Portrait of a nation

Portrait of a nation examines José María Velasco’s pastoral landscapes as instruments of surveillance and colonial violence. By juxtaposing ethnographic documentation with Velasco’s landscape paintings rephotographed with a surveillance camera, Victor Arroyo situates video tape and landscape painting as technologies of violence, producing depictions of landscape inaccessible to ordinary gaze. This video piece addresses the complexities of the political geography of race in Mexico, rendering landscape painting and video technologies as surveillance assemblages, normalizing the grounds for colonial violence.