Abstract
Energy fuels a global network that makes possible technology, capitalism, and contemporary subjectivities. However, the experience of this network differs depending on where energy is consumed and where it is produced. Two contemporary Colombian pictorial works, Jeison Sierra’s Ríos de oro y plata (2016) and Carolina Caycedo’s Dammed Landscape (2013), confront this question by problematizing the pictorial notion of landscape. Landscapes conventionally depict nature as a subject that is observed and dominated, serving the global control of territories and resources. Caycedo and Sierra take up the formal elements of this tradition but put them into crisis. They depict landscapes of Colombian territories affected by energy production. Sierra uses coal to paint the landscape affected by mining, while Caycedo prints a satellite photograph of a river altered by a dam built for a hydroelectric project on concrete blocks (as the ones used to build the dam). Through the use of coal, satellite photography, and concrete blocks as their artistic media, Sierra and Caycedo challenge the ways in which nature is violently forced into the cycle of energy production and subvert the distant, controlling perspective that traditional landscapes have historically offered. Thus their aesthetic projects question both the local and global scales to understand energy and its conflicts.
Thinking of energy in terms of aesthetics leads us to encounter a kind of Borgesian “Pascal’s sphere”—something whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere:1 all the technology and the society it has formed, all the economies and the ways in which they constitute us, and all social relations and their impact on the planet are mediated by the production, distribution, and consumption of energy. How can we aesthetically represent energy along with its impact on society, subjectivity, and the planet? Energy is the quintessential commodity that enables all other commodities to exist. It is also an infrastructure—the quintessential infrastructure that makes contemporary global economic and political systems possible.2 As novelist Amitav Ghosh notes, it is almost impossible to effectively represent the planetary and geological scale of destruction of the species using the tools of the novel, as this literary genre is rooted in the experiences and subjects that contribute to this catastrophe.3 In the same vein, artistic forms dealing with energy must shift our gaze so that it ceases to be the environment that we inhabit.4
In this article, I examine two Colombian artworks: Jeison Sierra’s Ríos de oro y plata (2016) and Carolina Caycedo’s Dammed Landscape (2013). Both artists focus on energy production at the site of extraction, where nature is transformed into a commodity to create energy infrastructure. Through the works of these two artists, I aim to explore what kind of aesthetics emerge when energy is viewed from a perspective of what Mary Louise Pratt called a planetary imagination.5 That is, an imagination of time and space that does not seek the universal but moves within spatial and temporal scales that include the historical times of imperialism and coloniality. It also relates to the geological times that give meaning to the Anthropocene and to the interactions between humans and nonhumans. To this end, I want to explore the artistic sensibilities of the Anthropocene, ranging from local and material to the planetary, and the way they relate to artistic traditions.6 As articulated by Jens Andermann, Gabriel Giorgi, and Victoria Saramago, working on environmental aesthetics implies
on the one hand, to reconfigure the sensorium that allows us to imagine, perceive, narrate and think the passage from the global to the planetary; on the other, to re-conceptualize aesthetics—in a tradition that also involves the avant-garde as well as posthuman thinking—in a way that allows us to disrupt received notions of aesthetics and make room to other arrangements of the sensible that register the agency of the non-human and the non-living.7
Works like those of Caycedo and Sierra go in this direction by embracing an aesthetic that forges a connection with the spatiotemporal scale of geological energy while also implicitly incorporating Dominic Boyer’s notion of electropower, which reevaluates modern power dynamics through the analytical lenses of energy.8 If we consider energy to be a commodity embedded in a global economic network and whose history is inseparable from modernity and capitalism,9 we see that the meanings and logic of its power are derived from colonialism. Modernity and capitalist expansion are inextricably linked to the coloniality of power. In particular they are connected to the formation of the European colonial-imperial subject as it relates to the historical construction of Latin America.10 Therefore, “insofar as their colonial history is the very condition that underwrites the emergence of global capitalism, the Americas are also in a differential position in regard to debates about the current ecological emergency and the torsions between the global and the planetary.”11
