych, which offered a means to perceive multiple, at times, simultaneous visions of place. Pereda described Recolección en el

Salar: Cita en Jaruma, executed in Bolivia in 2008, as “Performative actions in harmony with the cycles of nature and the inhabitants of the great sand flat. The soil had been offered and the llamas and the ball of wool had been signaled with colored wool.”54 In one part of this piece, a local man speaks about Pachamama and the celebration of St.

Sebastian (Figure 53).55 In Flores para un Desierto, one part of Recolección en el Salar:

52 Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright, “Between Art and Anthropology,” Between Art and Anthropology: Contemporary Ethnographic Practice (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2010), 8.

53 Teresa Pereda Interview, July 22, 2011, Buenos Aires.

54 Teresa Pereda, “Performances: Recolección en el Salar: Cita en Jaruma,” www.teresapereda.com (accessed 2012).

55 Teresa Pereda Interview, July 22, 2011, Buenos Aires. The ceremony of St. Sebastian is performed on January 20. It is a ritualized offering to Pachamama. Yarn is attached to the ears of llamas and a ritual sacrifice of one of these animals is performed. The flowering, or attachment of the yarn, is

178

Cita en Jaruma, two figures appear in an immense, flat landscape. The open desert terrain is vast and empty and a mountain range is visible in the distance. The film centers on Pereda’s unraveling of a clew of wool across the landscape (Figure 54). The shots alternate among close-ups of the wool against the earth, of Pereda moving the wool across the ground to more distant images of a line of wool marking or creating a pathway through the otherwise undisturbed desert, and to Pereda following the path, walking toward the viewer and then away. Towards the end of the video, another ball of wool appears. It has colored tassels, which is appropriate for the ceremony of St. Sebastian. As part of this ritual, colorful ribbons are attached to llamas’ ears. The bright colors of the yarn correspond to particular types of dyed wools that are used and worn by people.56

Each action is executed in a deliberate manner that imbues the film with a ceremonial quality.

Recolección en la Amazonía: Cita en Morena (2009), another part of her series

Recolección / Restitución, emphasized the defining natural features of the site (Figure

55). Pereda explored the traditions and myths that shape people’s consideration of nature.

Pereda described this piece as follows:

I developed different situations on the basis of three legends I chose: the one about the Boto vermelho, a sort of red fish; the one about the Curupira (“spirit of the woods who takes power over anyone who comes into the jungle and, in a

referred to as a wedding. Schneider and Wright, “Between Art and Anthropology,” 8. Members of the Quispe family, from the Aymara community of Jaruma, participated in this project. She created a series of objects, photographs and parts to the video for this work: Flores para un Desierto. The parts of this work consist of the following: “La trenza y el ovillo,” “Las líneas,” “Ofrenda y recolección,” and “Floreado.” See Teresa Pereda. Recolección / Restitución. Citas por América, 44 and 104.

56 Teresa Pereda Interview, July 13, 2011, Buenos Aires.

179

certain way, makes that person get lost in the thicket”) and the one about the Mapinguarí (“a huge being, half monkey and half man, who devours people”).57

El Tiempo del Agua, part of Recolección en la Amazonía, begins with a distant, aerial view of the Amazon’s dense, lush forest. A ball of wool then appears to autonomously wind through the forest, toward the viewer. Rain falls on the surface of the water as the wool floats down the river. Pereda emphasized water and the lush groundcover as the landscape’s dominant features. The majority of the video is comprised of close-up views of the forest, the river and the wool’s movement and transformation. This tactic creates an impression of being lost in the middle of a forest, unable to gain perspective. The initial scenes are accompanied by natural sounds that get louder as the clew moves closer to the viewer, eclipsing the view of the forest. As the scene shifts to an image of the river’s surface, the soundtrack transitions to eerie instrumental music. The sound throughout the rest of the film is layered, the din of the forest dominating at times, the instrumental sounds rising up at other moments. This segment does not show a single person, reinforcing the anthropomorphic attributes that nature assumes in local myth.

El Tiempo del Agua seeks to demonstrate that myths or stories are bound to everyday life. Pereda explained “a legend is the mirror of the one who tells and recreates it.” She asserted that local Amazonian residents personify nature, believing that “either you respect it, or it devours you.”58 In Lendas, another of Recolección en la Amazonia’s

57 Ana Maria Battistozzi, “Interviews with Teresa Pereda, Charly Nijensohn and Juan Pablo Ferlat,” in Recolección/Restitución. Citas por América, 91. The Boto is a pink river dolphin that is believed to lure people to a magical kingdom in the depths of the river

58 Ibid., 92.

180 videos, a local narrated the above tales in Portuguese.59 The stories present a local means of understanding the environment. This work contains layers, inserting her personal attachment to the land with local perceptions. The wool created a symbolic connection between Patagonia and the Amazon. It also juxtaposed an object that symbolizes agricultural production and an undeveloped image of nature.

The geographical expansion of her project and her evolving means of representing places reinforces the open quality of her journeys as a process of reflection on the earth.

Pereda’s art seeks to create balance and reinstitute a perceived solidity that contrasts with the destabilization of ideas about nature ushered in by the postmodern era and that defies the limitations of national discourse. However, she also seeks to combat the threat of homogenization and industrial development, which are tied to globalization.60 Her intention and approach that she takes in her work seeks to balance the idea of nature as a whole, an idea that has been the linchpin of ecological discourse, and postmodernism’s emphasis on the instability of concepts such as nature. Her works strive for the creation of a comprehensive understanding of the nation and region without presenting an overly essentialized image of nature or the rural cultures that she visits and documents in her work. Each journey and place is presented as a specific part of a larger story or greater entity that are united through her series.

59 Members of the community of Morena, comprised principally of caboclos, or mestizos of indigenous and European heritage, participated in this project. Morena is located in the Brazilian Amazon. This series El Tiempo del Agua, consists of the following parts, which were transformed into photographs, video and objects: “Lendas,” “El Timepo del Agua,” and “La Entrega.” See Teresa Pereda. Recolección / Restitución. Citas por América, 60 and 104-105.

60 Casanegra, “The Potentials of the Earth,” 42. Casanegra commented that “Postmodernism, our period, and its lifestyle are born in great urban centers. In contrast, these [Pereda’s] journeys to encounter the earth would seem to symbolize an act of gratitude and acknowledgment of that primordial element that, in the urban construction, has become hermetic.”

181

MILLÁN: SOLITARY JOURNEYS IN NATURE

Mónica Millán’s recent production principally consists of meticulous drawings and sound recordings of nature. She was born in San Ignacio, which is located in the subtropical Misiones Province of Argentina. This region has a larger rural population and slower economic development than other parts of Argentina. Although, its major cities, especially tourist centers such as Puerto Iguazú, have grown in recent years. It has a number of national parks and is known for its biodiversity.61 While Millán now lives in

Buenos Aires, she speaks nostalgically of her birthplace and journeys back to this province.62 Her work offers general reflections about nature, while her aesthetic and rendering of it is often tied to an expression of Misiones. Her frequent experimentation with nature and travels back to this area represent her own evolving consideration and expression of place. Her experience of place is modified by an inclusion of other references. Together, these fragments constitute layers of her understanding of nature and people’s relationship to it in rural regions.

Millán stated that “la naturaleza es mi idioma.”63 Her drawings are a complex web of delicate foliage that is always, in part, evocative of the landscapes of Misiones. Her works consume the viewer, overwhelming them with her precise depictions of fecund

61 It has been designated one of the World Wildlife Federation’s “Global 200” conservation regions. The production of Yerba Mate is one of the dominant agricultural products produced in the region. See Andrea E. Izquirdo, Héctor R. Grau and T. Mitchell Aide, “Implications of Rural-Urban Migration for Conservation of the Atlantic Forest and Urban Growth in Misiones, Argentina (1970–2030)” for a discussion of recent land use changes and projection of how rural to urban migration will impact the area in the future. A group of the Mbyá-Guaraní still resides in this region. See Gordillo and Hirsch, “Indigenous Struggles and Contested Identities in Argentina.”

62 Millán was born in Misiones. She studied drawing and painting at the Profesorado Superior Antonio Ruíz de Montoya in Posadas, Misiones. She later trained with Luis Felipe Noé. Since 2002, she has primarily created drawings, experiments with sound and textiles. Many of her installations include all of these elements.

63 Monica Millán Interview, August 12, 2011, Buenos Aires.

182 environments. She pieces together documents of her past excursions into the countryside and found images in her drawings, capturing a sensation of nature and its beauty in intricate scenes. Her drawings are an agglomeration of fragments that are melded together to create visceral, claustrophobic renderings of nature. For her drawings such as

Si gano mucho como mucho, si gano poco como poco (2008), she projected slides onto her paper, which was hung on the wall (Figure 56). She selects isolated elements from the slide and traces them onto the paper.64 This method connects her drawing to the documents and in turn to the removed sites that she represents. In this instance, she includes the weavers from Yataity. Her images also include other forms that are not directly connected to this place.

Rather than recording nature scientifically or sketching it directly from observation, her drawings and installations are rendered from memories, unconnected appropriated visuals such as images that she found in books of works by traveling-artists such as Alexander von Humboldt, and documents that she’s taken on excursions into the wilderness.65 The Spanierman Modern gallery, which showcased her work in the exhibition Argentine Arcadia (2007), asserted in a press release that Millán’s art is reminiscent of “a child’s idealization of nature, a fairy tale or a pure expression of nature’s freedom.”66 Millán has stated that she is interested in capturing nature’s beauty,

64 Ticio Escobar poetically and critically describes her method in “El Río Bord(e)ado.”

65 She projects images on to paper and traces the outlines, rendering textures that she has selected from images on Flickr or ones found in a book. For example, she came across a book of Alexander von Humboldt’s art recently and considered the connection of his journeys to the importance of travel in her own work. She explained her process as erratic, but organically connected. There is a consistency to her obsessive aesthetic and thematic focus on nature. Mónica Millán, Studio Visit, 2012, Buenos Aires.

66 She exhibited her work in “Argentine Arcadia: Works by Mónica Millán: September 13 – October 6, 2007,” Spanierman Modern, A Division of Spanierman Gallery, llc, Manhattan, New York= http://www.spaniermanmodern.com/07_Argentine%20Arcadia/millan-BIO.htm (accessed 2012).

183 but that she seeks to push this representation to an extreme.67 Her work does capture a sense of the pleasure of experiencing nature, but her representations also maintain an element of tension in them that hints at the human element or a landscape’s extreme diversity or fecundity. Her works are an “idealization,” but they also express the ambiguous relationships that people forge with their surroundings and the tension between growth and decay.

Millán created the series El Río Bord(e)ado from documents of her expedition through a changing landscape. In her description of this project, Millán stated that she developed this body of work with the idea of constructing a “Mapa de Recorrido Sonoro” after her initial travels to this area in 2002.68 She traveled down the coast of the Río

Paraná in the provinces of Misiones and Corrientes, photographed and recorded sounds of her passage through this place. These documents formed the basis of Picnic, Paisaje

Misionero and later drawings.

Her installation Picnic a Orillas del Paraná (2007) presented an amplified sensorial experience and nostalgic image of a fantastical nature (Figure 57). The textiles that covered the gallery floor and the three-dimensional crocheted vegetal pieces represented flowers, grasses and ground cover. The tactile scene was comprised of an array of colors, patterns and textures. Together these carefully crafted species shaped a fanciful environment and approximated the types of plants that one would encounter

67 Mónica Millán, Jardín de Resonancias, web version of catalogue, n.p.

68 Mónica Millán, “El Río bord(e)ado,” http://www.flickr.com/photos/58038338@N07/sets/72157630225574944/ (accessed 2012). Millán began to think about this landscape and the changes that it was undergoing in 2002. In 2004, she went on two expeditions along the river. The first trip lasted five days; she traveled with a guide. Two other women accompanied her during the second trip, which lasted a week.

184 along the banks of the Paraná. A string of clear lights wound through the installation. A recording of water rhythmically lapping against the river’s shore and birds chirping could be heard in the installation.69 The inclusion of sound enhanced the piece’s sensorial complexity. The scene’s scrupulous opulence forged visitors’ re-encounter with nature as something hyper-beautiful and emotive.

Millán noted that Picnic was inspired by her childhood: “En la costa del Gran Río se suceden los picnic familiares. Esos rituales marcaron mi infancia, mi primer diálogo con la naturaleza.”70 Millán was documented sitting in her installation Picnic, holding a teacup in her hand (Figure 58). In the photograph, her back is to the viewer. The inclusion of the artist within her installation provides a sense of scale and reveals her own direct interaction with her sculptural construction of “nature.” It also highlights the participatory nature of the piece: viewers were invited to sit inside her installation and to listen to the recording. Picnic enables visitors to actively experience an outdoor picnic through sight and sound. Millán thus encouraged viewers to pretend to be in nature, while remaining inside an urban gallery. Laura Malosetti Costa, curator of the exhibition

Pampa, Ciudad y Suburbio, in which Picnic was installed, described Millán’s Picnic as an installation that evoked the feeling of being in the country or a garden, creating the sensation of being somewhere else through the use of sound, color and texture.71 In this work, Millán communicated her personal interactions with nature as joyful experiences

69 “Una aproximación al monte misionero, su misterio y sus sonidos,” La Nación, June, 28 2008, lanacion.com (accessed 2012).

70 Mónica Millán, “Relato de Origen: San Ignacio-Misiones. Década del 70,” Artist’s Papers.

71 Laura Malosetti Costa, Campo, Ciudad y Suburbio (Buenos Aires: Fundación OSDE, 2007), 128.

185 that privilege her past experiences and assert nature as a valid contemporary subject in art.

Millán’s documentation and recollection of her sensorial experience of wilderness define her work. Works such as Paisaje Misionero (2005) and installations of drawings from the series El Río Bord(e)ado (2004–2007) also experiment with sound.72 Paisaje

Misionero is a recording of sounds that she documented during her expeditions along the river for El Río Bord(e)ado and then edited. Individuals were invited to listen to the recording on a headset while reclining in the gallery (Figure 59). In this photograph of the installed work, a woman rests in a chaise lounge with her eyes closed. Millán’s inclusion of furniture encouraged the visitor to relax and to be transported into nature. The footage consisted of a variety of sounds, including crickets, water lapping against a shore, birds, and the rain. The sounds are amplified and transition from one dominant sound to another. The diverse and layered soundscape recreated an impression of being in a rural area, near a river. Paisaje Misionero granted visitors the freedom to visualize and create their own associations with the noises they heard. Millán’s fascination with sound reveals her sensitivity and familiarity with being outdoors, outside of urban centers, and her continued experimentation with ways of representing nature.

Millán’s drawings from the photographs that she took during her journeys down the Paraná reflect her memory of the sites that she saw during these travels and the

“reality” of the forms captured in her images (Figures 60 and 61). In 2004, Millán wrote:

Sé que perdí para siempre la orilla de mi infancia, mientras alguien informa: en los próximos años las márgenes del río Paraná se verán inundadas, en las ciudades de Posadas (Argentina) y de Encarnación (Paraguay) por la puesta en

72 Millán continues to experiment with the use of sound recordings in her installations.

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funcionamiento de las turbinas de la represa hidroeléctrica Yacyretá, localizada en el pueblo de Ituzaingo (Corrientes).73

Millán’s statement noted the harm that the hydroelectric dam Yacyreta has had on surrounding areas. The dam has been an ongoing source of controversy that has led to the flooding of surrounding areas and subsequent displacement of people and environmental problems.74 Millán’s piece “ . . . nació de su inquietud por la desaparición de buena parte de la costa de Posadas (en Misiones) y de Encarnación (en Paraguay), con la futura puesta en funcionamiento de las turbinas de la represa hidroeléctrica de Yacyretá.”75 Her work, however, is not an activist’s denunciation of the dam, but a personal recording of a rural site that faces significant challenges due to the construction of a hydroelectric dam.

