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  • Tierras en trance: arte y naturaleza después del paisaje by Jens Andermann
  • Ashley Kerr
KEYWORDS

Nature, Environment, Ecocritism, Art, Latin America, Architecture, Modernity, Climate Change

jens andermann. Tierras en trance: arte y naturaleza después del paisaje. Metales pesados, 2018, 462 pp.

In recent years, wildfires in the Amazon, deadly cold in Texas, and rapidly melting arctic ice have made apparent that our environment is buckling under the weight of human activity. In his timely new book, Tierras en trance: arte y naturaleza después del paisaje, Jens Andermann investigates whether art can provide solutions to the end of the world as we know it: "¿Puede la experiencia estética proveer hoy un 'saber ver' (y un saber tocar, oír, oler) que nos ayude a deshacer el ensamblaje técnico-cognitivo que nos constituyó en sujetos ante un mundo objetivado?" (25).

To answer this question, Andermann examines a vast array of Latin American cultural productions. The works he studies are diverse in nearly every dimension: genre (vanguardista poetry, gardens, guerrilla memoirs, film, installations, happenings, post-dictatorship monuments, bioart, and much more), time (1920 to the present), and geographical origin (although the majority are from Argentina [End Page 258] and Brazil, the two areas Andermann has most extensively studied in the past). Through analysis of these works, he traces the development of "un pensamiento ecológico y político que trabaja por dentro de las formas estéticas" in the region (28). The chronological structure of the text makes the ongoing transformation of the relationship between art and nature clear as Andermann guides his readers from early-twentieth-century understandings of landscape as material and/or symbol to contemporary attempts to make sense of the postnatural Anthropocene, irrevocably altered by human hands. In this later stage, Andermann argues, it is through the aesthetic process that we can reach a state of trance that achieves the necessary breaking down of boundaries between individuals and communities, humans and animals, the cultural and the natural. Only through the trance can we develop new ways of being and knowing that will replace the colonial, neoliberal, and capitalist relationships with nature that have brought us to the brink of collapse.

The first two chapters of Tierras en trance look at landscape in works from approximately 1920–1960, developing a framework of landscape "in visu" and "in situ" that Andermann returns to often. In chapter one, he analyzes the rise of travel by plane, train, and automobile and how the resulting uneven relationships between speed and landscape imprinted their rhythms on Sergei Eisenstein's films, Blaise Cendrars's poetry, and the writings of Roberto Arlt and Mário de Andrade. In contrast to these examples of landscape "in visu," chapter two turns to landscape "in situ," including the gardens of Victoria Ocampo, Luis Barragán, and Roberto Burle Marx, as well as national parks such as the Parque Nahuel Huapí in Argentina. Andermann analyzes these spaces as if they were paintings or poems, examining how they bridged the modern and the natural as well as the cosmopolitan and the national.

In both chapters, Andermann skillfully braids together narratives of physical and environmental changes (for example, automobilism and new forms of tourism that unevenly incorporated peripheral areas into the nation) with analysis of parallel aesthetic changes. The first two chapters also grapple with the points of contact and tensions between Europe and Latin America, from the crisscrossing journeys of Ocampo and her collaborators in Sur to the adaptation of the European ski resort to the landscapes of Argentine Patagonia.

The middle chapter, which Andermann calls the text's "capítulo bisagra," looks at how regionalist literature responded to cosmopolitan modernizing projects by creating new transspecies alliances that could "perfora[r] al escudo inmunitario de la modernidad capitalista" (28). Andermann uses the language of ecocriticism and biopower to develop innovative readings of the novela de la selva, the works of Bernardo Canal Feijóo, and memoirs such as those by Che Guevara, Mario Payeras, and Omar Cabezas. It is here, Andermann argues, that Latin American art began to turn from impressing itself upon the landscape in capitalist and colonial terms to working with the environment...

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