We confuse rurality with the idea we have of its value. It is believed that the land is what is represented through productive readings: diagrams, fragments, maps in order to both make inroads into, and make use of the life it contains.

There are several considerations to be taken into account regarding the insertion of the concept of landscape within the urban and western imaginary. From a capitalist logic, the image plays a fundamental role in the production of patterns that subjugate the peripheral – the land and its bodies – as objects of extraction. The idea of landscape is constructed from its echo, from the very data that is collected from it and the surgical incisions that subject it both physically and conceptually.

From the visual practice we seek alternatives of representation that escape the romantic and extractive gaze as a tool of subjugation of the land through the image. We thus initiate a set of anti-landscape exercises, dialoguing with the irruptive forms of the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra’s anti-poetry as a challenge to the prevailing and socially accepted narrative aesthetics. This anti-landscape motivation looks beyond the circumference of the already named and conquered. It aims at its overflows. It embodies the longing to see peripheries without the shadow of sacrifice: not in their immaculate skies and fields, but from the cracks that cry out and break.

We have an enormous duty to the future and to the deconstruction of concepts. With the excavation of narratives concerning the landscape that subdue it from a series of ideas founded by the unleashing of colonial processes and their modern contours. The concepts are agile gusts that carry on their wings mysterious and potent incantations.

The edition of these illustrated pages highlights the construction of the narrative around landscape through a re-edition of the illustrated catalogues of the Expediciones Botánicas [Botanical Expeditions] and the painting of travelling artists in Latin America between the 17th and 19th centuries, in order to establish a review of the current social and environmental conflicts derived from agro-industrial extraction.

This edition is the result of a collaboration between the Centre d’Art La Panera de Lleida, Lo Pati, Centre d’Art de les Terres de l’Ebre and Sala d’Art Jove.