Millán’s excursions and reflections on nature are personal. Her works seek to recreate her own intimate experience with rural environs. In Millán’s exhibition El Río

Bord(e)ado at the Centro Cultural Borges (2009) , several chairs were dispersed throughout the gallery—each placed in front of a drawing (Figure 62). The close proximity of the furniture to the drawings and the inclusion of a chair rather than a bench invite each viewer to contemplate this disappearing landscape that she has represented on his or her own. This experience recreates her, often, solitary method of working in nature.

73 Mónica Millán, “Relato de Origen: 2004. El viaje,” Artist’s Papers. She stated that “La cota se elevará de los actuales 76 metros a su máximo nivel, 84 metros.”

74 Measures for the dam project began in the 1970s, but it did not begin operation until 1994. It was constructed under the joint efforts of the Argentine and Paraguayan governments. There are many studies on the impact that this dam has had on the surrounding region. The following are just a couple of examples: Claudia Orellana, “Paraná River Feels the Strain,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 3, no. 9 (November 2005): 466; Carmen A. Ferradas, “From Vegetable Gardens to Flower Gardens: The Symbolic Construction of Social Mobility in a Development Project,” Human Organization 56, no. 4 (1997): 450-461.

75 “Una aproximación al monte misionero, su misterio y sus sonidos.”

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Millán’s drawings are obsessive in their contouring of plants and animals. They recreate the sensation of the forested areas of Misiones. Her graphics are sometimes disrupted with crocheted plants that add a three-dimensional component to her work, mediating the flat plane of the drawing with the gallery space. In a recollection of her trip, she avowed that “Nunca viví otra sensación tan bella como la de ver el agua cortada por la proa de la canoa. Cambiaba de tonos según el clima: Verde, marrón, rojiza, violeta.”76 Her work centers on her pleasure of the landscape—a truth of which she believes is preserved in her documents and that is then reinstated through her art.

Millán’s collection of sounds and photographs mapped her journey and has since served as the foundation for later reflection. The installation of the works from this series permitted a multi-media window onto an environment that is being altered by development, encouraging the viewer to contemplate and appreciate the place that she represents. These works are about the pleasure of rural spaces and the importance of them to her identity.

Millán’s Vértigo de lo lento, which she began in 2002, is also based on travel to a rural are. However, in this work she assumes a role of ethnographer-artist. She spent a year conducting fieldwork in the rural Paraguayan village of Yataity. Her principal interest was in learning and documenting the continued traditional practice of Ao Poi.

She spent much time weaving with the Ao Poi producers and learned their technique. She also exchanged her own knowledge of weaving with the community. Her work with the weavers and her documentation of them resulted in a series of drawings and installations,

76 Celina Chatruc, “Perdidos en el Paisaje,” La Nación, December 5, 2009, Lanacion.com (accessed 2012).

188 produced between 2002 and 2012. Millán explained the premise of El Vértigo de lo lento in an interview as follows:

El tema de mi investigación fue la naturaleza. No solo trabajé el tema del bordado. Me pareció que el tema del paisaje tenía mucho que ver con ese ritmo que imprime el bordar: la aguja que entra y sale, entra y sale. Todo el pueblo tiene un ritmo, los cercos, los animales que ellos crían para su sobrevivencia y que caminan todo el día por las calles; llueve, hace calor, sale de Nuevo el sol… Lo que quiero decir es que hay como una cadencia que va de ellos a los animales, de los animales al paisaje y que vuelve a ellos, vuelve a imbricarse.77

Millán’s drawings reflect that, in fact, “nature is [her] language.” It is a critical element in the tale that she constructs about the community.

In the exhibitions of Vértigo de lo lento, Millán installed a table with locally produced textiles, photographic portraits of the villagers and town and drawings. Her drawings combined portraits and handwritten texts that were based on interviews with the subjects.78 Millán also installed a series of freestanding earth towers that she referred to as Guaridas at the Bienal Cuenca (Figure 63). These adobe constructions represented termite mounds that are sometimes seen in this community.79 These three-dimensional constructions “…que son las que tienen que ver con el paisaje de ese lugar.”80 The mounds are a physical manifestation of decomposition. The inclusion of organic material referenced the transformative and cyclic power of nature. They exemplified the omnipresence of nature as part of rural life.

77 “El Bordado en Yataity o el Vértigo de lo Lento,” ABC Digital, December 15, 2002, http://archivo.abc.com.py/2002-12-15/articulos/24594/el-bordado-en-yataity-o-el-vertigo-de-lo-lento, December 15, 2002 (accessed 2012).

78 Arístidea Escobar and José Escobar took some of the photographs that were exhibited.

79 She considered this place in relation to her home and her family’s traditions.

80 “El Bordado en Yataity o el Vértigo de lo Lento.”

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In this installation, representations of the community and their textiles were bound to the aesthetic features that define this particular place. Millán presented the land as an integrated concept, crafted with an anthropological and artistic eye. The drawings mimicked the textiles’ lacey surfaces, which are defined by positive and negative space.

The medium of drawing, a play of light and shadow, was meant to mimic the quality of their handicrafts. In this instance, nature was not the principal subject of the work. Yet, she still integrated into these images and spoke of it as an integral part of the work.

Millán validates rural tradition and values through her attention to this small community.

Millán’s Vértigo de lo lento tells the story of an indigenous community that continues to practice a traditional form of weaving, stressing the importance of a relatively overlooked place and cultural tradition. This work was included in the exhibition Tales of Resistance and Change: Artists from Argentina at the Frankfurter

Kunstverein in 2010 (Figure 64). The exhibition’s curator Rodrigo Alonso explained that

Millán’s work “are sounding boards for voices that are hidden but by no means lost.”81

His emphasis on the theme of resistance underscores the recuperative significance of her work. She brings marginalized fragments back to urban centers, refocusing attention to the beauty and texture of a rural life that she represents.

The portraits and stories of the villagers represented in Millán’s Vértigo de lo lento stressed the connection between identity and labor. Weaving was presented as a livelihood bound to a particular place and that constitutes a distinct identity. The pencil drawing Petrona was made from a photograph of Petrona working on a textile out of doors (Figures 52 and 65). The rendering is precise and emphasizes line over a solidity of

81 Rodrigo Alonso, “Mónica Millán,” in Tales of Resistance and Change: Artists from Argentina (Frankfurt: Frankfurter Kunstverein, 2010), 113.

190 form. Place and person merge. Beneath the image is a paragraph of handwritten text that was taken from Millán’s interview with Petrona. It records Petrona’s life and ties to

Yataity and Ao Poi.

Millán’s Si gano mucho como mucho, si gano poco como poco (2008) is a larger drawing that includes portraits of some of the weavers at work, drawn from the photographs (Figure 56). The figures are small in comparison to the canopy of dense flora that arches over their heads. As is typical of Millán’s work, the density of the vegetation that she depicts contrasts with the composition’s large areas of negative space.

She creatively plays with scale, giving the image a fantastical quality. The frog and lizards in the bottom portion of the piece are enormous in comparison to the human forms. The figures do not dominate these scenes; they are immersed within the complex web of foliage. This drawing is much larger than the smaller portraits that she created of the weavers. Millán asserts the importance and primacy of nature in everyday life in

Yataity and for herself.

METHODS OF ENGAGEMENT AND THE RECONSTITUTION OF PLACE

Travel and research are performative gestures that are documented and function as meaningful elements in Pereda’s and Millán’s works. Their individual travels mimic pathways of migration between urban and rural areas. Pereda’s recurrent use of wool and

Millán’s incorporation of textiles are tied to their childhoods. Both artists have also offered these materials or traditions as exchange with other distant communities and incorporated them into their works. Thus, the personal consistently remains an important element in their works. Each artist’s aesthetic sensibility is shaped by a nostalgic view of

191 nature; it is tied to a respect for rural places, rather than an oversimplified perception of rural life. The aesthetic integrity of the works and the ways in which each artist engages with the audience’s senses further permits their art to provide access to considerations of the natural world as integral components of history, myth and everyday existence.

Anthropologists Schneider and Christopher Wright have explored the borders between art and anthropology, centering on contemporary artists’ and anthropologists’ shared practice of fieldwork. They have described this methodological overlap or borrowing as a “contact zone” between contemporary art and anthropology as mediated by Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory of “relational aesthetics” and the work of anthropologist

Alfred Gell.82 They applaud contemporary artists for their experimentation with anthropological strategies and see the “incompleteness” of many artistic endeavors as an asset.83 The “incomplete” nature of projects by Pereda and Millán deliberately leave their works open to interpretation and future evolution.

Pereda’s art has been considered principally in relation to anthropological approaches and relational aesthetics. Critical readings of her art emphasize the utopian quality of her approach. Bourriaud’s “relational aesthetics” stresses the importance of the inter-relational aspect of some gallery work, pointing to a shift that occurred in the 1990s away from consideration of an isolated experience between art objects and single viewers.84 In other words, his theory argued that the critical judgment of such works

82 Schneider and Wright, “Between Art and Anthropology,” 7. They referred to Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, 1998.

83 Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright, “The Challenge of Practice,” Contemporary Art and Anthropology (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006), 20.

84 The “relational” aspect became important in analyses of such works as those created by Félix Gonzalez-Torres.

192 should center on the relationships that are temporarily created between participants by the work of art or represented in the work.85 Bourriaud’s theory developed in relation to works produced principally by European artists for the gallery. He argued that the rise of the Internet, globalization, and a transition to a service-based economy contributed to the shift to relational aesthetics.86 This turn marks a transition from solitary spectatorship to the privileging of art objects and actions that engage temporary communities that are formed in the gallery through the art’s design. These works offer more dynamic ways in which the viewer can engage with the art and through which meaning takes shape collectively.

This theory applies to the work of Pereda, but there are fissures between the art that Bourriaud theorizes and the work that she produces based on content, context, and her broader utopian agenda. The interactive, gallery-based elements of her work are exhibited alongside more stable art objects. The relational aspect of her work is undertaken in a controlled gallery context, as well as in rural settings. The act of offering earth thus shifts from the gallery in which it is read more as performance than ritual to rural areas in which it seems more of a religious rite than art. Spatial boundaries and distinctions between cultural actions are blurred, if one considers her individual actions as part of a larger series or body of work.

Art historian Claire Bishop poses a critical counterpoint to Bourriaud’s theorizing of relation aesthetics in “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” (2004) that complicates

85 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance, Fronza Woods and Mathieu Copeland (France: Les presses du reel, 2002), 112. Bourriaud defined “relational aesthetics” as an “aesthetic theory consisting in judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt.”

86 Ibid., 54.

193 the reading of works deemed to have a relational aesthetic, demonstrating the difficulty in analyzing an unstable piece and the marketing of experience as something that is always inherently good. She argues that the quality of the relationships formed between participants is not called into question in Bourriaud’s theory, nor are the nuances of the subject or content of individual projects taken into account.87 Bishop used Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s political theory and concept of antagonism to critique Bourriaud’s assessment of the politics of relational aesthetics. She argued that the assertion of

“utopia,” as an aspiration that extends beyond the momentary “microtopias” that

Bourriaud described, is not always naive and that it can have potential. She stated, “the task is to balance the tension between imaginary ideal and pragmatic management of a social positivity without lapsing into the totalitarian.”88 Pereda strives to achieve this balance in her work, meaning that her goal is not confined to the facilitating of a temporary, more democratic experience, but to achieving a continued practice that is centered around a loftier ambition.

During Pereda’s exhibitions of her Recolección / Restitución series, a modification of a ritualized offering to Pachamama is performed. Pereda perceives

Pachamama as a universal concept that is about totality, wholeness and the union of the land and people. She has stated that it is a universal concept and a cosmic one.89 Yet, she positions this idea against symbols that reveal the earth as something that is understood through cultural, economic and political layers. The staged, interactive ceremony that

87 Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (2004): 64.

88 Ibid., 66.

89 Teresa Pereda, Studio Visit, Buenos Aires, July 13, 2011.

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Pereda performs in her Recolección / Restitución exhibition gives the audience an opportunity to collectively receive earth.90

Pereda included her staple materials, wool and soil, in this act. She projected the outline of a circle on to the gallery’s floor and led participants one at a time to stand on the circle. The group selected was reflective of the audience’s demographic. Once everyone was organized, Pereda first placed a handful of soil in the small square of cloth, then folded the cloth and tied it together with a piece of wool. She then moved on to the next participant and repeated the action. Each cloth was adorned with the same cross insignia that she designed for her book Cuatro Tierras. The ceremony created a sense of community through the joining of people in a circle and their participation in a ritual.

However, Pereda acted as facilitator and mediator between each participant. The performance leaves room for individual reflection and unscripted action. The participants are able to take the earth with them, which granted them the opportunity to continue to reflect on this object after the performance ended. The earth that they were given was uniformly presented, which signals the idea of continuity and community, while never compromising their individuality. Art historian and critic Ana María Battistozzi also recognized the potential of the interactive, collective element of gallery work.91 Each member of the group was able to control the future of the parcel of earth that they were given. By giving the earth to these individuals, the act of travel and journey is also

90 The ritual Recolección en la ciudad: Cita en Cronopios was held in the Gallery Cronopios in the Centro Cultural Recoleta in April and May, 2010 as part of Recolección / Restitución. Citas por América. See Teresa Pereda. Recolección / Restitución. Citas por América, 76 and 105.

91 Ibid., 18 and Battistozzi, “Passages: In Pursuit of the Puzzle that Represents Us,” 90. Bourriaud contends that the contemporary exhibition is an “arena of exchange” and that “art is a state of encounter.” In a similar vein, in relation to Pereda’s work, Battistozzi has conceded that “There [in the gallery] the appointment has been conceived as the collective construction of a space-time of encounter and conciliation.”

195 rearticulated as the individual travels with it to different locations. The relational dimensions of her work make individuals’ connections to the work, these locations and each other direct. Even if these bonds are merely temporary, they express the possibility of this action as the beginning of a process that leads to a more sensitive or critical understanding and respect for the earth.

The earth is a key material and the principal subject of the work. The earth becomes symbolic in its allusion to larger ideas about constructions of land and place, as well as a means to consider one’s individual perceptions. The relationship between the object and the individual is as important as the idea of community. The sacred manner in which she handles the soil in each performance directs participants to consider the importance of soil within the exhibition and to the cultures and regions that she explored in her work. The ritual is a gallery-tailored reenactment of the offerings that she makes to different sites before she begins each project. Pereda transforms the physical earth in her art objects and performances, presenting it as having a cultural importance that exceeds its economic or political value.

Pereda’s Recolección en el Bosque: Cita en Yatana, part of the series Recolección

/ Restitución, also embraced ritualized performance. It was performed as part of the 2007

Bienal del Fin del Mundo in Ushuaia (Figure 66). Pereda researched this location and developed her project from factors specific to the place. She initiated this project by contacting a group responsible for managing the local refuge of native lenga trees.92 She found that Yatana translates as “to weave” in Yaghan.93 She thus decided to incorporate

92 Battistozzi, “Passages: In Pursuit of the Puzzle that Represents Us,” 89.

93 Ibid., 90.

196 the root of this place’s name into her work. Pereda brought thirty-eight kilos of wool to

Ushuaia and invited people to weave a “fabric or meshwork out of it [the wool], linking people and trees” (Figure 67).94 Schneider analyzed such performances in relation to the act of appropriation and relational aesthetics, arguing that the “sensuous qualities of materials” can have a notable impact.95 The wool, which viewers are also allowed to touch in gallery exhibitions, is soft to the touch and its tactility adds another means for the viewer to experience the work. Yet, in Recolección en el Bosque: Cita en Yatana, the site plays a crucial role in shaping the performance’s meaning.