The works of Sierra and Caycedo address one aspect of this colonial-planetary point of view: they focus on the territories where the production of energy manifests as what Macarena Gómez-Barris refers to as extractive zones, which are “the colonial paradigm, worldview, and technologies that mark out regions of ‘high biodiversity’ in order to reduce life to capitalist resource conversion.”12 Extractivism is fundamental to constructing contemporary neoliberal capitalism even though it is also “as old as modernity itself.”13 For Gómez-Barris, there is a continuity between colonial history and our current extractive economies. To make colonial success possible, territories and populations were transformed into exploitable entities through symbolic, physical, and representational violence.14 The extractive perspective treats territories as commodities, devaluing the hidden realms that connect human and nonhuman diversity. Like the colonial gaze, the extractive view facilitates the restructuring of territories, populations, and natural elements so they can be used for material and immaterial accumulation.15 In this regard the extractive view is an integral part of the Capitalocene—that is, “capitalism as a way of organizing nature—as a multispecies, situated, capitalist world-ecology” as Jason Moore argues.16
In Latin America many artists have critiqued capitalism by resisting the violence of the extractive projects in the region.17 I argue that Sierra and Caycedo articulate the dismantling of the extractive gaze and the imperial logic regarding the territory; moreover, they question artistic forms and traditions by inquiring into the relationship between energy, sensibility, and the Anthropocene. Specifically, Sierra and Caycedo ask how we perceive the territories of energy production by challenging the landscape art form, which has shaped the relationship between territory, nature, and politics and has been part of the configuration of the extractive view. In Western artistic traditions, landscape has played a fundamental role in the configuration of the colonial and the view of territories. Moreover, nonhegemonic takes on this form allow us to understand what is left behind by its colonial view.18 Therefore, I aim to examine Sierra’s Ríos de oro y plata and Caycedo’s Dammed Landscape by considering both how they challenge the landscape perspective and scale as well as their stances regarding catastrophic effects in extractive zones. By invoking the conventional notions of landscape while interrogating its underlying assumptions, these artists put forth sensibilities that estrange our material and visual encounters with energy production.
The Uncanny Landscape of Coal
Colombian painter Jeison Sierra created a series of landscapes about mining, one of which is Ríos de oro y plata (2016) (fig. 1). The foreground of the painting depicts plants, and a small river—colored in gold—runs through it. The background contains mountains and clouds. We normally call this a landscape. However, this view is not serene or majestic, and it lacks the natural beauty or grandeur of nature. Instead it appears to be a barren wasteland, with everything appearing to be of the same lifeless color except for the golden river, which looks like a metallic liquid. The label indicates that the artist used gold acrylic for the river. However, for the rest of the painting, he did not use charcoal, a classic artistic medium processed to fit the needs of artists; rather, he used coal, potentially derived from mines. As such, the painting is made of mining as well as representing it.
Sierra states that his work originates from his personal experiences with the gold mining process in his hometown, Zaragoza, Antioquia, and with the Nechí River.19 Life in this region revolves around gold mining, which has been the main economic activity since the colonial era in the sixteenth century.20 Mining is also a source of political violence and has caused socioenvironmental destruction across the territory. For those who have worked in mining, their view of gold is a mix of hope for development and an awareness of the violence associated with its extraction.21 Sierra’s perspective recognizes this complexity and does not condemn mining. Rather, there is a tension between the familiarity with the mining environment he portrays and its implicit violence. This is a tension between conventional landscape genres and the devastation portrayed by this composition. These are neither simply paintings of a space devastated by mining, nor are they representations of its conflicts. Instead, these landscapes captivate with the allure of gold’s brilliance while simultaneously drawing attention to the destructive forces at play.
