La tierra está en el aire. Imagen y colonización interior

Résumé

A colonisation process is usually understood as a movement from the inside to the outside, as a porous extension of the frontiers. Colonisation has been however a notion adopted to designate also some inner processes of transformation of the own domains. In the recent history of Spain, the National Institute of Colonisation operated between 1939-1973 a transformation of the rural landscape in several regions of the Spanish territory. Through the engineering of large-scale water infrastructures, draining, levelling and the construction of settler towns, it opened landscape to new agricultural practices and technologies, giving rise to an exploitation of the land resources. This unfolding of infrastructures coincided with the first series of aerial orthophotographic pictures mapping the whole Spanish territory. This transformation of the landscape happened then together with a new form of mediation, that of aerial vision. The simultaneous spread of these two surfaces –the terrains oriented to production and their photographic prints in the air- allow us to understand this dual interaction between light and earth in relation to the notion of medianatures proposed by media theorist Jussi Parikka. A double relation where, on the one side, aerial vision exerts its "power to transform, redefine and hybridize nations, territories and cultures in a most material way" -as media theorist Lisa Parks has stated-, and where on the other hand, vision appears as the outcome of a material relation with the surface; citing cultural theorist Ryan Bishop: “If something is visible, touchable, it is de facto a surface, and thus reliant upon some other entity, some other ground, not visible or graspable for its support.” This paper presents the Spanish Inner Colonisation in terms of a material genealogy of the contemporary visual regime, attaching thus to the production of images today a history of forced labour and environmental exploitation.