The activity created a temporary sense of community amongst participants through their cooperation. The wool, a product produced by people, was united with a tract of nature conserved by people. Pereda defined the parts of her performance as follows: “Performance / state of being and feeling through taking part in action.

Gathering / the requested soil becomes a symbol of belonging to a beloved place. Work / place for reflection that sparks collective desires.”96 Her definition of each part of her process emphasized her motivation: to understand one’s own being in relation to place, desire and community. In this instance, Pereda magnified the act of weaving and united it with the landscape, making it a performance of restitution that honored the site’s ecological importance and history.

The gallery lends itself to critical and poetic considerations of the actions and objects within this space. The reenactment of ritual in Pereda’s work, and by extension in

94 Schneider and Wright, “Between Art and Anthropology,” 10.

95 Ibid., 8-10.

96 Teresa Pereda, www.teresapereda.com (accessed 2012).

197 installations like Millán’s Picnic, appropriate traditional and symbolic actions and place them in the gallery context which leads to the formation of new meanings and possibilities of engagement.

Ritual is also an important component of Millán’s projects. However, her actualization of individual engagement with her art offers an alternate means of considering the importance of place. Millán recreates certain experiences in the environment such as picnicking by a river or walking through a forest. Her election of activities presents her memory of nature as part of her quotidian existence in Misiones and her later journeys into rural areas. Her recreation of these experiences in the gallery concretizes the cultural and personal importance of nature. Her art emphasizes open- individual contemplation over collective experience, mirroring her own impressions and experiences in nature. Her work privileges the optical. It preserves components of distinct landscapes, but integrates them into a construction of a composite image of nature.

The artistic preoccupation with networks is evident in the work of all of the artists discussed in this dissertation. Each, in some capacity, seeks to negotiate the local and the global and to unravel the complicated interconnections between various aspects of nature, economics, politics, culture, aesthetics and/or the idea of crisis. Schneider and Wright quoted Latour in their essay “The Challenge of Practice” from the text Contemporary Art and Anthropology, in relation to anthropology’s growing consideration of networks and the potential of this manner of investigation to explore the complexity of these interconnections. Latour argued “ . . . that there is increasing concern for the complex connectivity between sites—not just between global and local—but in terms of the performative and historical specificity of particular networks of power, translation and

198 appropriation.”97 Projects such as those by Pereda and Millán privilege the rural, the aesthetic and the personal or marginal. Their merging of the concepts of culture and nature seeks to create a more nuanced image of nature as part of a place, which is a goal that is similarly attempted by other artists in this dissertation. Pereda’s and Millán’s art represents an erosion of the barriers that have separated sites and peoples, culture and nature through a systematic study and creative re-creation of place. This ethical endeavor argues for the importance of considering subjectivity as part of the social and environmental and that the liberation of one must be tied to the others. Pereda and Millán create dynamic series of works that address the interconnected concepts of nature, land and earth and the ways in which these terms, which reveal various aspects of the natural world and one’s physical environment, are united with cultural identity and human experience, cultural production and livelihood.

97 Schneider and Wright, “The Challenge of Practice,” 21.

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CHAPTER 5: VISUALIZING ECOLOGICAL CRISES: LIMITS AND ADAPTATION

The enormity and complexity of global ecological crises pose broad scientific, ethical and philosophical questions. The potential alleviation of such problems as climate change requires cooperation among many individual actors and international institutions.1

Early chapters of this dissertation explored how artists confronted various aspects of ecological crises through a negotiation of scales: personal, local, regional and global. In earlier instances, local sites in Argentina were privileged and served as focal points through which artists considered broader environmental issues and, in some instances, their ties to neoliberal policies and the effects of globalization. The artists in this chapter, however, center on the global, seeking to make the intricacy of issues like climate change and natural resource depletion accessible through installations that employ Antarctica or a virtual scenario as sites that expose the global system with which individuals are united.

Their works are defined by an optimistic tone that seeks to encourage reflection and

1 Michael Ziser and Julie Sze, “Climate Change, Environmental Aesthetics and Global Environmental Justice Cultural Studies,” Discourse 29, no. 2 and 3 (Spring and Fall 2007): 384. The authors stated, “As literary ecocritic Ursula Heise has pointed out, the realist narrative structures that sustained earlier phases of environmentalism—structures that made use of well-defined places (Hetch, Hetchy, for example), iconic human agents (John Muir), and readily grasped mechanisms of cause and effect (damning destroys alpine valleys)—may be inadequate to represent an invisible global crisis, the responsibility for which lies in billions of widely dispersed individual and corporate actions and the effects of which are not indicated in new forms of tangible damage but as abstract upticks in statistical risk.” Originally published in Ursula Heise, “Toxins, Drugs, and Global Systems: Risk and Narrative in the Contemporary Novel,” American Literature 74, no. 4 (2002): 747-78.

200 participation about challenging issues that have had negative consequences. This chapter considers artists’ manipulation of technology and science as tools to increase people’s engagement with environmental issues. This chapter also demonstrates the challenge that artists face in confronting global ecological crises, while revealing both the strengths and weaknesses of these works that present “nature” and “ecological crisis” as unresolved, ambiguous concepts that are caught between a longing for resolution and the limitations of visual representation.

On a global scale, climate change and resource depletion seem untenable.

International discussions about ozone depletion began in the 1980s with the emergence of theoretical considerations of globalization.2 The Anthropocene phase, introduced to a wider audience by Paul J. Crutzen and notably examined in relation to globalization and history by Dipesh Chakrabarty in “The Climate of History: Four Theses” (2009), considers people as a “geologic force” whose histories are intertwined with nature. This new era is stated as beginning with the inception of industrialization and accelerating in the postwar era. It is defined by advancements in technology, population growth, and increased levels of consumption, especially that of fossil fuels.3 In “The Anthropocene:

Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature” (2007), Will Steffen,

Crutzen and John R. McNeill, describe “global change” as “the biophysical and the socioeconomic changes that are altering the structure and the functioning of the Earth

System,” seeing these as a series of non-linear and interconnected transformations such

2 Silvana Buján, “De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de sostenibilidad,” Gazpacho 1 (April 2010): 19. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009), 199.

3 Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36, no. 8 (December 2007): 614.

201 as those of the carbon cycle, land use, and urbanization that are occurring on a global scale.4 Within this complex, changing system, each person’s role is complicated and unstable, making the issue of “ecological crisis” further compounded by conflicting positions on human accountability, on an individual and institutional level. Although the artists discussed in this chapter do not respond directly to the notion of the Anthropocene epoch, their work implies a comprehension of ecological crises in a similar vein, noting the enormity of the collective human impact on the natural environment.

Information about global ecological change has been distributed through a variety of sources, varying from popular to specialized publications, from the perspective of an array of individuals, including scientists, activists and artists. The popular media’s reports on climate change often endorse fear, anxiety, apprehension or denial of such issues.5

Activists frequently circulate materials that evoke sympathy or fear to mobilize ecological concern and action, which can be accomplished through the distribution of images and/or data. In Argentina, Greenpeace has focused much attention on the global and national implications of climate change, electing Patagonia as a key site.6

Greenpeace’s “Cambio Climático: Futuro Negro para los Glaciares” (2010), for instances, informed readers of the significance of glaciers, emphasizing their importance

4 Ibid., 615. Steffen’s background is in Earth system science, Crutzen’s in the chemistry of climate and biogeochemistry, and McNeill’s in environmental history.

5 The UN organized an intergovernmental commission to monitor climate change in 1988. See Greenpeace, “Cambio Climático: Futuro Negro para los Glaciares” (December 2010): 2.

6 Greenpeace Argentina began to center its energy on climate change, seeing it as the greatest environmental threat. Its literature emphasizes the incidence of glacial melting and its efforts are centered on encouraging sustainable energy use and reducing carbon emissions. Greenpeace’s pamphlet, for example, highlighted the potential social, economic and environmental cost of this problem. It also discussed the advent of the “Ley de Glaciares,” in Argentina and its intent to monitor and offer minimal protection for the preservation and maintenance of the glaciers in Patagonia

202 as a fresh water reserve in Patagonia. The report described the negative social and economic consequences of the continued melting of glaciers in Argentina, relying on scientific research and current and historical photographs of the landscape to create an ominous depiction of glacial deterioration and to depict its consequences in both national and international terms.

Climate change and the depletion of natural resources have also attracted the attention of numerous contemporary artists, curators and scholars. For example, in the

United States, historian Finis Dunaway published “Seeing Global Warming:

Contemporary Art and the Fate of the Planet” (2009) and curator Lucy Lippard organized the exhibition Weather Report: Art and Climate Change (2007).7 These examples parallel the work created by the work of Argentine artists that will be examined in this chapter.

Notably, Dunaway’s essay criticizes art that is apocalyptic, arguing for work that inspires a personal connection to the issue. Lippard’s exhibition facilitated a number of collaborations between artists and scientists and showcased some works that highlighted the local implications of climate change in an interactive manner in order to make the topic accessible to the public. The focal works analyzed in this chapter similarly seek to reframe the topic in a positive, engaging manner that encourages participation and contemplation.

7 Finis Dunaway “Seeing Global Warming: Contemporary Art and the Fate of the Planet,” Environmental History 14 (January 2009): 9 and Ziser and Sze, 387-388. Lucy R. Lippard was the curator of the exhibition Weather Report: Art and Climate Change in 2007 at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Colorado. Exhibitions such as Rethink, which was held at the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen in 2009, have also centered on the theme of climate change. This show coincided with the United Nation’s summit on climate change and exhibited works such as Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno’s Biospheres.

203

This chapter explores works by Andrea Juan (b. 1964), Joaquín Fargas (active since the 1990s) and Grupo Proyecto Biopus (active since 2002), assessing their exploitations of beauty and experience as tools to encourage hope and visual enjoyment and to offer a more direct understanding of ecological crises. Many of these works also reveal corollaries in scale and interconnectivity between the virtual and natural worlds as virtual scenarios, inventions and digital imagery offer new possibilities for viewer engagement or perspective. Focal works were informed by travel, research and/or experimentation and the approaches taken by these artists are tied to the concept of exploration, which aptly conjures both positive associations of hope and the acquisition of knowledge and negative implications of conquest and control. Their work exposes the sciences and technology as integral filters through which people experience and understand “nature,” experimenting with the very lenses through which individuals realize their environments. The hope for the future is paramount in these works, which embrace the persistence of change. Individual pieces allude to environmental challenges and propose that responses be based on creativity and versatility.

Andrea Juan’s projects on climate change and a residency program that she has directed in Antarctica since 2008 are central elements in this chapter. Although based in

Buenos Aires, Juan has centered many of her works in Patagonia and Antarctica. The latter are informed by her research of biological phenomena and a philosophical consideration of the nature of catastrophe. Her photographic and video work focus on travel and scientific discovery, grappling with the limits of representation.8 Her enthusiastic descriptions of travel to Antarctica and her time there recall an earlier

8 Many works by Juan embrace the sublime as a trope to underscore the scale and complexity of nature, globalization and technology.

204 tradition of the traveler-artist and reinforce a reading of her images as reminiscent of

Romantic landscape painting. The residency program also facilitates the opportunity for artists from around the world to venture to Antarctica, experiencing a distinct environment where they can mingle with scientists and other artists.

Joaquín Fargas, who is also based in Buenos Aires and has participated in biennials and in Juan’s residency program, approaches the challenge of climate change and ecological crisis through his engineering and design background. He insists that technology is completely necessary for future survival and creates art that promotes physical or mental adaptation.9 Like Juan, his work reveals the tension between attempts to combat environmental change and recognition of the futility of many attempts to confront such challenges. His use of virtual technology and play with scale represent strategies for increasing the accessibility of large-scale environmental issues.

The La Plata-based collective Grupo Proyecto Biopus represents a younger generation of artists that explore the possibilities of interactive multimedia installations and their designs are shaped by the availability of new software and advanced technical and mathematical processes.10 Its artists create generative works that experiment with the parallels between virtual and biological systems that are directly shaped by human interaction, even if a consideration of ecological crisis is not the group’s overriding concern.

9 Joaquín Fargas Interview, August 2012, Buenos Aires.

10 The arte de sistemas of the 1960s and 1970s is a precursor to the type of work that they produce. Rodrigo Alonso, “Sistemas, Acciones y Procesos. 1965–1975,” in Sistemas, Acciones y Procesos. 1965–1975 (Buenos Aires: Fundación PROA, 2011): 13-24.

205

The proposals of Juan, Fargas and Grupo Proyecto Biopus position the dialogue about nature on issues of human adaptability, interaction, and creativity, examining the interstices between global, artificial, and biological systems. Each work adopts divergent approaches to considering “nature” in relation to past and current constructions, landscape and more general, encompassing visions of global crises in relation to contemporary realities and technological tools. The differences in these strategies expose the complexity and numerous layers of perceptions of global environmental crises.

Nevertheless, each of their projects also relies heavily on aesthetics, metaphor, and participation in order to engage the viewer, provoking a greater degree of ecological sensitivity through the participant’s enjoyment, intellectual engagement, or active labor.11

The guiding theories and scientific data that serve as the foundation for these works are not fully revealed to viewers. They do not use science or technology as a means to make data accessible to the viewer. Instead, sensorial experience and emotion, which are meant to reinvigorate the topic of nature’s health by making it part of the mediated, technological world, are emphasized. These works are open-ended and insist on the unstable and contingent quality of nature.

The chapter concludes with critical assessments of art’s capacity to confront ecological crises such as climate change. Most of the critics mentioned in this segment are Argentine and respond directly to the works of Juan, Fargas and other contemporary artists. They appeal for art to overcome the shortcomings of data, science, and fear-based tactics, through its potential to elicit new means of personal engagement. These reflections are telling, exposing the precarious place of art itself.

11 Artist and theorist Roy Ascott examined the importance of metaphor in increasing consciousness in his article “Planetary Technoetics: Art, Technology and Consciousness,” Leonardo 37, no. 2 (2004): 111-116.

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ANTARCTICA AS A GLOBAL SYMBOL: ARTIST RESIDENCIES AND SCIENTIFIC COLLABORATION

Antarctica is a fragile environment that more readily registers environmental changes caused by human impact. It is also a bastion of scientific research. Antarctica’s unique ecosystem and its status as an internationally controlled area occupied permanently by scientists, military personnel, artists and families who reside there for varying periods of time, makes it an attractive location for a residency program.

Residency programs have provided pervasive support to contemporary art practice that parallels the expansion of transnational communities that are either virtually or temporarily connected.12 For artists working with environmental issues, residency programs grant them an opportunity to participate in local manifestations of particular environmental issues in different locations throughout the world. The artist’s corpus of work becomes a network of international points that facilitate global connections and dialogue. The artist-in-residence programs established in Antarctica are unique in that they enable artists to travel and work on a continent that requires a greater degree of institutional and technological support. The base’s community is transitory. The residents’ roles as creative researcher and traveler are emphasized.