Even though the painting has origins in the artist’s experiences with gold, the use of coal as a primary medium is equally significant. While the presence of gold reinforces Sierra’s local perspective on mining, his choice of coal implies not only a local problem but also a wider perspective of the mining industry. Along with oil and gas, coal is one of the most used fossil fuels for energy production, although recent years have witnessed decreasing use even with the overall increase in fossil energy demand caused by the war in Ukraine.22 This is partly because it is one of the most polluting energy sources. Colombia has a unique relationship with coal. Although Colombia uses less coal than other forms of energy, the nation is among the world’s largest exporters of coal, trailing only Indonesia, Australia, and Russia.23 Its mining has been a significant source of revenue for the nation.24 This implies that in Colombia’s collective imagination, coal is not thought of as an energy source but as a commodity. Its presence is felt not in the form of thermoelectric plants but in the deposits that are waiting to be mined. Consequently, regions where coal is extracted exhibit an extractive dynamic: they are territories whose nature has been fundamentally altered as a result of global interests and powers.25
Beyond its practical use, coal possesses aesthetic qualities and a range of associated meanings. The Spanish word carbón translates directly to “coal” in English. However, carbón carries additional meanings and associations beyond the literal element. It can be used metonymically to refer to the carbonization of the atmosphere (as if a “coalization” were happening). Additionally, coal is linked to the steam engine (powered by coal) and the first Industrial Revolution and the planetary transformation that followed. Although it is now an energy commodity in decline, coal has the aesthetic power to appear as one of the primordial matters of the Anthropocene. What kinds of aesthetics can be created using coal as the primary pictorial material to represent the landscape in which it is extracted? This question is linked to the broader question of the relationship between artistic work and capital from both the representational and material perspectives. On one hand, the means of artistic representation can be commodified as materials embedded within the extractive networks of capital. On the other hand, visual mimesis can participate in the commodification of the subject matter, but it can also record and participate in the political processes that resist capitalism’s forms of power over life.26 This tension is especially evident in Sierra, considering the type of landscape it depicts. This is part of a particular aesthetic tradition, and it has both political and geographical dimensions.
Originally, the word landscape (or Landschaft in German) referred to a delimited area or a “land shape.” More specifically, it now refers to an area whose shape is defined by the interactions between its constituent elements, primarily its natural elements. Consequently, it represents the interventions that humans make in a natural area.27 Thus this term defines a geographical space and the nature-culture relationship. By considering energy as a condition for modernity and a commodity that is produced and distributed via global systems, its history and genealogy are tied to colonialism. Therefore, when we consider energy in terms of the location where the materials that enable it are extracted, we are confronted with the interactions between power and nature within this territory—this is the logic of landscape.
In his classic study on the topic, Denis Cosgrove points out that since its origins in the West in the fifteenth century, landscape has primarily been a pictorial concept. Its subsequent development as a geographical category is derived from these assumptions. In Cosgrove’s view, as an aesthetic form landscape was closely linked to the emergence of the bourgeois subject. The notion of the fixed-point perspective determined how landscape was represented on the picture plane and, in turn, how space was thought. The represented nature, which was characterized by static and harmonious natural spaces, created a single point of view and the illusion that space was possessed from a distance. This was a product of the ideology of the bourgeois property owner, and it helped to shape this ideology.28 Moreover, as noted by Philippe Descola, the configuration of perspective and the modes of reproducing nature that contributed to the formation of the European landscape played a pivotal role in solidifying the concept of human existence radically separated from nature. In other words, the history of the Western landscape is inseparable from what Descola refers to as the Great Divide between nature and culture, as well as the notion of a transcendent human subject aiming to establish a hierarchical relation with nonhuman beings.29 Now, because the bourgeois subject is an intricately intertwined imperial subject (that precedes it and enables it), the artistic notion of landscape is inherently influenced and shaped by this interconnection. Specifically, it emerges because of and is made feasible by the persistently expansive imperial gaze that is being directed toward colonized territories.30 If Latin America is essential in shaping modernity and the global imperial systems (and the extractive logic associated with them), then the landscape itself is configured by how imperial powers viewed the dominated territories, including Latin America. From its first manifestations during the colonial period until its consolidation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the notion of landscape has been associated with the imperial control of both nature and the people that inhabit the Americas.31 Imperial subjectivity required a way of seeing non-Europeans; this established non-Europeans as the other and established themselves as European subjects.32 There is an explicit notion that natural space is a place to be converted into a governed territory and then incorporated into the world as commodity. In turn there is an implicit notion of the subject who observes and imagines it. Therefore the hegemonic notion of landscape as a space of social and natural interactions is linked to the aesthetics of the implicit subject that observes and visually domesticates nature as an image. The technique and the ideological presuppositions of the landscape are the products of an “imperial eye”33 that possesses and seeks to dominate; moreover, they produce this domination and subject because they make possible its vision of space.
