El Dorado: founding myth, colonial enterprise and imaginary geography. Critical Views on Contemporary Works and Artists from Latin America and the Caribbean.

Abstract

Rethinking the foundational myths, imaginary geographies and their visions of America, enhances El Dorado as a central axis for this study. However, although the powers established made it a source that unleashed the desire for appropriation of the territory and gave golden glow to the desire for expansion and domination of the colonial enterprise with its tireless pursuit of extractivist interests; it is fundamental in this analysis to appreciate the permeability of these genetic symbols towards the critical gaze of artists from Latin America and the Caribbean who revisit that contradictory modern colonial universe, and the very idea of El Dorado, with the interest of discussing other forms of its existence from the critical perspectives of contemporary extractivism. The greed for gold that inhabited after colonial operations has had significant implications and perceptions in his works. It is therefore interesting to reveal the importance of El Dorado as a reference in early colonial times and in the following ones to distinguish it as one of the great American foundational utopias, and to analyze its permanence in time when gold traced the paths of penetration into the territory and the acts of possession, to demonstrate its mode of existence in the gaze of contemporary artists from Latin America and the Caribbean as a critical and decolonial revisitation. A methodology of analysis would be followed based on documentary and visual sources and a selective catalog of works and authors, which propose to reflect on the ways of reactivating these founding imaginaries to make a contribution to the fields of art and visual culture by integrating in an interdisciplinary way issues as vital in our days as the image, the imaginaries, the environmental and social impacts, as well as their devastating effects on the individual and nature.