The necessity of technological support for survival is more apparent in Antarctica, as the permanent infrastructure is limited and the conditions are extreme. The arctic environment imposes limitations on the type of work that artists can produce. Artists reside on bases, temporarily removed from their day-to-day experiences, and there is only

12 Viviana Usubiaga, “Institución y acción en el campo artístico contemporáneo en la Argentina,” Poéticas contemporáneas: Itinerarios en las artes visuales en la Argentina de los 90 al 2010, Rafael Cippolini, Fernando Farina, Andrés Labak, Roberto Echen, Fondo Nacional de las Artes, et al (Buenos Aires: Fondo Nacional de las Artes: Fundación YPF, 2011), 63-69. Usubiaga analyzed the role of residency programs and the importance of the Internet and private institutions in supporting artistic activities in Argentina in recent decades.

207 a limited distance that one can travel on the continent; movement is entirely dependent on the availability of transportation and the weather. There are days and periods during the year when travel is not possible.13 Antarctica’s distinct environmental characteristics create an immersive environment for artists to contemplate and produce work about the relationship between humans, nature, technology and the sciences.

The Programa de Arte en Antártida began in 2005 as part of the Dirección

Nacional del Antártico (DNA). The program has continued to expand its international scope and since 2005 artists from Spain, Canada, Australia, Austria, England, New

Zealand and the United States have participated.14 Juan directs the Proyectos Culturales de la Dirección Nacional del Antártico, Cancillería Argentina and is a Professor of Visual

Arts at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, which has been affiliated with this program through its hosting of two Sur Polar exhibitions at its museum.15 The residency program, which is between thirty and forty days in length, solicits proposals for projects that address subject matters “related to environmental preservation and [human] interaction in that territory.”16 The program’s call for participation states that projects

13 Andrea Juan Interview, 2011, Buenos Aires and Andrea Juan: Proyecto Antártida (Buenos Aires: Latingráfica Impresos Offset SRL, 2005).

14 “Sur Polar II,” Sur Polar II: Arte en Antártida (Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural de España en Buenos Aires, 2010): n.p. The ITSAC Catabatic Experimental Platform for Antarctic Culture (ICEPAC) is a mobile “living and working unit” that can support six crewmembers for thirty days. Artists, engineers and scientists from the United States, New Zealand, South Africa, Slovenia, Brazil and Chile participated in researching, developing and deploying solutions related to sustainability. The program always accepts three applicants from Argentina.

15 The Museo de Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (MUNTREF) hosted the first Sur Polar exhibition in 2008 and the third one in 2011. The Cancillería Argentina regulates the scientific, educational and artistic activities undertaken on the continent.

16 Institutional Cooperation Program: National Direction of the Antarctic. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Cult Arts Residency in the Argentine Antarctic Stations. Residency Announcement, n.p (provided by Andrea Juan in 2011).

208 dealing with science and technology are privileged. The program’s mission thus, to an extent, drives the dialogue about climate change. Many artists venture to Antarctica one time and create isolated projects that engage with the scope of the residency program.

However, Juan’s repeated travels to Antarctica and sustained exploration of climate change has led to a developed and comprehensive body of work about the relationship between people and ecological crisis.

Furthermore, the continued inclusion of Argentine artists and the annual iterations of Sur Polar in Buenos Aires creates an extended connection between the city and

Antarctica that ensures greater public awareness of this continent and climate change.

The exhibition and catalogue both have served as important documents of the work created during the residencies and aid in the dissemination of information about climate change. While most of the artistic projects are more poetic than didactic, scientists have been invited to speak publically during some of the events related to the exhibition.17

Brief accounts of the collaborator-scientist’s research are also included in the exhibitions and catalogues.

The first Sur Polar exhibition was held during the International Polar Year, 2007–

2008. This exhibition granted outsiders an opportunity to see multiple projects centered on the same ecosystem at once. The circulation of the Sur Polar exhibitions to other international venues, as well as the individual exhibition of Juan’s work in different locales, stresses the importance of creating a network of visibility in order to spark dialogue in distinct sites.18 Her international residency program in Antarctica and

18 For example, Sur Polar II traveled to the Museo Tecnológico de Mexico DF in 2009 and Juan has frequently shown her work in New York City.

209 collaborations with scientists has stimulated dialogue across disciplines and geographic space.

The international scope of the program enforces transnational collaboration and dialogue about global environmental issues, reflecting the increasing trend of transnational collaborations in contemporary work. It also intersects with the “utopian” model of collaboration between nations that was solidified in 1959 by the Treaty of

Antarctica, which established a series of regulations to protect the continent from the exploitation of natural resources and territorial desires and disputes.19 Although some works engage less with technology and the sciences, artists are temporarily inserted into a closed, interdisciplinary context in which they at least reside alongside scientists who are stationed at the base. The residency serves as an optimistic example of the type of collaboration that is needed to cope with issues like climate change.

Antarctica’s limited development provides a stark contrast to the city of Buenos

Aires. The site’s distance, general inaccessibility and difference permit people to more readily project their fears of ecological crisis on to it. These qualities also encourage people’s romantic visions of this place. It is a site that is defined by hope and discovery in its attachment to scientific studies and the potential for technological advancements and understanding that it offers. Similarly, the landscape registers change and has been used as a symbol of ecological crisis by environmental activists.

Juan’s repeated emphasis on the uniqueness of her experience residing in

Antarctica highlights travel and discovery. Her reflections in catalogues and interviews read like travelogues, reiterating the foreign nature of this distant land. Juan’s

19 Fargas discussed this in relation to “Proyecto Utopia.” See http://joaquinfargas.com.ar/es/utopia.htm (accessed 2012).

210 introduction to Sur Polar II’s exhibition catalogue described the “virgin state” of

Antarctica.20 Juan has qualified her experience in Antarctica based on its difference to her everyday life: “no hay reloj, la meteorología determina los tiempos. Tampoco hay dinero, ni moneda, ni negocios, ni despensas.”21 She recalled that the Internet is available, except when there’s a storm and the antenna is down. Her descriptions are evocative of travel writing, of which Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and

Transculturation (2008) provides useful insight. Pratt analyzed Alexander von

Humboldt’s writings as part of European expansion. She asserted that Alexander von

Humboldt “. . . sought to reinvent popular imaginings of the America, and through

America, of the planet itself” through his travel writings about South America, which

Pratt assessed as “. . . non-specialized works [that] are also bold discursive experiments . .

.”22 Humboldt granted nature a principle part in his texts. It is presented as a dynamic, powerful and elusive force.23

Pratt’s analysis of Humboldt’s texts is part of her larger examination of constructions of America, an enterprise that was tied to imperialism and the repercussions of colonial ideology. While Juan’s and Humboldt’s motivations, eras and media drastically differ, the processes that each undertook, or is currently undertaking, and the

20 Sur polar II, n.p.

21 Andrea Juan, “Colores y Sonido Sobre la Antártida,” Página/12, 2006, http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/espectaculos/6-4024-2006-10-03.html (accessed 2012).

22 Mary Louise Pratt, “Alexander von Humboldt and the Reinvention of América,” Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 109-140.

23 Ibid., 118. Pratt argued that Humboldt depicted through his writings “not a nature that sits waiting to be known and possessed, but a nature in motion, powered by life forces many of which are invisible to the human eye; a nature that dwarfs humans, commands their being, arouses their passions, defies their powers of perception.”

211 romantic nature of this venture have parallels. Science and discovery are the foundation of these creators’ products. In each instance, nature is re-imagined through representations of an unfamiliar and distant landscape. Each returned with visual documents and experiences that were circulated to a larger audience, allowing others to witness the artist’s discovery of a new place. Climate change and the threat of impending ecological crises have encouraged desires to seek out a new “planetary consciousness.”

To do this, Juan represents Antarctica as a new frontier that is explored and distilled to the viewer through aesthetics, science and stories of individual encounter.

Juan’s representations of the remote arctic landscape and her often fervent descriptions of travel to this continent also parallel Pierre Restany’s travel into the

Amazon in the late 1970s and his desire for a new “planetary consciousness” to be achieved through art. His “The Manifesto of Rio Negro ” (1978) reflects his fascination with the Amazon and his vision of it as the essence of nature.24 For Restany, the Amazon represented an “integral nature” through which one could imagine a renewed conception of nature as distinct from the metropolises of such cities as Buenos Aires. The Amazon and Antarctica have both been used as symbols of environmentalism precisely because each has an exotic appeal and represents “untouched” nature. It is a different, but similarly unique ecosystem. Images of the Amazon, like those of Antarctica, permit a view of nature that is stripped of its mechanization and hybridization. It appears more pure than the nature that is accessible in an urban ecosystem. Imaginings of these landscapes are bound to the myths and tropes of nature used to explain it as wild and

24 Ibid., 109-140.

212 powerful. Scenes of these less populated locales diverge from the urbanites everyday experience with natural elements.

Juan used Antarctica’s distinctness as a means to bring greater visibility to climate change, which she explored as an example of a complex global crisis tied to natural and human processes. She populates her scenes to allude to the human presence. Juan, unlike

Restany, is less interested in exploring “integral” nature in itself than in understanding nature through the filter of science. Her work is an artistic interpretation of the scientific translation of climate change.

The notion of discovery is paramount in her work. Scientific breakthroughs and new findings parallel the artist’s new discovery of Antarctica and the thrill that accompanies this introduction to a land that still seems “virginal.” The concept of discovery relates to an interest in expanding the limits imposed by scale and comprehension. Juan’s works playfully examine the tension between people’s discomfort with being overwhelmed and the desire to control the catastrophes that overwhelm them.

Her works translate scientific fact into scenes that are at once both more accessible and ambiguous.

JUAN: CATASTROPHE

Andrea Juan primarily works with digital photography, video and installation.

Since 2005, Antarctica has figured prominently in her work, which is based on scientific studies and travel to this continent. Juan has focused on climate change’s impact on this sensitive ecosystem and on Patagonia. Her initial inquiry into the topic of climate change

213 was based on her fieldwork in Patagonia in 2002,25 which resulted in the digital installation Getting Over.26 The work consisted of three floor length flat screens and a square bench that was situated in the gallery’s center. The following videos were projected simultaneously into the space, while a hidden camera recorded visitors and cast their visages on to the installation: Bordes Finales (center), Demasiado Agua y Celeste

(right), Estás Ahí? (left) and Bajo Nuestros Pies (floor) (Figure 68). Viewers’ likenesses and moving images of avalanches, droplets of water, glaciers and ice floes were superimposed. Juan explained:

The idea of confronting the visitor with his own destruction, this done as a simulacrum of ice landslides and overflowing waters projected on the spectator, aims at generating a new questioning about our own behavior, our devastating relationship with the environment, the intolerance towards the different and doubtful values of power.27

Juan presented individuals as part of the process of environmental degradation. Visitors were physically immersed within the installation, while also being made to view their portraits as part of this unstable space.28 As participant and spectator, the viewer’s perception was shaped by the feeling of being in a setting that is sublime and the uncanny ability to glimpse a snapshot of one’s experience within the installation at the same time.

This strategy destabilizes the viewer’s role and surroundings.

25 Teresa Riccardi, “1st Biennial of the End of the World 2007,” LatinArt.com (accessed June 2012).

26 The installation was exhibited in Getting Over, which was sponsored by Fundación Telefónica. Charly Nijensohn also created the video work El éxodo de los olvidados (2011) in Patagonia and Después del final (2007), which represents the melting of the glaciers in Greenland. He began work in Patagonia in 1999. For additional information, see his website www.charlynijensohn.org.

27 Andrea Juan, “Getting Over to Regain Illusions,” Getting Over: Hacia una nueva ilusión (Buenos Aires: Espacio Fundación Telefónica, 2004), 52.

28 Corrine Sacca Abadi also analyzed this piece in Getting Over, 11-13. She argued that this installation represented a means of more actively engaging the viewer and complicating his or her relationship to the work and to its subject: environmental disaster.

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This installation was part of the exhibition Getting Over: Hacia una nueva ilusión, organized by curator Corinne Sacca Abadi in 2004 at the Espacio Fundación

Espigas in Buenos Aires. Abadi exhibited several of Juan’s projects on catastrophe that were produced since 1999.29 Juan’s Teoría de la catástrofe (2002 / 2004) included the installation Getting Over and other photographs that explored the notion of ecological catastrophe. The series of photographs captured a range of views of glaciers and portraits of figures underwater.30 Some images of the glaciers are close-ups. Others present the glaciers against open water or as ice floes. Her combination of landscapes and portraits within this series reinforces the connection between humans and nature. Estratos sonoros en la segunda fase de la teoría de la catástrofe consists of three photographs taken in southern Argentina. These images represent open water bordered on the top and bottom by glaciers (Figure 69). Juan employed the melting glaciers as a “metáfora de la violencia que atraviesa a la vida humana,” seeing it as one example of the catastrophes that people, in part, collectively cause.31

Juan inscribed marks on these digital landscapes, implying scientific measurement and superimposing a human mark on the landscape. The mark exposed science and art as filters through which the viewer realizes climate change. Juan also exhibited photographic-objects (rectangular cubes of varying sizes that were covered with close-up photographs of the glaciers) (Figure 70). The objects and their imagery created an

29 Before shifting to environmental issues, Juan examined the human preoccupation with emergency and catastrophe in Proyecto SOS (1999) and Serie Rescate (1999–2000). See Getting Over.

30 The portraits included those of Camila, Daniel and Mario. See Andrea Juan, www.andreajuan.net/.

31 “Andrea Juan,” Colección de Arte Argentino Contemporáneo, Macromuseo, http://www.macromuseo.org.ar/coleccion/artista/j/juan_andrea.html (accessed 2012).

215 abstract, fragmented rendition of the environment. The vacant space around these objects recreated a physical sense of the glaciers dissolving.

The exhibition’s overarching concept is catastrophe. Juan defined catastrophe as an agglomeration of the many conflicts, events and tragedies that plague humanity; they include poverty, pollution, war and ecological degradation.32 She imagines violence as part of the human condition and as effecting social and environmental conditions. Her conceptual foundation for her work was French mathematician René Thom’s catastrophe theory, which he developed in the 1960s. Juan stated in 2005 that she encountered

Thom’s book Parábolas y Catástrofes, which spoke of catastrophes as “‘formas geométricas abstractas que simbolizan los procesos que generan un cambio brusco en la realidad.’”33 Juan described Thom’s concepts of “estabilidad o equilibrio” as fundamental to her work.34 Stability is not fixed or sustainable.35 Change is inevitable and catastrophe signals a state of flux.

32 Marta Dillon, “Teoría de la Catástrofe,” Página12, April 18, 2003, http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/las12/13-600-2003-04-24.html (accessed 2012).

33 Luis Aubele, “Cambiemos de Actitud Antes de que Sea Demasiado Tarde,” Lanacion.com, August 7, 2005, http://www.lanacion.com.ar/728048-cambiemos-de-actitud-antes-de-que-sea-demasiado- tarde (accessed 2012).

34 Getting Over, 43. Juan explained these as “un sistema pueda permanecer estable aun cuando se produzca el cambio él mismo. Pero llegado un momento, lo que son simples cambios cuantitativos pasan a ser modificados” and “cambio cualitativo o discontinuidad,” which is defined as “el sistema se transforma internamente de modo radical. Varía la situación de equilibrio interno, creándose una situación nueva.”