Landscapes create a perspective that mediates and regulates how humans conceive their relationships with a territory. The territory is the product of a subject, and, simultaneously, it shapes that subject. This occurs implicitly in the mimesis of a natural space or by inhabiting it, seeking to transform and dominate it. In its mimetic dimension, the landscape enables the representation of a domesticated territory; in its spatial dimension, the landscape allows for its organization. It is an invisible subject that is separate from the natural aspects that it seeks to encompass or control.34 This is manifested in what Alain Roger termed the “double artialization” of land by the landscape, either directly, such as in gardening or landscaping (in situ), or in its mimetic visual representation (in visu).35 Indeed, in colonial history, the landscape served as both a mode of perception and an agent of territorial transformation. In considering the British West Indies, Jill Casid argued that empires engaged in altering territories by transplanting plants from diverse latitudes and employing the coerced labor of enslaved individuals who were “transplanted” and forced to integrate into new spaces. This transformation aimed to establish productive plantations. Simultaneously empires crafted seemingly idyllic spaces, presented as natural, which, when examined alongside pictorial and literary depictions, veiled or idealized the coerced labor that underpinned them.36
Jens Andermann argues that the landscape has been a key ideological apparatus of colonialism and global capitalism;37 in turn, it contributes to the internalization of capital in planetary life. The landscape erases spatial and temporal rhythms, both human and more-than-human assemblages, to construct a vision of nature that is stripped of its historical conflict and commodified. It implicitly creates a boundary of the natural, beyond which lies the unrepresented. This overlooked area encompasses the complexity of vegetal and animal life as well as “bacterial agents, lichens, chemicals, mud, rock, and fungi.” In present times, these agents emerge most clearly as the disasters and devastation of extractive capitalism; subsequently, the Capitalocene38 becomes more apparent. However, the landscape fails to account for the overflow of matter that results from the violence of human action.39
Andermann claims that in contemporary art a type of aesthetic representation has emerged in response to “the end of the landscape.” First, this representation critiques the configuration of the observing subject by altering the scale and traditional point of view. This allows it either to get closer and account for the biological and material agents or to step back from the landscape to comprehend what has been overlooked and repressed. According to Andermann, this constitutes a critique not only of the past but also of a future in which what is repressed by the extractive view, in which the landscape participates, comes to the forefront: “In thrusting human and nonhuman bodies, and even nonliving forms of matter such as rock formations and aquifers, into a shared state of precarity, uprootedness, and enmeshment, the end of landscape also puts us face-to-face with matterings that . . . can no longer be witnessed and inhabited as ‘world.’”40
With all this in mind, we can examine the significance of Sierra’s coal landscapes in Ríos de oro y plata. On one hand, its composition (i.e., the way shapes are organized) reflects that of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as the configuration of the river, mountains, and perspective appears conventional. The painting maintains the traditional appearance that, as we saw, is linked to the extractive colonization of nature. On the other hand, in contrast to the traditional landscapes analyzed by Casid and Andermann, where the absence of an explicit representation of conflict aims to generate a false, depoliticized harmony and an image of nature ordered and controlled by the imperial gaze, in Sierra’s painting, the represented space is far from appearing domesticated. These dynamics manifest in the effect of using material from the mine to depict the forms. While the shape of the landscape is preserved, the rivers made of gold, and the land made of coal, carry its unmistakable characteristic of being altered by extractivism but without a reference to the idea of utilitarian gain associated with the extractive view.
