Pablo Albarenga’s Seeds of Resistance. Creating awareness by artistic...

Abstract:

This paper explores the audience-oriented aesthetics of the work of photographer Pablo Albarenga (Uruguay). His photo-series Seeds of Resistance (since 2018) serves as a starting point to reflect on the role of art in popularizing shifting ethical attitudes related to knowledge of marginalized or indigenous cultures and their role in struggles against construction projects, exploitation of resources, and the use of violence. In this series, Albarenga creates portraits of indigenous men and women from Ecuador or the Brazilian or Colombian Amazon. He always shows them lying down and shot from above, combining such images with aerial views of territories associated with them ‒ river landscapes in the Amazon, banana plantations marked by monoculture, rivers or shorelines polluted by plastic waste.

The presentation will focus on how the human body and portraits are used in these photographs to “calculate” (Jean Luc Nancy) tangible bodily experiences of resonance for the audience. Furthermore, the paper pursues two goals. Albarenga’s specific “relational” aesthetic will be located within a “long” pictorial tradition of audience address operating through the use of anthropomorphic figures and an aesthetic of corporeality. Religious as well as political-secular motif traditions and stylistic models are addressed. On the other hand, the deviation of the specific aesthetics of Albarenga’s work from this tradition is discussed in detail. In this context, the reclining of the bodies and a related “horizontal” orientation of the representation of things will be discussed, which contrasts with a dominant aesthetic of “verticality”. In addition, the combination of body representation and cartographic representations as they also characterize aerial photography will be examined, alongside the use of aesthetic stylistic devices of the avant-garde such as montage or the serial.

Finally, Albarenga’s project will be set in relation to similar artistic productions such as the series Borders by Shelley Niro (2008), the series Endless Hunger Map by Jonathas de Andrade (2019-2020), or the long-term project Genesis by Sebastião Salgado (published 2013). The images will be methodically interrogated by using tools from political iconology and relational aesthetics.

Anbei einige Bilder alle von Pablo Albarenga in coooperation with various leaders of environmental, opendemocracy ad indigenous inititiatives and communities.