Paper short abstract:

My presentation will examine Leonel Luna’s artwork La conquista del desierto (2004), which portrays piquetero groups and other demonstrators during the 2001 crisis. I will demonstrate how Luna’s work suggests an interpretation of the crisis that highlights the often side-lined mediation of race in Argentina.

Paper long abstract:

My presentation will examine Leonel Luna's artwork La conquista del desierto (2004), a version of Juan Manuel de Blanes's Ocupación militar del Río Negro (1896). Blanes's epic canvas is the iconic rendering of the Conquest of the Desert, and appears in the back of the 100-peso bill. In La conquista del desierto Luna intervenes the original painting by replacing the figures of Roca, his officers and indigenous people, with photographs of piqueteros and other demonstrators taken during the 2001 protests.

I will demonstrate how, by linking contemporary piquetero groups to 19th-Century indigenous communities, Luna's work suggests an interpretation of the 2001 crisis not only as a financial and political episode but also as an event inscribed in a specific history of political conflict and power relationships that goes back to the very foundation of the modern Argentinian nation-state. Particularly, I will demonstrate how La conquista del desierto highlights the often side-lined mediation of race and racism in the definitions of piquetero and other working-class groups during the crisis and its aftermath, and underscores the continuity of forms of racial domination throughout the country's modern history. Through this, Luna's artwork invites to re-read Argentina's political history and the crisis through the perspective of race and its articulation with other social variables.