The use of pictorial media that comes from what is being represented is not unique to Sierra; in fact, this is a common practice that has regularly been adopted in the context of technological modernization. The rise of capitalist industrialization and technological advances such as photography have revealed the relationship between technology, the forms of exploitation that facilitate it, and the means of artistic representation. The mechanisms that enable the production and reproduction of images have transformed how artists perceive their relationship with the objects of representation, artistic form, and the distribution of images. As a result, forms of the production and distribution of capitalism have become an integral part of the way in which art is created. This is evident in photography and film, but this concept has also influenced the arts in general.41 Following the theories of C. S. Peirce,42 art criticism has called this form of representation indexicality: a relationship of contiguity between reality and the image that represents it. In the cases of film and photography, indexicality implies that the illusion (long since refuted) is not a pictorial decision but a record of the real. However, other art forms since the avant-garde have deliberately incorporated objects of representation into the works, making them the mimesis of the world (the most famous case of this is Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain).43 Beyond these deliberate inclusions, art in general not only formally mimics productive processes, but, often, in its material existence, is itself a trace of the relationship between the capital and the matter that makes it possible.44
This awareness of the material that is used in both artistic and energetic production is present in Ríos de oro y plata. The critical force of Sierra’s landscape is not in the items that are represented (the river, some clouds, some plants) but in the way in which the mimetic act itself is configured. By working with coal from mining, Sierra makes evident the link between the logic of the transformation of nature and the painting itself. However, unlike in Duchamp’s Fountain or the collages of the avant-garde, the material incorporated in the work is not a commodity enjoyed as a final product by consumer society. Rather, in this case, he uses a commodity that sets in motion the industrial system that produces all other commodities. Thus, compared with these others, the indexicality of Sierra’s paintings defamiliarizes a different facet of the relationship between capital and nature. The object has not left the logic of the market to enter the universe of Sierra’s paintings; rather, nature has been transformed from its ecosystemic relationship into energy. Using a material that is very close to the moment of extraction, the materiality of the painting that makes possible the mimesis of the landscape becomes unfamiliar.
While traditional Western landscapes often conceal the process of exploitation or depict it from a distance, in this work coal and gold spill directly onto the canvas. This gives the painting the aesthetics of the “end of the landscape” that was discussed above. In this context, the earth’s materials, which are removed by the energy-driven extractive economy and repressed by the traditional landscapes, resurface.45 Sierra’s portrayal of coal invites us to reconsider our perception of the ubiquity in our lives of what its extraction generates. Rather than being confined to the invisible realm of thermal plant energy, perceived solely as a force facilitating urban life,46 or being an invisible yet ominous contributor to global warming through CO2 emissions, coal now materializes as a tangible medium within the painting—it is an index of a territory turned into an extractive zone. Sierra integrates coal into the painting’s materiality, which links it to its origins in the land. This establishes a continuity between the act of extraction and artistic creation.
In colloquial language, Colombians used the term plata to refer not only to silver but also to money. So while “ríos de oro y plata” might be translated as “rivers of gold and silver,” it can also be “rivers of gold and money,” alluding to the promise of wealth and progress in mining. Simultaneously it also refers to the extracted materials that have displaced all other life; the unending need to extract gold and energy has overburdened human and nonhuman beings for the sake of financial gain. From this point of view the extractive view is revealed without being sheltered by its ideological alibi.
However, despite the constitutive presence of coal and gold in the painting along with their indexicality and the potential evocation of the problematic nature of gold and coal extraction, Sierra’s composition retains elements of the dominant, subject-centered approach to landscape painting. In my view this unresolved tension between media and composition, between the end of the landscape and its prevalence, constitutes the structuring element of Sierra’s aesthetic of landscape.