35 John W. Murphy, “Catastrophe Theory: Implications for Probability,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 50, no. 2 (April 1991): 144. Sociologist John W. Murphy’s text provided insight into Thom’s catastrophe theory and Juan’s application of it in her work. Murphy explained that the theory’s name alluded to the fact that probability statements are contingent on the particularities of a specific domain. Murphy asserted the importance of Thom’s position in relation to postmodernism and the notion that math functions like language as a form of mediation—a mediation of reality, 145. Thom’s concept resembles Latour’s assessment of nature and politics in The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, which posited that mathematics, like the sciences, are based on their own sets of contingencies. These postmodern positions question and seek to undo the universalizing and essentializing meta-narratives of science and mathematics. In each instance, these theories have an important application to destabilizing the idea of nature as itself singular and universal. Ecologists and environmental activists

216

Juan’s fascination with the idea of catastrophe is its ambiguity, the impossibility of knowing how a system will respond to rapid change and the assumptions and anxiety attached to this concern. This preoccupation is explored in her work. Juan is interested in people’s role in inducing and perpetuating catastrophes and their lack of total control over nature. Argentine artist Horacio Zabala classified three principal categories of catastrophes: “the mythological, historical and ones in nature.”36 Juan’s expression of catastrophe in her work united these categories in a manner similar to the ways in which history and human and nature relations are currently being re-imagined. Chakrabarty’s text diverged from Zabala’s separation of catastrophe into distinct categories, binding humans to climate change. Juan’s conceptual position frames catastrophe with curiosity, verging on hope—not fear or anxiety.

Juan also acknowledged the impact of Jean Baudrillard’s The Illusion of the End

(1992) in shaping her understanding of catastrophe as signaling hope, not just tragedy.37

Juan argued “el fin es una ilusión porque siempre hay un más allá, un volver a empezar, una especie mutante que vivirá cuando unos pocos sobrevivan y se adapten.”38 Juan’s conception of catastrophe is a condition that is inclusive and widespread. On the one hand, her works are informed by fieldwork and a specific scientific study. On the other, have promoted this construction of nature in order to incite concern, collaboration and action. Thom’s theory illuminates the tension between the control that people desire over their surroundings through reason and scientific tools and their limits with respect to people’s ability to know every aspect of a phenomenon and its outcomes.

36 Horacio Zabala, “Images of the Catastrophe,” Getting Over, 52.

37 Andrea Juan, “Theory of a Catastrophe,” Andrea Juan, http://www.andreajuan.net/en/prycto_tcas.aspx (accessed 2012). In particular, she mentioned Baudrillard’s assertion that: people’s actions contribute to the incidence of catastrophes, that “the illusions about a final end [are] tinted with peace, relief and hope” and that “the end will always be un-localized.”

38 Dillon, “Teoría de la Catástrofe.” Her recent series New Species (2011) further deals with the theme of adaptation and discovery.

217 this information serves as inspiration for a more generalized construction of an experience or allusion to a rampant crisis. Some of her serial projects such as El bosque invisible are based in multiple sites. Juan’s transgression of national boundaries and scales through the inclusion of images from different sites and the enhancement of microscopic specimens communicates an understanding of ecological crisis as mutable and global. Juan’s reflections and her work locate ecological crisis as a product of people’s tendency for self-destruction. But, her conception of catastrophe is equally shaped by her anticipation of the possibilities of change.39 Getting Over emphasizes catastrophe’s allure, while also demonstrating the violence and discomfort that it causes.

The viewer is left to grapple with the tension that exists between the two.

Juan’s Metano (2006) poetically reflects on people’s involvement in climate change. Her project was inspired by the research of Rodolfo del Valle and Pedro Skvarca, two scientists from the Dirección Nacional del Antártico. Rodolfo del Valle has investigated methane leaks. He argued that methane is “one of the three most dangerous substances contributing to the greenhouse effect in the atmosphere” and that methane leaks cause a dangerous feedback effect.40 Essentially, climate change causes glaciers to melt and sea levels to rise. The methane gas that was frozen into the ice is then expelled, which causes temperatures to increase. The cycle is then repeated and intensified.41 Of course, the process of methane leaks is biological, but climate change, to varying degrees, can be attributed to human activities.

39 Alberto Giudici, “La Antártida, Tema y Escenario a la vez de una Video-Instalación,” Clarin.com, August 2, 2005.

40 “Additively Interfering in the Natural Oscillation,” Interview with Dr. Rodolfo del Valle on board the icebreaker ARA Almirante Irizar, February 2005, Andrea Juan, 94.

41 Ibid.

218

Metano is a series of photographic stills and short approximately thirty-second videos of performances that were filmed on Antarctica’s peninsula between January and

February of 2006. Juan’s earlier work Red (2005), which used red tulle as a metaphor for violence and blood, informed her development of Metano.42 Juan’s performances do not leave a permanent mark on the landscape. The short duration of these actions highlight the fleetingness of change. Tulle was used in each of these projects to signify a substance, act or concept that is difficult to represent visually. One or two figures are included in some of these images, connecting them to the process.43 The tulle’s opacity fluidly connected the landscape with the human figures. It was often enlivened by the wind and by the force of the protagonist. The tulle obfuscated the viewer’s gaze, coloring the scene. The conceptual layers of Juan’s subject were manifested in the oscillating, compositional layers of her images. Methane’s gaseous or liquid state was also communicated effectively through her chosen material.

Metano’s videos were projected on to both sides of three flat screens that were organized in a triangle (Figures 71 and 72).44 The photographs and videos presented distinct views of performances that staged the human body’s interaction with the landscape and the tulle in a variety of ways, emphasizing the dynamic quality of these relationships. One video showed liquid bubbling beneath the surface, creating an impression of gas rising from melting ice into the atmosphere. There are four types of

42 See discussion of Red in Andrea Juan. Juan was interested in the double meaning of the word red; in English it refers to the color and carries a number of connotations such as violence, while in Spanish it means net, which alludes to the complexity of the environmental issues that she references to in her works.

43 Silvana Fontana is her assistant and appears in most of Juan’s projects. Sometimes Juan seeks the assistance of other people residing at the bases. In Metano, Fontana is one of the principal performers.

44 This was the configuration for the installation at the Bienal del Fin del Mundo in 2007.

219 scenes captured in the other videos and photographs: the uninhabited arctic landscape; the figure clad in gear, laboring through the landscape; the landscape covered by a thin layer of fabric, and figure/s wrapped in tulle (Figures 73-75). All of the videos included ambient sound. Most images presented a single figure, but some portrayed two people. In one video, a person walks slowly over icy terrain, holding on to rolls of florescent colored tulle that is unraveling in the wind. It ends with two figures tangled in a mass of fabric. Their bodies are almost completely covered with opaque layers of tulle. In each scene, the tulle, representing methane gas, figure/s and landscape presented changing degrees of the figure’s ease or struggle in the landscape.

Juan’s representation of methane and her play with how people, methane, and the environment are united, visualizes that which is typically invisible. The changing weather conditions drove the performance, impacting the figure’s mobility and the visibility of the scene itself. For instances, in certain instances the wind was audible and sleet accumulated on the camera’s lens, obscuring the view. Some were taken from the ground and others were shot aerially from a helicopter. The viewer is granted a comprehensive vision of the landscape through these different perspectives. The bright blue, purple and pink tulle dramatically contrasted with the arctic landscape, which heightens the images’ aesthetic appeal.

The extremes of weather and lighting conveyed the continent’s harsh conditions and the reality that individuals’ actions respond to climatic changes. Juan has often stressed the challenges that she faced in Antarctica due to the severe and variable weather.45 The videos clearly captured this, revealing the artist’s inability to fully

45 Andrea Juan Interview, 2011, Buenos Aires and residency program information sheet.

220 manipulate her surroundings. The actors’ actions were similarly influenced by the weather. The scenarios imply that people contribute to the methane cycle. Their role, however, is ambiguous. The figures were shown as active in certain scenes and passive in others. The photographs of the figures trapped beneath layers of tulle emphasized a sensation of entrapment—of being caught within a process that is beyond human control.

Juan later developed the project El bosque invisible, which examined the role of arctic phytoplankton in regulating climate change. The project was divided into discrete parts: the Serie Antártida (2010), Serie Azul (2009), Serie Patagonia (2008) and Serie

Paisajes. Parts of El bosque invisible solely represented the phytoplankton: the Serie

Azul, which includes enlarged graphic images of phytoplankton against a blue background, and the resin sculptures (Figure 76). The other parts of the project featured staged scenes in Patagonia and Antarctica.46 Her use of these sites gestured to climate change’s widespread impact. Patagonia makes the issue nationally relevant, while

Antarctica signals its international importance.

The Serie Patagonia documented a figure staged against the backdrop of the coast. In one image, a woman stood on a precipice of rocks, facing the Mar Argentino

(Figure 77). The figure’s face was obscured from view. She thus seems merely an indicator of the environment’s human element. Magnified images of phytoplankton are superimposed on the scene. Juan’s play with scale and her placement of the phytoplankton in the composition force the viewer to contemplate the relationship between the represented forms: microscopic plants, figure and landscape. Juan altered

46 Verónica Willenberg, “Tributo: Ciclo de Arte y Pensamiento que honran a la Naturaleza,” Arte, Ciencia y Naturaleza en Conexión (Buenos Aires: Tierra de Exploradores, Asociación Civil; Art in Lobby 2010), 8.

221 one’s view of the land by disrupting it with forms and revealing that which is invisible to the naked eye. The artist’s inclusion of a figure in the landscape, communicated the human dimension of climate change. Juan’s work in Patagonia and Antarctica formed conceptual ties between the national and global, which is bound to her idea of catastrophe as something that is “un-localized.” The parallel makes glacial melting a broader issue to contemplate. Juan’s consistent inclusion of figure/s implies that human action is united with global biological processes and also gives the viewer a point of reference. The viewer can identify with the figure and imagine him or herself in the scene that is represented.

The Serie Antártida consisted of androgynous mannequins and abstract, colorful representations of phytoplankton (Figure 78). It is comprised of video and photographic stills that contain felt phytoplankton and mannequins staged in different configurations in the arctic landscape. The cloth mannequins are human scale and have articulated limbs.

The scenarios captured in the stills differ from one another and, as with the images in

Metano, there are compositional variations, distinguished by different actions, weather conditions and vistas. The bright, fluorescent colored felt dramatically contrasted with the mannequins and the landscape. This effect heightens the images’ visual interest and directs the viewer’s attention to the felt strips and objects that the mannequins manipulate in each scene. Antártida’s works have a narrative quality. The key activity is the figures’ manipulation of the felt. They either work together or alone. In some scenes the felt appears as though it’s an accessory and in others the mannequins appear to be closely studying the material.

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El bosque invisible references Paul Falkowski’s studies on marine phytoplankton’s role in regulating earth’s temperatures through the absorption of carbon dioxide. Juan’s “invisible forest” speculated on people’s potential impact on the carbon cycle and the links between human actions and biological processes connected to climate change.47 The title of the series, El bosque invisible alerts the audience to the invisibility of the phytoplankton to the human eye and the general public’s ignorance of their function. Juan imagined phytoplankton’s operations alongside human actions. The figures’ activities seem to allude to scientific discovery and to varying degrees of awareness and control. The ambiguous images are tinged with an aurora of excitement and hope.

Juan’s intention was to create images that imagined a harmonious connection between people and the environment: “las obras proponen volvernos a mirar como seres puros en armónica conexión con nuestro entorno.”48 Juan’s mannequins are forms with which people can identify, but they also remain foreign, futuristic apparitions. Unlike

Getting Over, the viewer is not visually immersed within a sublime simulation, but is asked to gaze upon a distant landscape and to contemplate the figures’ interaction with the arctic ecosystem and ecological phenomenon.

The views are beautiful in their compositional simplicity. The flat landscape stretches out into the distance, punctuated by the sea or sky. There is no urban infrastructure with the exception of a few wires. The mannequins are sexless and faceless. They are an abstracted, generic representation of human beings. The simplicity of the figures directs the viewer’s attention to the staged interaction between the

47 “Andrea Juan: Argentina,” Sur Polar II, n.p.

48 Willenberg, “Tributo,” 8.

223 phytoplankton, the figures and the environment. The outcome of their actions, their intent or their feeling is completely unknown, which permits viewers to come to their own conclusions.

There were three types of scenes that are pictured: the mannequins alone in the landscape, the mannequins studying felt and the mannequins wearing felt. Some of these scenes were captured from a distance and other images offered close-ups of the staged mannequins. El bosque invisible, Antártida 3014 documented three mannequins standing in a triangular formation in the arctic landscape (Figure 79). They faced the viewer. Their arms positioned by their sides. Their forms punctuated the horizontal expanse of snow- covered terrain and band of blue sky. The position of the figures within the landscape evokes the moment of discovery. The isolation of the figures and their postures make them appear as though they are explorers, marking new territory. The figure’s diminutive scale in relation to the landscape mimics Romantic conventions of representing the sublime, of picturing the figure within an ambiguous and expansive landscape.49

The two mannequins in El bosque invisible, Antártida 2323 sat side by side on the flat white ground that stretched to a sliver of blue sky in the distance (Figure 80).

49 Juan’s representation of the sublime will not be examined in depth in this chapter. However, it is worth stressing that her work in Antarctica is evocative of the Romantic traditions and the sublime as theorized by Kant. It is notable that Charly Nijensohn’s videos also evoke the sublime, presenting an ominous, yet beautiful landscape punctuated by figure/s. For example, see El éxodo de los olvidados (2011), which was created in Patagonia. Critics have analyzed Nijensohn’s work as an existential meditation on the relationship between the human form and the environment. Rodrigo Alonso asserted that each of Nijensohn’s videos create tension between the human figure and nature, which presents a conflict as “both real and existential at the same time.” See Rodrigo Alonso, “About Charly Nijensohn,” www.charlynijensohn.org/About_Charly_Nijensohn.html (accessed June 2012). Alonso argued that Nijensohn’s articulation of the sublime in his work is closer to its Romantic formulation and Kant than to postmodern or contemporary reinterpretations of it. Nijensohn was born in Argentina and lived and worked in Buenos Aires for a number of years. He resides in Berlin, but remains connected to the art scene in Buenos Aires and collaborates with Teresa Pereda and Juan Pablo Ferlat. Although his work is not explored in this dissertation, it has notable ties to this theme and warrants mention.

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The mannequins were adorned with strips of blue felt with orange tassels that were draped around their necks like scarves. The material was also gathered in their hands. The figures’ postures could indicate silent contemplation or a complete unawareness of the material that was draped across their bodies and tumbled onto the ground. They appear relaxed and in harmony with their environment.

Another photograph pictured a close-up of the three mannequins with strips of felt entangled around their hands and arms (Figure 81). The land and cloudy sky blended together, creating a hazy backdrop of whites and grays. The three figures formed a semi- circle. Only their torso was captured. They appear to look down at the felt that is gathered in their hands and streamed down their arms. The scene was staged in such a way that the mannequins appeared to be studying the material, discovering and researching it.

Juan formed an interface among science, nature and the body in these works. She circulated scientific information through her allusion to it in her work and the inclusion of more specific information in catalogues and exhibitions, while privileging her art’s aesthetic integrity.50 Her work begins with travel and research. Both aspects of her process are evidenced in the final product and reveal a negotiation between her intention to inform the viewer of particular biological phenomena and to show the beauty and harshness of a remote landscape. Juan’s images also make visible the landscape’s transformations and explore the contingent relationship between humans and nature. Her focus on a particular landscape in relation to one facet of climate change, either part of its outcome as in her depiction of glacial melting in Getting Over or her metaphorical

50 For example, Ziser and Sze discussed aesthetics in relation to Burtynsky’s images, seeing them as bordering on “eco-pornography.” The critique of the potential of aesthetics to overshadow content is an important point to make.

225 depiction of methane and phytoplankton’s role as contributor or indicator of climate change, permit a means of accessing the topic. The concept of scientific discovery, the responsibility of people in causing global catastrophes or altering present conditions each has broader implications, divulging a larger mission to confront people with that which they cannot easily observe.

