|
The action that we present here denounces the celebration of the so-called 'Campaign to the Desert' (1879). That campaign, under the direction of the general Julio Argentino Roca, was a war of extermination launched against the native inhabitants of Patagonia in an epoch of national consolidation. GAC's action consists of a public ceremony of desecration of the monument to the patriotic 'hero,' which is situated in the historical core of downtown Buenos Aires.
The intervention underscores historical continuities between past and present: from the process of territorial colonization of the nation-state opened by the newly created army (representing its first internal job by which it 'modernizes' its potential with the acquisition of Remington rifles to be used against the indians), to the subsequent oligarchic state rule (represented by the Rural Society), to the alliance with transnational capital of the last dictatorship and its continuity in the neo-liberal democracy of the 1990s (represented by the Spanish corporation Repsol which has exploited Patagonian oil wells since that decade of privatization of national companies, and by Benetton).
This problematic continuity interrogates the legitimacy of the state's law, with its demarcation of borders by acts of foundational violence. The grammar of the intervention, with its different graphic styles, elaborates a historical narrative that displays not only a continuity among agents of power, but a constant actualization of the foundational violence that asserts its sovereignty over indigenous territory. This violence reiterates itself constantly despite domestic regime changes and despite major shifts in the planetary hegemonic order (from the oligarchic state with British ties of the nineteenth century that expropriates mapuche land, to today's global corporative capitalism). In 1991, Benetton purchased Patagonian land from a British corporation, becoming the largest landowner in Argentina. GAC designed and posts the following poster, which recasts and reconfigures the graphic discourse of the Italian corporation and its aesthetic of difference. The poster situates a difference that has no accommodation within the market and its flows of capital, a legal disagreement that exposes the violence at the bottom of state legality.
As part of the graphic material GAC also prints and distributes the following 'proposed laws' in support of both the legal actions that mapuches have taken at the local level for the restitution of their land, and the process of restitution of an alternative version of national history and identity. Recommended Articles: “Audiencias y contextos: la historia de ‘Benetton contra los mapuches’” "El espectáculo de la memoria: trauma, performance y política" Diana Taylor http://hemi.nyu.edu/archive/text/hijos2.html
|