Hydropower and Countervisuality
People who travel through the Colombian Andes occasionally come across the sight of lakes. In these lakes there are sometimes sailboats or fishing boats. If you are lucky you might catch a glimpse of a concrete wall that reveals the truth: they are hydroelectric dams. Although serene images of these dams may be found in photos at tourist agencies, the dams are primarily seen in photographs from energy and engineering corporations. From the distant perspective of a tourist, one can sense the peaceful and sublime yet always controlled beauty of the still water. It is impossible not to feel wonder at being in front of a lake that did not exist until recent years and understanding that this quiet body of water electrifies a nation. In this way, this is the very realization of the logic of landscape. Nature has been simultaneously transformed in situ (an artificial lake has been created) and in visu, the view of a postcard image, portraying the magnificent peace of this productive new space, integrated to the hegemonic image of dams that “serve state propaganda and corporate public relations agendas that cipher progress through images and discourses of industrialized nature, attesting to a worldview which empowers humans to control rivers through brute force.”47
In Colombia approximately 70 percent of the country’s electricity production is generated by hydroelectric plants. Hydropower is generally perceived as clean energy in terms of climate change; however, this perception does not account for the social and environmental impacts and the damage caused by dams.48 Despite the promises of corporations promoting this source of energy, it is increasingly evident that the benefits of energy generation do not outweigh the environmental and social harms they cause.49
Dammed Landscape (2013) by Colombian-British artist Carolina Caycedo (figs. 2 and 3) depicts the landscape of a hydroelectric dam: El Quimbo in the southern Colombian Andes. However, this is not a conventional representation of a landscape. The installation consists of two concrete blocks on which two images of a river are printed. In one image the river appears altered; in the other, it is practically nonexistent. The installation gives the impression that the images were printed on two fragments of the hydroelectric plant wall. Both images reflect the devastation of the zone and the death of the river.
El Quimbo was the first dam in the country that was built with transnational capital. From the beginning it manifested the problems caused by hydroelectric dams with notable intensity. Since 2008 when the state began promoting the project, the construction has been controversial due to the builders’ noncompliance with regulations and agreements, a lack of understanding of the environmental impacts, and the various forms of violence and displacement it generated. However, the history of this dam is significant for its richness and for the diverse actions taken by affected communities to resist and confront it.50 This confrontation holds special symbolic significance, as it was the second dam built on the Magdalena River, which the Muisca ethnic group named Yuma, “friendly river.” The Magdalena River is considered to be the most important river in Colombia, central to the construction of the country’s collective identity and history of river transportation, and it is also a source of symbols of Colombian nationality.51 The river also has had relationships with populations that date from before colonial times; these relationships go beyond the development and the state’s national identity associated with the river, as indicated by archaeological records.52 Thus the dam is embedded in a political struggle for territory, which can be viewed from two perspectives. On the one hand, corporations and the state perceive it as a strategic supplier of energy and goods that will benefit national development in the global market. On the other hand, the communities that have confronted these powers perceive the territory in general and the river in particular as a living entity with whom they share a bidirectional human-natural relationship.53
Dammed Landscape is inserted into this complex dynamic. The installation is part of the larger Be Dammed project that Carolina Caycedo has been developing since 2012.54 This project emerged from Caycedo’s interest and participation as an artist-activist in the environmental movement against dams that began with the Quimbo and expanded to other dams.55 By creating an aesthetic exploration that integrates research and activism, Caycedo seeks to articulate the perspectives of the affected communities and present their Indigenous knowledge of the region. Thus she puts forward Indigenous and local ways to understand territory, water, and landscape that are not based on a hierarchical radical distinction between humans and nonhumans.56 To achieve this she has incorporated sound recordings, video art, sculptures made with materials she received from the inhabitants, and object books that aim to capture the notions of the river and its inhabitants from a relational perspective.57