FARGAS: INVENTION AND ADAPTATION

Joaquín Fargas creates sculptures, video, virtual and bio art that reflect on global ecological challenges.51 His work is driven by his commitment to the idea that art, science and technology are integral in helping people to understand current environmental crises such as climate change and in inspiring new technological advancements. His art is symbolic and educational. He caters to a myriad of audiences: the general public, students, and specialists in fields related to art, design, and technology. Fargas’s humor and optimism shape his artistic inventions, which are testament to his belief in the importance of creativity in adapting to changing circumstances.

Fargas’s art contends with themes related to the limits of natural resources and society’s comprehension and control of the environment. He has experimented with scale and technologies as a means to enhance viewer engagement. Fargas’s Sunflower –

Centinela del cambio climático and Proyecto Utopía have inspired deliberation of climate change. He created Sunflower for the 2007 Bienal del Fin del Mundo in Ushuaia.

51 Education and the union of science, art and technology are paramount to Fargas. He teaches and works with students on his projects. He is a member of the Red de Popularización de la Ciencia y de la Tecnología en América Latina y del Caribe (Red Pop).

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It was a metal sculpture of a sunflower that was installed outside (Figure 82).52 The petals were equipped with solar panels that provided the work with enough energy to illuminate at night and to document its surroundings. Sunflower served as a functional environmental weather station that observed air pollution, ultraviolet radiation, and temperatures.53 The flower was also equipped with three video cameras that recorded the surrounding landscape and documented the sculpture itself as part of the site. The gathered data was then wirelessly transmitted to a “host-building” and posted to a website. The wireless feed provided a virtual connection between the literal site where the sculpture was installed and the locations of others who accessed the site. The circulation of visual records and data via the Internet embraced the global applicability of climate change, expanding the project’s reach through the use of technology.54 Yet, the photographic documents rooted the sculpture in a particular location. The images’ inclusion of the sculpture self-consciously made the data-collecting tool visible and revealed it as part of the landscape.

Fargas’s sculpture served as a symbol for green design and increased environmental sensitivity. The sunflower’s tie to Argentina, a region where it is commercially grown, lent added relevance to the form.55 Fargas replicated the

52 Riccardi, “1st Biennial of the End of the World 2007,” 1.

53 Joaquín Fargas, “Sunflower – Centinela del Cambio Climático,” http://joaquinfargas.com.ar/en/sunflower.htm (accessed 2012). English translations are quoted directly from his official website. Florencia Battiti, “Joaquín Fargas y su Sunflower,” Gazpacho, 30.

54 The organizers of the biennial also mediated on globalization, uniting the ends of the Earth through the transmission of live video that documented artists’ works to cities in northern Canada and Finnish Lapland. See Biennial Foundation, “The First Edition of the End of the World Biennial was presented in 2007,” http://www.biennialfoundation.org/biennials/biennial-at-the-end-of-the-world/ (accessed 2013).

55 Juan also has represented the sunflower in Los Girasoles (2005), which was executed at the Esperanza Base in Antarctica. Juan projected images of sunflowers that she had digitally recorded onto the

227 sunflower’s tendency to shift its position in relation to the sun and to close at night in his work. Just as the sun fuels the flower, his sculpture was fueled by the energy that the solar panels collected.

It directed people’s attention to climate change, signaling the importance of increasing environmental awareness.56 It also alluded to the utility of technology in enhancing people’s ability to register these trends and in creating ecologically sound means of producing energy. Fargas’s use of sustainable technology in this sculpture underscored the possibility of using technology to mitigate the negative impact of human activities. Fargas argued, “these flowers function as symbols and witnesses of the constant environmental changes the world is going through,” claiming, “this critical and delicate perspective may be the beginning of a global change of mind in favor and ahead of the weather.”57 The sculpture functioned as an interface between people and the natural and technological worlds of which they are part.

The sculpture’s design and installation played with the boundaries between people’s perception of nature and space. The enlarged, mechanical sunflower diverged from conventional designs of weather stations and deviated from its subject’s natural form. The work altered and documented the landscape, forcing the viewer to reconsider weather, art and technology as parts of the environment.

Buenos Aires Glacier. She had recorded the images in the Pampas. The event merged these two distant locales. Her action pointed to the need to create more solid conceptual links between these locations and the ecological systems that support species and environmental conditions. Also, see Sabrina Cucullansky, “Tecnología Natural,” Lanacion.com, July 22, 2005, http://www.lanacion.com.ar/723293-tecnologia- natural (accessed 2012).

56 Fargas stated that his work carries a social and environmental message. “Sunflower – Centinela del Cambio Climático,” information packet.

57 Fargas, “Sunflower – Centinela del Cambio Climático,” http://joaquinfargas.com.ar/en/sunflower.htm.

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Fargas’s Proyecto Utopía explored the tension between people’s aspirations to stabilize and improve current ecosystems and the natural process of entropy. He developed the series of works during his residency in Antarctica in 2011. His work was shown at the exhibition Sur Polar III, which was held at the Universidad de Tres de

Febrero in Buenos Aires. His project consisted of two sculptures and a video installation:

Don Quijote contra el cambio climático, Extinción – Creación, and Quiescencia (Figures

83-85). Each considered the temporal dimensions of climate change. His works responded to present circumstances in relation to speculation of the past and the future.

Don Quijote contra el cambio climático was comprised of three windmills that were installed temporarily in Antarctica’s landscape and later as part of Sur Polar III.

The relatively small windmills generated cool air, signaling the need to create technologies that would help regulate rising temperatures and slow glacial melting.58 The kinetic, metal towers were originally arranged closely together in a row on the Buenos

Aires Glacier near the Esperanza Base (Figure 86). The structures were built from lightweight materials that were easy to transport and assemble. Video, audio recordings and photography were used to show the project to visitors at the Sur Polar III exhibition.

His sculptures were installed in the gallery and appeared as a prototype for Fargas’s

“invention.”59 The inclusion of the sculptures in the gallery alongside documentation of them in Antarctica’s barren landscape contextualized the sculptures and created visual coherence between the two sites.

58 Joaquín Fargas, Studio Visit, 2012, Buenos Aires.

59 Joquin Fargas, “Proyecto Utopia,” http://joaquinfargas.com.ar/es/uopia.htm (accessed 2012).

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Fargas’s sculpture presented technology as a symbol of hope for the creation of tools in alleviating large-scale environmental challenges. Yet Fargas also recognized that there is not a perfect solution or a utopian future.60 The title of his project is ironic. In his remarks about this work, he compared climate change to other major catastrophes like

Chernobyl and oil spills. He argued that these crises were caused by globalization’s affects and that people need to act together to confront these issues.61 Fargas explained his conception of Antarctica as “un continente entre la utopia y la distopía.”62 Fargas employed Don Quixote’s battle as a metaphor, stating that “quien lucho contra los molinos de viento, pensando que eran unos gigantes que querían someter al muñeco, en una pelea estéril e imposible.”63 Fargas’s evocation of the protagonist’s mistaken conception of windmills as enemies could be read as an indictment against those who mistakenly see technology as the enemy in a romantic crusade for the achievement of an imagined state of ecological harmony.

Fargas’s allusions to Don Quixote and utopia in his title underscore the impossibility of finding a solution to the problem. The windmills’ ineffectiveness in actually altering the earth’s temperature points to the impossibility of “winning” the fight against climate change. Yet, despite Fargas’s position, he created work that encourages engagement with the issue and argues for the importance of continued efforts to develop

60 Fargas referenced Gödel and his theory that perfect arithmetic is impossible.

61 Joaquín Fargas, “Proyecto Utopía,” http://joaquinfargas.com.ar/es/utopia.htm (accessed 2012).

62 Ibid. Also see Fargas’s presentation of his work in the broadcast “Simbiosis entre el Arte, la Ciencia y la Tecnología,” TEDxRíodelaPlata, November 2011 (accessed 2012).

63 Fargas, “Proyecto Utopía,” http://joaquinfargas.com.ar/es/utopia.htm.

230 creative designs to negotiate people’s changing roles within a larger interconnected system and to adapt to insurmountable changes.

Extinción – Creación was a whimsical meditation on adaptation and the cycle of life and death or evolution. The work was comprised of a series of solar powered, mechanized plants and animals. The sculptures reflected on environmental change, extinction and invention as a cycle that connects the past to the future. His work alluded to the possibility of recreating extinct species through advancements in science and technology.64 These works again utilized solar energy, purporting the value of this technology and demonstrating the importance of the sun in sustaining life.

Quiescencia offered a serene representation of Antarctica’s landscape. The video installation consisted of three flat screens that captured footage of ice floes that appeared stranded in the water or lodged against an outcropping of rock. The images were accompanied by the sound of waves. Fargas asserted that these moving images were intended to demonstrate the unique quality of this environment and to provide people a chance to contemplate nature without the distractions of their everyday life.65 Although, his images are calming to view, the imagery also highlights the process of change even in a relatively peaceful scene.

Fargas’s designs are captivating and have the potential to appeal to diverse audiences. They are symbolic calls for future action and environmental awareness. His approach to the issue of climate change addresses the limitations of human action, while also heralding technology’s practical potential and art’s symbolic one in confronting such problems. Despite Fargas’s assertion that the attainment of utopia is impossible, he

64 Fargas, “Proyecto Utopía,” information packet, provided by Fargas in 2012.

65 Ibid.

231 presented a streamlined vision of technology and invention that do not account for the ethical questions or problems that some uses of it could present. Yet, it is perhaps the optimism and the irony of works like Don Quijote contra el cambio climático that make his works appealing. They ask the public to simply pay attention to an issue, which in itself, is a significant task.

FARGAS AND GRUPO PROYECTO BIOPUS: VIRTUAL POSSIBILITIES

The projects examined in this section explore the impact that people’s behavior has on ecosystems. Fargas and Grupo Proyecto Biopus employ new technologies that change the manner that individuals engage with art and encourage the participant’s own reflection on broader questions about social behavior and what it means to be one part of a system. Joaquin Fargas’s Biogame (2011) is part of Crédito Ambiental, a larger conceptual project that responds to humans’ irresponsible use of natural resources and the degradation of these resources through global processes and human action. Fargas considers biopolitics and bioethics as theoretical foundations for this work.66 The design of the project itself is a continuation of his exploration of ecological themes, globalization and scale. Proyecto Biosfera (2006–2012) provides an interesting counterpoint to

Biogame (Figure 87). Biosfera is an example of bio art that consists of small globes,

66 Fargas explained the inception of biopolitics and bioethics in his description of Biogame, stating that biopolitics was introduced by Michel Foucault in order to express the relationship between the state and human life in general and that bioethics was first used as a term in 1927 by Fritz Jahr. Jahr defined the concept of “imperative bioethics,” which reflected on human’s relationship with plants and animals. In 1970, Van Rensselear Potter used this word in an expansive manner in various publications, connecting biology, ecology and medicine. Fargas, “Crédito Ambiental / Biogame,” http://joaquinfargas.com.ar/es/biogame.htm.

232 which contain individual, closed ecosystems (Figure 88).67 By reducing the scale of an ecosystem to a contained, handheld object, the vastness of the world is reduced to its basic elements and the responsibility of the individual is made more apparent.68 These mini-ecosystems are educational and permit open contemplation.

Fargas sought to make individual participant’s aware of the global repercussions of individual actions in Biogame. Fargas created a virtual system in which each person is allotted a set amount of “environmental credit.” This credit is intended to cap each person’s consumption during his or her lifetime. His conceptual plan is meant to raise consciousness about consumption. He proposed the arbitrary date of 2060 as a deadline for the activation of his proposal. His proposal functions symbolically, while also suggesting that practical action must be taken to curb consumption. His model stresses the significance of individual action and therefore empowers the individual within the system. Fargas’s project is centered on the idea of limits, encouraging concern with the depletion of natural resources worldwide.

Biogame was designed to educate future generations to become effective environmental stewards.69 The game begins by asking the participant ten multiple-choice questions. One of the possible answers would have a positive effect on the planet and the others would have negative environmental consequences. After the participant answers each question, either a green or red pixel appears on a map of the world; the color green

67 Fargas has realized numerous variations of this project since its inception in December of 2006. The works vary in scale. “Proyecto Biosfera,” information packet, provided by Fargas.

68 “Simbiosis entre el Arte, la Ciencia y la Tecnología,” TEDexriodelaplata.

69 Fargas stated “la tierra es un sistema cerrado que a los ojos del humano se presenta como infinito pero sus recursos son limitados y el impacto que ejercen la persona sobre él hace ya varias generaciones que se hace notar.” Fargas, “Crédito Ambiental / Biogame,” http://joaquinfargas.com.ar/es/biogame.htm (accessed 2012).

233 signifies that the selection would benefit the greater natural and social community and the red symbolizes a negative impact.70 The objective of the game is to protect the planet. It demands consideration of the entire system and one’s responsibility to others as a member of a global community.

People are made to consider one’s own success in relation to the well being of others. Curator Nina Colosi maintained, “artists can play a role in creating a societal mindset aimed towards the resolution of the conflict of nature vs. human consumption.”71

Clearly, Fargas attempted to accomplish this feat with his project Biogame.

Distribution and consumption are the foundation of the conflict that he presents. Fargas explained “el propone como una plataforma desde la cual lanzar propuestas entre utópicas u distópicas en relación a la vida futura en el planeta y sus posibilidades de sustentabilidad o extinción.”72 Biogame and Biosfera each address the obstacle of invisibility that scale creates. Rather than using technology to provide the individual with more information, Fargas’s projects seek to help people understand the significance of their actions and relationship to the planet, creating pathways for them to begin to re- conceptualize this complicated bond.

Grupo Proyecto Biopus73 is representative of emerging Argentine artists who are interested in the potential of generative technologies in art.74 Biopus designs experimental

70 Fargas, “Crédito Ambiental / Biogame.”

71 Nina Colosi, “Artists as Cultural Diplomats for the Environment,” Sur Polar, 42.

72 Fargas, “Crédito Ambiental / Biogame.”

73 Emiliano Causa and Christian Silva began to collaborate in 2001. In 2002, Júlian Isacch and Tarcisio Pirotta joined the pair and decided to found the collective Grupo Proyecto Biopus. The name unites the words “bio” and “opus” in order to reference their search to create “living works.” Matías Romero Costa joined the collective later that year. Emiliano Causa, multimedia artist and systems engineer, and Matias Romero Costas, multimedia artist, composer and educator, are now the primary active

234 projects, using software that responds directly to collective interactions, which generate music and/or direct some aspect of the work’s visual components or function.

Participants engage with a system that has basic parameters; the work is created through visitors’ involvement. Their closed-systems have the potential to encourage more conscientious action in that people are made aware that individual actions have larger, unforeseen consequences within a greater system. The group’s art is embedded with critical reflections about art and society and existential questions.

Some of the collective’s recent projects have directly addressed environmental issues. They are tied to a line of work that considers human systems as joined.75

Coexistencia (2011) was an artificial replication of a natural environment in which participants were asked to interact with stuffed animals that represented actual species

(Figure 89). It was designed by Emilano Causa, Matias Romero Costas, Ezequiel Rivero and David Bedoian. The work simulated an ecosystem with a limited supply of resources.76 Sizeable forms of stuffed animals filled the darkened gallery. Each was overlaid with video mapping and installed in the space. Patterns of glowing color reflected across the surface of these forms while they were “alive,” producing music in members. Interview with Emilano Causa, Buenos Aires, 2012 and Emiliano Causa, “Grupo Proyecto Biopus, una búsqueda en el arte interactivo,” www.biopus.com.ar, 2009 (accessed 2012). I will refer to the group as Biopus throughout the rest of the chapter.

