The herds in the Argentine pampas landscape. A heterochronic journey through visual and literary images of the 19th and 21st centuries

Abstract

Based on a corpus of images taken from the Argentine visual arts and literature of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century, this paper analyzes the herds in the Argentina pampas as a mythological machine that is opposed to the myths of the captives and the desert. Just as these have been functional to the configuration of the nation, the myths of the herds bring with them other ways of being together and other spaces. The images studied allow us to reflect on the conception of nature and landscape. The herds are, as it is argued throughout the article, the figures and the figures machines of a non-andropic or anthropic nature. The Pampean landscape is not a desert, it is, instead, a field of multiple encounters and interactions.