Colonial echoes in the present: landscapes and audiovisual archives of Binational Patagonia

Abstract

Through an audiovisual corpus composed of six films of various genres: Orelie Antoine, rey de la Patagonia (Narcisa Hirsch, 1983); La película del rey (Carlos Sorin, 1986); Un rey para la Patagonia: una Superpro-ducción Subdesarrollada (Lucas Turturro, 2010); Rey (Niles Atallah, 2017); Gigantes (Natalia Cano, 2020) and Notas para una película (Ignacio Agüero, 2022), we will observe how these record some colonial memories and archives in the Argentine-Chilean Patagonias. We will work with a transdisciplinary methodology that combines studies of transnational history, which seeks points of contact and exchanges between both countries and a description of cinematic poetics with the aim of reflecting on how colonial scars survive in the present and are critically reactivated through cinema. As a result, we propose a relational geography that is evident in the poetics of audiovisuals, which seek to construct border stories, since they have blurred borders between past and present, and between fictional and documentary elements.