What is important is the content. A journey of artistic expressions in defense of the environment in the Andean region of parallel 42° 1960-2010

Abstract

This forgettable autumn of 2021, five hundred families had just seen their personal utopias destroyed, and a heartfelt solidarity seized everyone. The replacement of a burned cello, a simple piece of news published on Facebook©, made it clear the power that artistic expression has in the Comarca and that which is perceived about the Region. That same artistic expression is one of the most genuine bases of local environmental awareness. That statement about the "lugar de la naturaleza" [place of nature] (Escobar, 2000), has been slowly accumulated through the successive migratory layers that, from the sixties, summoned painters, hippies, pacifists, or just those whose search was to escape from overwhelming machinery of the large cities.

We seek to bring together the burned trees that, intervened in art, are the victims, those burned lenga trees, are perceived like many young people of the 60s and 70s, with the power of the survivors (Gagliano, 2021). Life stories, ingredients of the primordial soup that is cooked in the cauldron of the history of that place: “La Comarca”; generating a synthesis between art and nature. Synthesis tested in the nineties with the intrusion of the new age world and its burden of social individualism, generating a rupture that shows us two different ways of living nature.

We will travel this trail through interviews with key figures, in the search for the "Historiadores de domingo” [Sunday historians] (Fernández and Dalla Corte, 2001) and the artistic work that defends the utopia of preserving the environment and of the "good living".