Blind Spots in the Modern Landscape

• In Event: Sueños de progreso, paisajes en ruinas: política, arquitectura y crisis (I)

Abstract

The landscape, in WJT Mitchell’s oft-cited conception, is simultaneously a spatial and visual category: a site and sight shaped by political projects, technological forces, and cultural covenants. In this presentation, I want to consider the modern landscape in mid-twentieth century Latin America as a hypervisual phenomenon, mediated by recurrent strategies such as aerial viewing, the flattening of geometric space, and the miniaturization of prospective horizons of development through urban spaces or visual media. I propose that this enframing of modern landscapes as seen sites and sights to be seen hinged on pacts of visibility that in turn cast problematic encounters, spaces, and subjects off scene. My main contention is that these blind spots —as I want to conceive them— compel a broader understanding of the modern landscape that diversifies the constructivist canons that commemorate aesthetic innovations as visionary feats.

The analysis will focus on sites of violence and contemporary ruins of the mid-twentieth century military dictatorships of Dominican Republic and Venezuela. Against the dominant imaginaries that equated development to territorial transfiguration and rapid modernisation, I look to traces of state violence and clandestine resistance to contend that modern monumental repertoires materialized not in spite of, but amid frictions caused by contiguous thrusts of construction and destruction, legibility and erasure. My aim is to explore the potential of specific blinds spots as productive phenomena that renegotiate conceptions of the landscape, cultural heritage, and collective memory. I will consider how they disturb the visual pacts that organised the modern landscape; help to unearth biopolitical, ecological, and aesthetic mechanisms set in motion during intense periods of nation building and autocratic statecraft; and how their contemporary status as rubble demands our attention even as ruinous sites are recurrently displaced from public debates and imaginaries.

Author

• Lisa M Blackmore, Universität Zürich