74 Arti Cultores and Juan Pablo Ferlat are two other examples of artists who use technology in inventive ways that consider one’s relationship to nature and nature’s ties to new technologies. Arti Cultores uses social media to inspire guerrilla seed plantings in urban spaces. Ferlat’s recent work on Máquina Mnemosyne would be fueled by solar energy and produce self-portraits. The work is generative and self-sufficient, but also mimics the cycles of nature. The production and destruction of self-portraits also humanizes the work and links the individual to the cycle of nature.

75 For example, Grupo Proyecto Biopus created Vida Liquida (2010), Sobre la Falta (2008) and Sensible (2007), which all engage with the idea of a natural ecosystem and / or the societal consumption of natural resources.

76 Grupo Proyecto Biopus, www.biopus.com.ar/obras/coexistencia/index.html (accessed 2012).

235 real-time. Visitors received instructions on how to interact with the piece. Participants were invited to pick the animals up and move them. However, the stuffed animals also need a certain amount of inactive time to recharge, meaning that there is a limit to how long people can actively engage with them.

This simulation intended to create an experience in which participants self- consciously considered the impact that their actions have on other living entities.

The work reflected on the idea of apocalypse and functioned as a metaphor for nature.

More specifically, the group sought to create an experience that replicated one’s travel to an exotic place where he or she is compelled to consume all the resources because of the appeal of resources that seem new. Biopus explained “esta naturaleza invita a participar, seduciendo al público con su música y colores, pero luego de un tiempo, las personas descubren que el abuso en esta interacción excesiva del público rompe.”77 In other words, people inevitably disrupted the balance of the ecosystem. In this instance, this disruption was signaled by the animals ceasing to produce music. The installation’s ecosystem could only become productive again after the animals rested and their energy was restored. The installation presented a virtual microcosm of the planet, suggesting that individuals should be attuned to the needs of other species and the limitations of natural resources.

This project, like Fargas’s Biogame, used interactive experience to make people’s role within a global system more apparent.

77 Grupo Proyecto Biopus, “Coexistencia,” http://www.biopus.com.ar/obras/coexistencia/index.html (accessed 2012).

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GLOBAL ECOLOGICAL CRISES AND ART’S LIMITS

The projects examined in this chapter highlight the filters through which contemporary conceptions of nature are imagined. The notion of ecological crisis and the impact of globalization and climate change are visually translated to the viewer. Each artist confronted various aspects of the problems created by scale, invisibility, representation and the utopian and dystopian views that people project upon the world. In each of these projects, the past and/or the future is negotiated through representations, inventions and simulations of the present. In these works, the sciences and technological simulations or tools are used to reassess the complexity of the ecological challenges and realities that people are participants in, making these overwhelming systems accessible through technology and aesthetics that play with scale and the parameters of engagement.

This chapter’s focal projects experimented with diminishing the distance between individuals, landscapes, and environmental phenomena, attempting to lessen the threat of global scale and discourage apathy. In the catalogues for the works explored in this chapter, the curators and other artists and critics reflected on art’s potential and its limitations in addressing ecological crises. An analysis of critical statements about art about environmental challenges supports the notion that art is capable of communicating stories, evoking feeling and presenting layered mediations on ecological crises as partly ethical and philosophical dilemmas. Yet, art, like any other approach, inevitably does not present fully satisfying presentations of “nature” or ecological problems.

Finis Dunaway’s “Seeing Global Warming: Contemporary Art and the Fate of the

Planet” (2009) encouraged a shift in art’s tone about environmental issues from a negative, didactic one to a more intimate and constructive approach. He offered a positive

237 critique of curator Lucy Lippard’s 2007 exhibition Weather Report: Art and Climate

Change. His analysis highlighted art’s potential to help people understand the

“humanistic dimensions” and their personal stake in climate change.78 Dunaway argued,

“Weather Report, at its best, gestured toward a promising vision of environmentalism, an emotive shift from a politics based solely on fear and sacrifice to one based on hope and pleasure too.”79 His analysis of the exhibition rested on his belief that “apocalyptic imagery” does not spur engagement or action and that data or iconic images meant to evoke concern have proven insufficient.80 These tactics can repel and alienate people, rather than making them feel personally engaged. Dunaway, and the parameters of

Lippard’s exhibition, promoted collaborations between scientists and artists, site-specific and interactive work.

In the catalogue for Getting Over, Corrine Sacca Abadi argued, “in order to effect a significant change in the state of affairs it is not enough to achieve ecological awareness and a new political will.”81 Her statement supported Dunaway’s claim that something beyond the distribution of information or “apocalyptic imagery” is needed to incite societal change. Abadi framed her view in relation to Félix Guattari’s book Three

78 Dunaway, “Seeing Global Warming,” 10.

79 Ibid., 11.

80 Ibid., 10. Dunaway is currently working on the book-length project From the Atomic Bomb to Global Warming: The Environmental Crisis in American Visual Culture. He argued “climate change seems too vast and overwhelming: the apocalyptic imagery associated with it, paradoxically, may foster complacency and pessimism.”

81 Corrine Sacca Abadi, “Andrea Juan: Getting Over to a New Illusion,” Getting Over, 49.

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Ecologies (first published in French in 1989), arguing for a consideration of ecology as multiple and “interdependent.”82 This needed shift is discursive and conceptual.

This pluralistic vision of the environment and the connection between the local and the global, the individual and the sublime nature of the crisis at hand, is created or implied through selected artists’ use of digital technology, aesthetics and metaphors to encourage reflection on human’s relationship to nature and causation of environmental catastrophes. Teresa Riccardi’s review of the Bienal del Fin del Mundo described the difficulty that artists had in addressing the biennial’s principal theme: “the polar environmental situation, the sustainability of circumpolar societies or the interconnection between polar and global processes.”83 Riccardi argued environmental issues “. . . were little understood by the public and by some of the artists” and that the density of this topic “. . . require[d] a more complex exercise than a mere signaling.”84 Her point is valid. How much information is sufficient? How much data is too much?

The artists in this chapter have sought to teach through experiential means more so than through the transmission of specific data. It is possible that this approach could lead to a greater degree of self-awareness as an active member of a global community or interest in the topic, but it is equally possible that some works err on an oversimplified gesture to issues like climate change. Yet Nina Colosi observed “their [the artists’] aesthetic responses to the landscape can provide the vital emotional connection that can

82 Ibid. She stated, “Felix Guattari asserts that an ecological-ecosophic revolution can only be achieved on a planetary scale, as part of an essential cultural, political and social revolution.”

83 Riccardi, “1st Biennial of the End of the World 2007,” 1. Marcelo Giménez and Alicia Romero directed the education project Aves Migratorias in collaboration with the Edith Matzen Hirsch and Fernando Goin schools and Prácticas Sensibles. Juan’s video installation Metano, work by Charly Nijensohn and Jorge Fargas’s Sunflower – Centinela del Cambio Climático were exhibited.

84 Ibid., 1.

239 be effective in conveying to the public that the Poles are integral components of the Earth system that respond to and drive changes elsewhere on the planet.”85 Colosi’s remark, like Dunaway’s evaluation of Weather Report, argued for the importance of emotional appeal in combating apathy and overcoming a disconnected view of environmental issues.

Such comments spotlight the fluid and contested role of the contemporary artist, the wide range of environmental projects, and the debate over effective tactics.86 The problem of representing global environmental challenges lays in the fact that climate change, globalization and the transformation that the natural environment is undergoing are each impossible to represent in their entirety and definitions and possible future outcomes of these phenomena are disputed. The French art critic and curator Annick

Bureaud astutely stated that the works in Sur Polar were situated “between a kind of new realism based on technological instruments and a metaphoric embodiment, the artworks build this dialectic link between the elsewhere and the here of the global mind.”87 This link spans geographic distance and time. The works collectively create a constellation of gestures that unite scientific inquiry and human emotion, the known and projected fear and desire about the unknown.

In Amanda Boetzkes analysis of Land Art of the late 1960s and contemporary projects by artists such as Olafur Eliasson in relation to phenomenology, Boetzkes makes some important arguments about the difficulty in representing nature and the use of

85 Colosi, “Artists as Cultural Diplomats for the Environment,” 42.

86 Zabala, “Images of the Catastrophe,” 52. Zabala argued in his essay for the catalogue Getting Over, “in an era of the image, the so-called social function of art is not only unpredictable but also temporary and uncertain.”

87 Annick Bureaud, “Extremities at the Heart—Connecting (with) the Poles,” Sur Polar, 12.

240 technology as a tool in mediating a simulated encounter. She explained, “ . . . the earth for us is not a mere thing with clear boundaries, but rather the essential terrain that orients all perception.”88 Drawing from Jean-Luc Nancy’s writings on eco-technology, she wrote

“. . . there is no nature that is not thought through ecotechnology, through a reductive biological model, through conservation, resource management, sustainability or environmental crisis . . .”89 In other words, nature is primarily considered in relation to its social and economic function and the systems that have been established to mediate it.

Art, however, as Boetzkes suggested, permits a means to consider or represent nature beyond the parameters of sustainability, management, crisis and conservation, even while it touches on these issues.

Juan, Fargas and Biopus created works that treated climate change and the depletion of natural resources not only with creativity, but also with self-consciousness about the consequences of people’s collective impact and the limitations of individual actions to remedy these situations. These works included proposals for conscientious action and appeals for a greater awareness of the environment and one’s place in it.

Science and technology inform the art, but are also positioned as integral tools in explaining present conditions and acclimating the public to unforeseen future changes.

The artists cast technology as either a catalyst for the destruction of nature or as a tool to progress towards a utopian future. In any case, all of the artists discussed in this chapter have embraced science and technology as necessary and defining parts of one’s existence. Virtual scenarios and inventions are displayed to make the invisibility and

88 Amanda Boetzkes, The Ethics of Earth Art (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 15.

89 Ibid., 104.

241 inaccessibility of ecological crises such as climate change or the possibility of resource depletion tangible to a slightly broader audience. The works by each artist reflect conflicting sentiments of wonderment and fear, desire for control, knowledge of the limited impact of their actions and of representation itself. Their projects indicate not only the common human desire to control “nature” through scientific research, political mandates, economic incentives and technological adaptations, but also the conflict between this desire and forces that are beyond an individual’s control.

242

CONCLUSION

This dissertation explored how a selection of contemporary Argentine artists responded to ecological crises through a negotiation of scales, ranging from the individual to the global. Their work is representative of a current trend in which relationships between people and their environment are examined as part of intersecting biological, political, sociological and economic systems. I argued that my selection of artists’ works contended with the conflict caused by industrial development and neoliberal economic policies and/or reconsidered the concept of nature and individuals’ relationship to it, shifting the dialogue to questions of place, engagement and adaptability. Artists grappled with these issues, promoting a multifaceted image of the earth and its relationship to people. Together, the works evidence the significance of a pluralistic vision of the environment that is determined by the physical and cultural particularities of a given place and its position within an international network.

Central to this dissertation are two, perhaps understated, themes that connect the entire study: democracy and geographical boundaries. As demonstrated in this dissertation, the natural environment is experienced through its physical manifestation as part of a larger, hybrid ecosystem and is defined through a multiplicity of lenses that simultaneous code one’s surroundings: embedded cultural associations (some retained 243 from the past), political rhetoric and regulations, economic circumstances, and technology. Spatial and temporal divisions are eroding. Yet, this blurring of boundaries does not and should not be interpreted as homogeny. It is clear that the art analyzed in this dissertation reveals that art about the natural environment and ecological crises is a diverse, non-linear field.

Within the local web of producers examined, a palimpsest of historical and present factors defines the environment and local and global awareness and associations define production. The historical division of the land in Argentina, based on the early inception of Buenos Aires as a “lettered city” that was superior to the provinces, was alluded to in the work of Teresa Pereda. Other artists in this network, such as Nicolás

García Uriburu and Grupo Escombros, expressed concern with urban environmental contamination. While this is an issue that many cities encounter, an understanding of the particular significance of the artistic use of public space after the Dirty War and of collective work after the economic crisis of 2001 reveals layers of meaning embedded in the works, demonstrating the importance of context and the strong association that developed between work about democracy and freedom and environmental concern for some artists working in Buenos Aires.

The boundaries between “nature” and built space, between the city and the rest of the nation, and between the city and other international locations are significant. The division between north and south (in addition to labels of western and non-Western, developed and underdeveloped) represents a paradigm of unequal power distribution that was further questioned with the implementation of neoliberal economic policies, beginning in the 1990s. Hierarchical divisions of space, based on such factors as class 244 and cultural values, are revealed through each artist’s utilization of site. In some instances, the artist performs in a site as a means to draw awareness to it as a contested or disregarded area. Artists also engaged sites through the documentation of its environment and its physical cultivation or transformation. The creation of a virtual site serves as a model for a complex, large-scale issue, providing an engaging scenario as a parallel simulation of such challenges as the depletion of natural resources. Many works analyzed in this dissertation utilized technology as a key tool for documenting environmental realities, circulating information, and expanding the viewership or participant network for a given project. Each of these uses of technology shares a common interest in expanding the work’s audience and/or suggesting technology’s potential in developing alternate means of educating people about the environment, mitigating environmental damage or engaging in discourse that could transform the ways that the land is used.

Regardless of the specific intention of each artist, the works proposed a spectrum of limits and possibilities for art. Their works questioned our ability to comprehend the environment. In addition, as Teresa Riccardi has attested, these projects on environment

“may trigger another problem: How to demonstrate these concerns without making it an obvious pedagogical, illustrative process, or oversimplifying a scientific problem.”1

Some artists explored the potential of arts’ aesthetic capacity to ignite discourse about problems, without having to find a solution. Other artists aligned with social movements, working with and forming communities as a means of empowerment and enacting transformation through participation. Whether they were concerned more with presenting abstract, global problems or concrete local ones, each suggested that the environment is a resource that should be respected.

1 Teresa Riccardi, “1st Biennial of the End of the World 2007,” LatinArt.com, 2. 245

The theme of democracy is most apparent in the work of Ala Plástica, which proactively engages with communities and takes legal action to grant people the right to decide what happens to the environment that they live in. This collective is furthest from the practice of a conventional definition of art. The work of Mónica Millán, on the other hand, represents art that is object-based and that is not meant to communicate a particular lofty message about the preservation of the environment. Yet I argue that the scope of her work also engages with the theme of democracy as she meticulously creates drawings, soundscapes and installations that are about the subject of a “nature” and traditions that are removed from the urban view. Her works are a testament to the significance of one’s personal connection to the natural environment. The rest of the works are situated between these two poles represented by Millán and Ala Plástica, each drawing attention to underlying, fundamental questions: who should determine how the natural environment is managed? What is each person’s individual responsibility? What agency do individuals actually have in mitigating ecological crises? What is your connection to the natural environment? How do borders define one’s understanding of the natural environment? Their works collectively exist not as concrete proposals for what should be done or clear, singular representations of what the concepts of land, nature, earth, environment and ecological crisis mean in contemporary society, but as markers of some common trends and facilitators for dialogue. It is our job to respond.

246

Figure 1: Nicolás García Uriburu, Vertical Coloration, Iguazú Falls, 1971. The Museum of Modern Art Library.

247

Figure 2: Exhibition photographs of Berni’s xylographs, Argentine Section in the Italian Pavilion, 31st International Art Exhibition, Venice, Italy, 1962. Antonio Berni: A 40 años del premio de la XXXI Bienal de Venecia, 1962–2002 (Buenos Aires 2002), n.p.

