5. Albums, Atlases, and their Afterlives

The first part of this chapter discusses art projects that intervene directly into the books and other materials created by travelling European naturalists of the later colonial period, whose conception of nature has so thoroughly shaped representations of Latin America’s landscapes. I explore projects by Rodrigo Arteaga (Chile), Antonio Bermúdez (Colombia), Claudia Coca (Peru), Tiago Sant’ana (Brazil), Oscar Santillán (Ecuador) and others that stage material interventions or performances in relation to the printed images, atlases, albums and catalogues that recorded the findings of scientific expeditions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As well as combating the particular images of Latin America forged in these works, these artists reflect more broadly on the affordances of different material technologies—such as printing, engravings and the book—used to create and disseminate knowledge. The second part of the chapter brings together projects that engage with the scientific, commercial and artistic afterlives of the iconic images that emerged from Humboldt’s journey across the Americas (1799–1804). Bermúdez demonstrates how Humboldt’s images of Latin American landscapes—such as the famous views of the Chimborazo—live on through different kinds of cultural mediation and commercial accumulation. The relationship between Humboldt’s science and extractivism in Latin America, suggested in a poetic mode by Santillán, is explicitly developed in the expansive Archivo Humboldt (2011–), a set of performances, documentation, and (mock) archives created by Fabiano Kueva (Ecuador). These remediations and re-enactments recuperate archives of all kinds for decolonial purposes, reworking them in ways that decentre the ocularcentric, logocentric bias of Western modernity while exploring the power of published words and images to represent the colonial other.