MaPa, Marcas en el Paisaje. Fotografía y Política

Abstract

This article deals with a photographic project called “MaPa, Marks on the Landscape”. This project was made from a reflective and investigative perspective. It talks about the privatization of land, landscape and natural resources in Chile: the sea, minerals, the Mapuche land, the arable land, the water, the air and the mountains. The author travels and captures photographic panoramas of different landscapes as strategies to provide a “guidance” to the viewer, helping to visualize the present occupation of the Chilean landscape. There is a photomontage of a photorealistic render within each panorama. This photomontage inserts a billboard in the landscape. This billboard is made of merging silhouettes from company logos. The author associates these logos with the land exploitation that different companies practice in each landscape. Each fence stresses the image by branding the place as a business record that privatizes the landscape. It also represents an incision or mark. MaPa is a fictionalized photographic art project that tries to visualize a fact as a poetic-political act.