Figure 3: Exhibition photographs of Berni’s xylographs, Argentine Section in the Italian Pavilion, 31st International Art Exhibition, Venice, Italy, 1962. Antonio Berni, n.p. 248

Figure 4: Antonio Berni, Inundación en el barrio de Juanito, oil and mixed-media, 186 x 124 cm, 1961. Antonio Berni (Buenos Aires, 1977), p. 92.

249

Figure 5: Antonio Berni, Juanito cazando pajaritos, 1961, xilo-collage, 174 x 128 cm. Antonio Berni, Plate 50.

250

Figure 6: Antonio Berni, Juanito bañándose, 1961, xilo-collage, 194.5 x 145 cm. Antonio Berni, Plate 53.

251

Figure 7: Antonio Berni, Juanito pescando, 1962, xilo-collage. Antonio Berni, Plate 49.

252

Figure 8: Antonio Berni, Juanito pesca con red, 1961, xilo-collage, 150 x 105 cm. Antonio Berni, Plate 51.

253

Figure 9: Antonio Berni, Juanito con pescado, 1961, xilo-collage, 169 x 126 cm. Antonio Berni, Plate 52.

254

Figure 10: Antonio Berni, Tormenta en la pampa, 1962. Antonio Berni. Plate 57.

255

Figure 11: Antonio Berni, Pampa y Cielo, 1962. Antonio Berni, Plate 58.

256

Figure 12: Nicolás Garcia Uriburu, Coloration of the Grand Canal, Venice, 1968. Uriburu: Utopia of the South (Buenos Aires, 2001), p. 77.

257

Figure 13: Barton Silverman, Photograph of Nicolás García Uriburu’s coloration in the East River, New York City, The New York Times, May 27, 1970. The Museum of Modern Art Library.

258

Figure 14: Nicolás García Uriburu, Portfolio (Manifesto), “Intercontinental Environment of the Waters,” 1973, Silkscreen, 75 x 55 cm. The Museum of Modern Art Library.

259

Figure 15: Nicolás García Uriburu, Latinoamérica reservas del futuro, 1973. Uriburu: Utopia of the South, p. 123.

260

Figure 16: Nicolás García Uriburu, Coloration, Puerto Madero, Dock 3, Buenos Aires, 1992. Uriburu. Utopía del bicentenario, 1810–2010: 200 años de contaminación (Buenos Aires, 2010), n.p.

261

Figure 17: Grupo Escombros, La Ciudad del Arte, Announcement, December 9, 1989, La Plata, Argentina. Fundación Espigas.

262

Figure 18: Grupo Escombros, Sutura, on the cover of La Estética de la Solidaridad: Segundo Manifesto, December 9, 1989, La Plata, Argentina.

263

Figure 19: Grupo Escombros, Siembra, December 9, 1989, La Plata, Argentina. Fundación Espigas.

264

Figure 20: Grupo Escombros and Greenpeace América Latina, Flyer for Recuperar, 1990. Courtesy of artist.

265

Figure 21: Grupo Escombros, Recuperar, Ciudad de Avellaneda, 1990. Courtesy of artist. 266

Figure 22: Grupo Escombros, Crimen Seriado, La Plata, Argentina, June 10, 1995. Courtesy of artist.

267

Figure 23: Grupo Escombros, Crimen Seriado, La Plata, Argentina, June 10, 1995. Courtesy of artist.

268

Figure 24: Grupo Escombros, El Árbol, Crimen Seriado, La Plata, Argentina, June 10, 1995. Courtesy of artist.

269

Figure 25: Greenpeace América Latina and Grupo Escombros Flyer, Map for Recuperar, 1990. Fundación Espigas.

270

Figure 26: Niclás García Uriburu, Tree Plantation, Avenida 9 de Julio, Buenos Aires, July 9, 1987. Uriburu: Utopia of the South, p. 220.

271

Figure 27: Nicolás García Uriburu, Basta de contaminar, left half of banner, 1999. Uriburu: Utopia of the South, p. 284.

272

Figure 28: Nicolás García Uriburu, Empresas Contaminantes Auspician, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2000. Uriburu: Utopia of the South, p. 282.

273

Figure 29: Nicolás García Uriburu, Utopía del Bicentenario: 200 años de contaminación, 1810 – 2010, mixed media, 106 x 128 cm. Uriburu. Utopía del Bicentenario, 1810–2010: 200 años de contaminación, p. 29.

274

Figure 30: Daniel Acosta, Riachuelo box, mixed-media, 1997–1998. Courtesy of artist.

275

Figure 31: Grupo XI Ventanas, Proyecto Ria-Chuelo, La Boca, 1997–1998. Grupo XI Ventanas: Arte acción, 1996–2002 (Buenos Aires), n.p.

276

Figure 32: Grupo XI Ventanas, Quilmes Baja Temporada, Quilmes, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2001. Grupo XI Ventanas: Arte acción, 1996–2002, n.p.

277

Figure 33: Daniel Acosta and Paloma Acosta, Deriva, July 8, 2005, Riachuelo, La Boca, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Courtesy of artist.

278

Figure 34: Daniel Acosta, Deriva, July 8, 2005, Riachuelo, La Boca, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Courtesy of artist.

279

Figure 35: Daniel Acosta, Aire, 1st Festival del Aire, Vela de Coro, Venezuela, August 14, 2007. Daniel Acosta: Proyecto Terra, p. 29.

280

Figure 36: Grupo Escombros, Recuperar, 1990. Courtesy of artist.

281

Figure 37: Grupo Escombros, Agua S.O.S., 1990. Courtesy of artist.

282

Figure 38: Grupo Escombros, El árbol de la vida, organized in San Juan’s Plaza 25 de Mayo on November 4, 2010. Flyer. Courtesy of artist.

283

Figure 39: Grupo Escombros, El Sembrador de Soles, 2002. Pamphlet.

284

Figure 40: Grupo Escombros, Rascacielos, 1990. Proyectos para el desarrollo de los Países Bananeros según las Grandes Potencias, 11. The Museum of Modern Art Library, Queens.

285

Figure 41: Especies emergentes poster, Argentina, 1995. Courtesy of artist.

286

Figure 42: Ala Plástica exhibition, Valorización ecológica y cultural de los humedales del Delta del Paraná, Sala microespacio del Museo del Bellas Artes in La Plata, December 3, 2010. Courtesy of artist.

287

Figure 43: Arrhythmias of Counter-Production: Engaged Art in Argentina, 1995–2011 poster. October 6, 2011–January 20, 2011, University Art Gallery, University of California at San Diego. Courtesy of artist.

288

Figure 44: Flyer for Colony Park public forum. Argentina. July 2011. Courtesy of artist.

289

Figure 45: Ala Plástica, Cartografía original emergente del relevamiento, 60 x 93 cm. 1999. Courtesy of artist.

290

Figure 46: Rafael Santos, Photograph of Magdalena oil spill, 1999–2007, video. Courtesy of artist.

291

Figure 47: Rafael Santos, Photograph of Magdalena oil spill, 1999–2007, video. Courtesy of artist.

292

Figure 48: Rafael Santos, Photograph of Magdalena oil spill, 1999–2007, video. Courtesy of artist.

293

Figure 49: Teresa Pereda, Páginas de artista, 2000. Four wood and glass boxes with soils from different regions of Argentina and inkjet text on handmade paper. Each object is 26 x 36 x 4 cm. Teresa Pereda. Tierra (Buenos Aires, 2008) p. 78. Courtesy of artist.

294

Figure 50: Teresa Pereda, El Libro de las cuatro tierras, 1996–1998.Wooden box with a hand printed book on paper created from soils from Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Neuquén and Misiones provinces and cotton pulp. Box also contains four tubes with soil from these regions. Teresa Pereda. Tierra, p. 74. Courtesy of artist.

295

Figure 51: Teresa Pereda, Itinerario de un país, 1996–2006, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Raúl Lozza, 2007. Teresa Pereda. Tierra, p. 118-119. Courtesy of artist.

296

Figure 52: Mónica Millán, Petrona, pencil drawing on paper, 55 x 75 cm, 2012. Courtesy of artist.

297

Figure 53: Teresa Pereda, Recolección en el Salar: Cita en Jaruma, 2008. Courtesy of artist.

298

Figure 54: Teresa Pereda, Flores para un Desierto, part of Recolección en el Salar: Cita en Jaruma, 2008. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 55: Teresa Pereda, Recolección en la Amazonía: Cita en Morena, 2009. Courtesy of artist.

299

Figure 56: Mónica Millán, Si gano mucho como mucho, si gano poco como poco, pencil on paper drawing, 150 x 200 cm, 2008. Courtesy of artist.

300

Figure 57: Mónica Millán, Picnic a Orillas del Paraná, installation, detail, 2007. Courtesy of artist.

301

Figure 58: Mónica Millán sitting in Picnic a Orillas del Paraná, 2007, Textile, sound and light installation. Approximately 200 x 190 x 220 cm. The sounds were recorded during two trips to the Río Paraná (Posadas, Ombú, Colonia Polana-Posadas, Misiones) in February and March, 2004. Sound assemblage and publication: Mene Savasta Alsina. Courtesy of artist.

302

Figure 59: Mónica Millán, Paisaje Misionero, 2005. Courtesy of artist.

303

Figure 60: Mónica Millán, El Río Bord(e)ado, Photograph from Millán’s expedition down the Río Paraná, 2004. Courtesy of artist.

304

Figure 61: Mónica Millán, El Río Bord(e)ado, pencil drawing on paper, 130 x 104 cm, 2007. Courtesy of artist.

305

Figure 62: Mónica Millán, El Río Bordeado, La Línea Piensa, Exhibition view, Centro Cultural Borges, Buenos Aires, 2009. Courtesy of artist.

306

Figure 63: Mónica Millán, Guaridas in Vértigo de lo lento, Bienal del Cuenca, Ecuador, 2004. Courtesy of artist.

307

Figure 64: Vértigo de lo lento, in the exhibition Tales of Resistance and Change: Artists from Argentina, Frankfurter Kimstverein, 2010. Courtesy of artist.

308

Figure 65: Photograph of Petrona, 2002, Yataity, Paraguay. Courtesy of Mónica Millán.

309

Figure 66: Teresa Pereda, Recolección en el Bosque. Cita en Yatana, Bienal del Fin del Mundo, 2007. Courtesy of artist.

310

Figure 67: Teresa Pereda, Recolección en el Bosque. Cita en Yatana, Bienal del Fin del Mundo, 2007. Courtesy of artist.

311

Figure 68: Andrea Juan, Getting Over installation with artist, Teoría de la catástrofe, 2004, Espacio Fundación Telefónica, Buenos Aires. Courtesy of artist.

312

Figure 69: Andrea Juan, Estratos sonoros en la segunda fase de la teoría de la catástrofe, 2002. Andrea Juan: Getting Over: Hacía una nueva ilusión (Buenos Aires, 2004), p. 43. Courtesy of artist. 313

Figure 70: Andrea Juan, Instalación azul, Getting Over, photo-objects, 2004. Andrea Juan: Getting Over: Hacía una nueva ilusión, p. 22. Courtesy of artist.

314

Figure 71: Andrea Juan, Metano, Bienal del Fin del Mundo, installation diagram, 2007 Andrea Juan, http://www.andreajuan.net. Courtesy of artist.

Figure 72: Andrea Juan, Metano, installation view, Bienal del Fin del Mundo, 2007. Andrea Juan, http://www.andreajuan.net. Courtesy of artist.

315

Figure 73: Andrea Juan, Metano, photograph, 2006. Assistant: Yanina El Kassisse, Collaboration: Roció Souto, Carlos Gutiérrez, Matilde González y Rubén Martinini. Andrea Juan, http://www.andreajuan.net. Courtesy of artist.

316

Figure 74: Andrea Juan, Metano, photograph, 2006. Andrea Juan: Proyecto Antártida, p. 28. Courtesy of artist.

317

Figure 75: Andrea Juan, Metano, photograph, 2006. Andrea Juan: Proyecto Antártida, p. 30. Courtesy of artist.

318

Figure 76: Andrea Juan, El bosque invisible: Serie Azul, 2009. Andrea Juan, http://www.andreajuan.net. Courtesy of artist.

319

Figure 77: Andrea Juan, El bosque invisible: Serie Patagonia, 2008. Andrea Juan, http://www.andreajuan.net. Courtesy of artist.

320

Figure 78: Andrea Juan, El bosque invisible: Serie Antártida, 2010. Andrea Juan, http://www.andreajuan.net. Courtesy of artist.

321

Figure 79: Andrea Juan, El bosque invisible, Antártida 3014, Serie Antártida, photograph, 2010. Courtesy of artist.

322

Figure 80: Andrea Juan, El bosque invisible, Antártida 2323, Serie Antártida, photograph, 2010. Courtesy of artist.

323

Figure 81: Andrea Juan, El bosque invisible: Serie Antártida, 2010. Andrea Juan, http://www.andreajuan.net. Courtesy of artist.

324

Figure 82: Joaquín Fargas, Sunflower – Centinela del Cambio Climático, Ushuaia, Bienal del Fin del Mundo, 2007. Courtesy of artist.

325

Figure 83: Joaquín Fargas, Don quijote contra el Cambio Climático, from Proyecto Utopía, Sur Polar III, Universidad de Tres de Febrero, 2011. Photograph by Lisa Crossman.

326

Figure 84: Joaquín Fargas, Extinción – Creación, from Proyecto Utopía, Antarctica, 2011. Courtesy of artist.

327

Figure 85: Joaquín Fargas, Quiescencia, from Proyecto Utopía, still from one of the videos, Antarctica, 2011. Courtesy of artist.

328

Figure 86: Joaquín Fargas, Don Quijote contra el Cambio Climático, Antarctica, 2011. Courtesy of artist.

329

Figure 87: Joaquín Fargas, Biogame, 2011. Crédito Ambiental information Packet.

330

Figure 88: Joaquín Fargas, Biosfera, 2006–2012, Courtesy of artist.

331

Figure 89: Grupo Proyecto Biopus, Coexistencia, 2011.

332

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ARCHIVES AND LIBRARIES

The Museum of Modern Art Library (Manhattan and Queens)

Fundación Espigas (Buenos Aires)

Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires

Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires)

Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Latinoamericano (La Plata)

Biblioteca Nacional, Hemeroteca, Buenos Aires

INTERVIEWS

Daniel Acosta

Emiliano Causa (Grupo Proyecto Biopus)

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Joaquín Fargas

Juan Pablo Ferlat

Andrea Juan

Alejandro Meitin and Silvina Babich (Ala Plástica)

Mónica Millán

Teresa Pereda

Héctor Puppo (Grupo Escombros)

Rubén Ravera (Director, Museo Histórico Provincial, Parque Ecológico y Cultural Guillermo Enrique Hudson)

Rafael Santos

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BIOGRAPHY

Lisa Crossman is a native of Vermont. She graduated from Northern Arizona

University in 2006 with a BA in Art History. She received a MA from Tulane University in 2008, specializing in the history of modern and contemporary art of Latin America.

Her early graduate work and master’s thesis "Inter-American Perspectives on La Pintura

Contemporánea Norteamericana, 1941" centered on cultural exchange within the

Americas during the 1940s. She continued her studies at Tulane in the Art History and

Latin American Studies joint-degree program. While at Tulane, she conducted research funded by the Tinker Foundation and Tulane’s School of Liberal Arts in Argentina,

Uruguay and Peru. During the latter part of her graduate work, Lisa’s focus shifted to the study of environmental art, which culminated with her dissertation "Contemporary

Argentine Art and Ecological Crises." She has also worked with local art institutions, including the New Orleans Museum of Art. She plans to continue to explore themes related to her past work through her research, teaching, and the development of exhibitions.