In her analysis of Caycedo’s work and its relationship with the social movements that she is connected to and the political issues they confront, Macarena Gómez-Barris points out: “We might pause to consider how hydropower functions on a scale of extractive capitalism that demands exponential, if finite, social and ecological resources. Large dams require expansive infrastructure and intensive capital investments, usurping thousands of acres of land. . . . What conceptual tools allow us to puncture the assumption of dispossession that is embedded in the logic of hydropower?”58 This leads us to contemplate the larger question about the relationship between hydropower and the complex system of energy. Coal extraction causes devastation, which is evident at first glance; in contrast, hydropower operates with a different dynamic. Dam construction does not aim to extract material from a specific place; rather, it transforms the landscape. This is both a representation and a geographical relationship between beings (humans and nonhumans) in a territory. When we consider that a lake is not merely a body of water but is also an ecosystem comprised of the beings that inhabit and surround it, we can begin to fathom the violence that dam construction causes. When a dam is constructed, all beings in the nearby territory see their vital and social dynamics subjected to the logic of turbine operation, which operates in national and international markets. From the perspective of the territory that Caycedo defends in her work, water is violently transformed into an entity serving a corporation. By taking on a predesigned form it loses its essence as nature. The extractive viewpoint perceives this transformation through the commodified aesthetic of a serene and industrially productive marvel—a powerful lake that did not exist before. This lake is not treated as a living being but rather as a resource that has instrumental value—specifically, for the hydropower turbine. This lake exists purely to be exploited, as what Jason Moore calls cheap nature; as such it is a product of the relationship between energy and capital.59
As Gómez-Barris’s rightly notes, Caycedo constructs a countervisuality—that is, a way of disputing the prerogative of power to decide what is visible.60 This is achieved in two ways. First, Caycedo’s installations consider the perspectives of both the human and nonhuman inhabitants of the dammed river, which articulates viewpoints and epistemologies that challenge the dominant narrative of transnational capital. Second, it employs the same technology that corporations use to expose what the hydroelectric companies’ point of view hides.61 The first strategy is evident in most of Caycedo’s works in Be Dammed, as the series is characterized by integrating, both in its process and in the final product, the voice and the point of view of the communities with which it works. It also critiques the limited perspective offered by the landscape, exposing the social and natural dynamics and relationships that escape it.62
In Dammed Landscape Caycedo explores another angle that I want to highlight. In this work the emphasis is not on alternative perspectives but on composing a landscape using precisely the elements of the dominant perspective and subsequently dismantling it. First, the images are printed on concrete blocks. Like Sierra’s Ríos de oro y plata, the material used for energy production has become part of the material of the artistic work itself. In other words, there is an indexical relationship in which the represented object and mimetic device converge. While Sierra’s work focuses on coal (nature transformed into energy), Caycedo’s work indexes the transforming material: the concrete that is turned into a water-retaining wall. Walls represent the primary manifestation of violence against the river caused by dams. In turn this violence becomes part of this work. Second, while Sierra’s compositions evoke landscapes from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Caycedo appeals to a more contemporary type of landscape: aerial photographs. These modern landscapes tend to depict transformed natural spaces as abstract compositions that can either aestheticize destruction or conceal environmental conflicts and their political implications.63 Caycedo’s work challenges the foundations of both traditional and aerial landscapes. She portrays what Jens Andermann calls despaisamiento (un-landscaping): the “cancelation of any relationship between humans and the environment that is not governed by a radical destructiveness.”64 The extreme commodification of the extractive zone leads to the destruction of space, making it impossible to represent the hegemonic notion of landscape.
In its representation and its forms and materials, the installation challenges the notion of the landscape. By constructing a representation of the dam that consists of a fragment of it, the painting also highlights its “un-landscaped” state; in this way the work exposes the scars of a procedure obfuscated by the spatial imagination of electropower. In Sierra the landscape is evoked through the image’s composition; this is achieved by maintaining a traditional distant point of view. However, when this remote gaze, which is characteristic of the bourgeois and imperialist nature of this art form, becomes extreme and the territory is observed not from a distant hill but from space, one wonders about its implications. This viewpoint is not accessible to the human body; it is only made possible by our technological society. While this system is controlled by humans and results from the intensified development of the capitalist modernity project, it is not the same gaze or individual subject that is present in the traditional landscape. The perspective of countless satellites from Google and Starlink turn the entire surface of the earth into the object of algorithmic surveillance and corporate control. In turn this presents a crisis for the modern subject, especially in terms of capturing a landscape with an individual eye and portraying it on a canvas. This highlights the need to consider more than just a colonial gaze. We must embrace the environmental perspective mentioned in the introduction. Caycedo adopts this perspective by using devices that allow us to observe the entire planet. By including a satellite image in a series of installations that reclaim a local perspective that includes the agency of more than humans, by using it to depict the violence the dam inflicts against the territory, and by imprinting it on the material of the dam itself, Caycedo appeals to the various scales of the planetary imagination that was mentioned above.
