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Lisa Blackmore examines dynamics of hydropower and its contestation by visual, spatial and participatory means in the work of Carolina Caycedo.

In this article, I focus on how water operated as symbolic capital during the notoriously repressive dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (1930–61) in the Dominican Republic. Under his regime, alongside an apex of territorial control and modern aesthetics came a nadir of political freedoms. During Trujillo's tenure, water took on important symbolic and material dimensions as a conduit for authoritarianism: it served as a tool to bind together dictatorial power and spatial order through a mode of territorial and urban design rooted in hubristic hydraulics. With hubristic hydraulics I refer to the strategic ways that water flow was harnessed through infrastructure and choreographed through landscape and monumental architecture to embody and lionize the dictator's power. Channeled into reflecting pools, nationwide irrigation works, and monumental fountains, water functioned at the juncture of aesthetics and politics as an important tool in the modernization of urban space and the territory at large. Water was a strategic resource that enabled Trujillo to be cast as the “arquitecto de la patria nueva” (the architect of a new fatherland), and the ways it was made to flow through modern architecture and infrastructure offer an illuminating means to expose the entanglement of territorial control, urban modernity, and authoritarian politics. more...

This article explores El Helicoide and La Torre de David as remnants of the recurrent boom-and-bust cycles and spectacles of progress associated with Venezuela's ‘magical state’ (Coronil). Their redefinition as ‘phantom pavilions’—constructions designed to symbolise development but haunted by crisis and precariousness—serves as a conceptual tool against the amnesia and hysteria these sites provoke. First, I use it to track the buildings' grandiose designs, subsequent curtailment and modified uses through political and economic history. Second, the concept informs the analysis of recent artworks that summon monumentality and ruination to envisage alternate forms of public engagement with truncated sites. more...

This interdisciplinary book brings into dialogue research on how different fluids and bodies of water are mobilised as liquid ecologies in the arts in Latin America and the Caribbean. Examining the visual arts, including multimedia installations, performance, photography and film, the chapters place diverse fluids and systems of flow in art historical, ecocritical and cultural analytical contexts. The book will be of interest to scholars of art history, cultural studies, environmental humanities, blue humanities, ecocriticism, Latin American and Caribbean studies, and island studies. more...

This article explores theoretical-methodological challenges in researching the formation of collective memory in the wake of dictatorship. The worldwide growth of memory sites suggests space crystallizes memory into stable formations. However, rather than monolithic discourses, environments attest to complex processes of memorialization and willful amnesia. I propose that research-led filmmaking can draw out spaces’ heterogeneous “stories in waiting.” Through the documentary After Trujillo, which revisits memory sites and ruins of Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship from 1930 to 1961 in the Dominican Republic, I assess how working at the interface between research and film can (a) probe space’s testimonial capacity; (b) engage audiences in public debates about violent pasts; and (c) stimulate sustainable discussions through online platforms. Given that films still lack recognition as academic outputs, at stake here is the claim that creative methodologies constitute “a form of research” and “detectable research outputs.” more...

Atendiendo a recientes discusiones sobre las ruinas modernas, este artículo propone que el arte contemporáneo ofrece vías para mirar y relatar estos monumentos truncos sin neutralizarlos como patrimonios nostálgicos ni reducirlos a meras imágenes desprovistas de sus heterogéneas historias. Tomando como caso de estudio El Helicoide —un audaz centro comercial convertido en sede policial— analizo tres instalaciones que capturan el potencial productivo de las ruinas para mostrar el “andamiaje ideológico” (Boym) de la arquitectura y ensayar nuevas formas monumentales (Rancière). more...

The recent passing of Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela from 1999 till 2013, produced a juncture in the nation's imaginary that immediately sparked numerous and diverse commemorative practices. This article explores this sudden demand for a coherent and enduring memory of the late president by analysing different official postures and commemorative strategies. These are initially placed in the context of key historiographical tropes of the Bolivarian Revolution, and then analysed in light of such tropes. Specifically, the discussion identifies a thirst for ‘documents’, used in the broad sense proposed by Jacques Le Goff, which converged on the presidential body, the social body and public space as potential stimuli for memory. In this context, the initial possibilities of embalming Chavez's body, free tattoos of his signature and its use to decorate government buildings, appeal to the archive as a source of authority and as the commencement of history, as Jacques Derrida has it, while extrapolating the ... more...

The growth of internet penetration in Latin America, as digital culture scholars have revealed (Taylor & Pitman, 2013), has seen the emergence of tactical media practitioners who push the boundaries of aesthetic form and received discourses. This article examines the use of performance, photography and social media in works by Venezuelan artist Érika Ordosgoitti to assert that her use of Facebook is a deliberate form of “electronic disturbance” (Critical Art Ensemble, 1994) that expands the traditional spatial and temporal horizons of performance. By shorting conventional circuits for the circulation of art, Ordosgoitti’s practice engages broader audiences in critical debates about normative controls of photography and bodily representation in social media. Ultimately, the article contends that the depiction of artist’s nude body is a critical gesture that replaces the complacent selfie with a contestatory “shareware body”. La croissance de la pénétration de l’Internet en Amérique latine est témoin de l’émergence de professionnels des “media tactiques” qui repoussent les limites de l’esthétique et les discours conventionnels, dont les chercheurs de la culture numérique ont révélé (TAYLOR & Pitman, 2013). Notre article traite la performance, la photographie et les médias sociaux dans l’œuvre d’artiste vénézuéliene Érika Ordosgoitti. Je constate que son utilisation de Facebook fait partie d’une stratégie consciente de la "perturbation électronique" (critical disturbance) (CRITICAL ART ENSEMBLE, 1994) qui élargit les horizons spatiaux et temporels traditionnels de la performance. En faisant une court-circuite de la diffusion conventionnelle de l’art, nous engageons un public plus large dans les débats critiques autour des contrôles normatifs de la photographie et sa représentation corporelle dans les médias sociaux. Á la fin, nous maintenons que la représentation d’Ordosgoitti en corps nu représente un geste critique qui remplace la complaisance de la “selfie” avec un "corps de shareware" contestataire. more...