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Gilda Mantilla, Raimond Chaves Secrets of the Amazon 2011

  • Not on view

Traveling and researching scientific expeditions in Peru, Mantilla and Chaves came across the book Los secretos de la Amazonía: Manual de supervivencia en la selva (Secrets of the Amazon: Survival manual for the jungle). This text was published in 1981 as an account of life in what the author, César Huamán Ramírez, calls “semi-civilized” places. Using a slide projector—a pointedly outdated technological device—Mantilla and Chaves reproduce the book’s claims about life in the Amazon alongside details of grainy, black-and-white photographs of the region. Rather than present the stereotypical colorful images of the region’s natural abundance, the artists render the Amazon as “a kind of anti-landscape”—a series of grayish, bookish, pointillist images devoid of romanticism.

Gallery label from Chosen Memories, April 30–September 9, 2023
Medium
Two sets of eighty 35mm black and white slides
Credit
Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros through the Latin American and Caribbean Fund in honor of Juan Carlos Verme
Object number
675.2017
Department
Media and Performance

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Provenance

Revolver Galería, Lima
Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York and Caracas, 2013
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2017

Exhibition history

Buenos Aires, Universidad Torcuato di Tella, "La Vuelta al Mundo...Cuatro Sesiones de Diapositivas: Obras, Relatos y Proyecciones", August - September 2014

New York, Vera List Center for the Arts, "Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros: Viewing Room", November 16, 2015

Puebla, Mexico, Museo Amparo, “Portadores de sentido,” February 9 - July 22, 2019

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