Caycedo achieves closeness through the material as well as a planetary and geological scale that allows the disaster to be accounted for. This is even more significant when considering the emphasis on Latin America’s place in enunciating the installation. It is not simply a global gaze on a dam; rather, this piece is a planetary-scale composition that is inserted in a group of works that constantly claim a point of view located in the territory and that is articulated through the struggles of its inhabitants. Therefore Caycedo’s work originates from Latin American aesthetic thought, which recognizes its place in the plot of energy production (the ground zero of extractivist capitalism); from there, it claims a planetary vision of extractivism.
However, there is a paradoxical condition of Dammed Landscape: the point of view that allows for the planetary scale of the installation is a technological marvel. Technology here reaches beyond the satellite to the entire network of production that makes it possible, including the society that consumes and orders the world to produce a satellite. Then we can realize that the images are made possible precisely because of the energy society demands of the dam.
This contradiction can be interpreted in two ways. The first is to have a tacit acceptance of the energy required for contemporary aesthetic production. Thus any critique is subsumed by accepting our dependence on the universe that energy and capital have created. Alternatively, a more powerful interpretation is to view the work as a mise-en-scène of the contradiction in the sensibility of today’s society. The landscape depicted is only possible under the conditions of modernity and technology, while it also assumes the ultimate conditions of the material and ideological expansion of the modern project. The installation finds the destruction on which it is based, which reveals its impossibility.
Conclusion: Art, Politics, and the Materiality of Energy
In principle, the works of Sierra and Caycedo that I have explored are modest in their purpose. They depict conflicts in the local territories in which energy production manifests as extractive violence. In this sense they operate within the coordinates of the landscape and they ultimately offer views of a natural-cultural space. There are a few reasons why they may have resorted to this form. Perhaps because we are still heirs to the type of gaze and aesthetics that the processes of constructing imperial modernity have imposed. Any contemporary landscape unavoidably evokes the landscapes of the past and what they signify: the gaze of the enlightened subject that was constructing a planetary consciousness through geography, science, and aesthetics.65
Landscape is an aesthetic device of imagination and spatial ordering. As it was conceived in the colonial past, it is also a device used to construct a subjectivity functional to controlling a territory. The artists’ uses of materials and perspectives simultaneously embrace and dismantle the landscape. They embrace its distant gaze while incorporating the most problematic aspects of the subject matter that they are representing aesthetically. They explore the implications of representing energy extraction using materials. To me this makes sense, because Caycedo and Sierra’s true objects of aesthetic representation are not only the territories affected by the hydroelectric or mining activities but also the ways in which these are articulated through the planetary network we call energy. In this way Caycedo and Sierra take this form of representation to its limit, bringing to the forefront the politics behind these materials before they dissipate into the energy infrastructure of contemporary capitalism.
Notes
Davis and Turpin, Art in the Anthropocene, 3–4; Szeman and Petrocultures Research Group, After Oil, 64–65.
Dussel, “Europa, modernidad y eurocentrismo,” 46–47; Mignolo, Darker Side of the Renaissance, 326–27; nv11543455C52Quijano, Modernidad, identidad y utopía, 93; Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder y clasificación social,” 93–95.
Clavijo-Bernal, “Represando el alto Magdalena,” 77–82; Sánchez Torres, “Cuerpos, agua y emociones,” 32–44.
Blackmore, “Water,” 428–30; Descola, “Landscape as Transfiguration”; Rudas, “Landscape,” 277–79; Blackmore, “Turbulent River Times,” 25.
Caycedo and De Blois, “River.”
Andermann, Tierras en trance (my translation), 216.
