Date
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Presenter 1: Dafne Cruz Porchini, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), “The artist Fermín Revueltas and the Visual Imaginaries of Technology in Mexico: the mural Allegory of Productivity (1934)”

  • Summary: This essay will discuss the visual imaginaries of technology, developed by Fermín Revueltas (1901–35) in one of his last works, 1934 fresco mural Allegory of Productivity, commissioned by the Banco Nacional Hipotecario y de Obras Públicas de México (formerly Banobras). This commission presented the uneven developments between the emergent transformation of urban Mexico. Revueltas--who had participated very actively in the estridentista movement--not only transferred the aesthetic and visual program of modernity into the mural, but he also wanted to include content aimed at fostering a better exploitation of natural resources. The main "character" in this fresco is an engine or dynamo, an artifact also linked to labor. Similarly, the landscape appears populated by electrical cables, towers and chimneys. Revueltas had taken photographs of the industrial and rural environment of Mexico from where he surely took several models that, eventually, inspired some mural sections. In analyzing this large-format work in detail, I provide evidence on how Revueltas evokes a technological and industrial utopia in total correspondence with Mexico's post-revolutionary nationalist project at the time. The essay structure is the following: a) The artist and the mural in the context of postrevolutionary Mexico; b) The machinery aesthetics. A depiction; c) The possible visual models.

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Presenter 2: Leida Fernández Prieto, Institute of History, National Spanish Research Council (CSIC), "Trompe l'oeil of the Nation: Visual Aesthetics, Agriculture, and Slavery in Cuba"

  • Summary: This chapter analyzes the aesthetics of slavery produced by colonial science sites through the Havana Botanical Garden. In other words, it seeks to answer how colonial science contributed to the narrative of whitening through a design of modernity, civilization and urban progress of the city, whose influence continues to this day where there are no architectural elements or monuments that rescue the enslaved within the collective memory of the city. By doing this, I argue that the colonial institution silenced the existence of slavery, including an informal cemetery for the enslaved, based on a design of modernity and leisure for the city that responded to the influence of the beautiful according to the ideal of French aesthetics, which crossed the borders of the Spanish empire. Traditionally, colonial science has been analyzed as uncontaminated by slavery within the historiography of Cuba. Also the aesthetics of slavery has paid more attention to the landscape and sugar factories since ecocriticism. In recent times, we have found new approaches that rescue the voices of the enslaved within the modernity of the city, where my work is inscribed from the intersection of the history of science, aesthetics, and slavery.​