Description: “The Heart of Darkness in the Lacandon Rain Forest” is a talk by Dr. Deborah Dorotinsky, Institute of Aesthetic Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Dorotinsky examines the visual construction of landscape and ethnicity in Mexico, as counterpoints to the post-revolutionary discourse on urban development, the New Man and modernization.
Time: Wed. Feb.15 from 5-6 p.m.
Location: Art Building (ART) 1.120
Admission: Free
Deborah Dorotinsky, Institute of Aesthetic Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), will examine the visual construction of landscape and ethnicity in Mexico, as counterpoint to the Post Revolutionay discourse on urban development, the New Man, and modernization. Photography of indigenous peoples of Mexico grew towards the end of the 19th century together with the documentation of popular types. Photography soon became an artifact in the classification, control, and knowledge production of cultural, social, and gendered otherness.
In 1943 Mañana published a four-part photographic essay on an adventurous field trip undertaken to the Lacandon rain forest by a group of scientists, government officials, and two of the magazine’s journalists. The rhetoric of the journalistic account recaptures the discourse of the 19th century adventure and travel novels characteristic of Colonial discourse. It also turns the rain forest and the Lacandon groups into a Mexican version of Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, wherein inhabitants mark the zero degree of civilization.