Visions of the Andes: Thinking the Andean Landscape Critically

Building upon Ximena Briceño's recent book Visiones de los Andes: Ensayos críticos sobre el concepto de paisaje y region (Plural & University of Pittsburgh, 2019), co-edited with Jorge Coronado, this talk will discuss how the concepts of ‘landscape’ and ‘region’ operate as mediations between the poles of Nature and Culture in the Andes. Moreover, she contends that asking the double question that served as premise of our book: How does landscape appears in the Andes? and How does the Andes makes part of the concept of landscape? is all the more urgent today vis-à-vis neo-extractivism in the region and the current environmental crisis. 

Ximena Briceño is a lecturer of Latin American literature and culture at Stanford Univerisity since 2008. She holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University and has been a research fellow at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin. Her teaching and research areas include Andean and Latin American literatures and film, animality theories, and cultural consumption. She has been co-coordinator of the research group materia at Stanford since 2014. Her latest book, Visiones de los Andes: Ensayos críticos sobre el concepto de paisaje y region (Plural and University of Pittsburgh), co-edited with Jorge Coronado, is a collection of essays that study landscape with regards to literature, archaeology, art, painting, photography, architecture, environmentalism, and activism in the region. Her current book project studies the artistic retelling of Francis of Assisi’s life and miracles as literary motifs in Latin American literary works from the first half of the twentieth century.

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. LUNCH WILL BE PROVIDED