Portrait of a Nation

José María Velasco is considered one of the most influential artists who made of Mexican geography a symbol for national identity through his landscape paintings. Velasco’s 19th century pastoral landscapes traced the shifting economies of objects in colonial Mexico, validating claims of legality by the settler state. Velasco’s pastoral landscapes aptly depict subjugation and colonial violence as normalized instruments of dispossession.

Portrait of a Nation examines José María Velasco’s pastoral landscapes as instruments of surveillance and colonial violence. By rephotographing Velasco’s landscape paintings with a surveillance camera and re-staging them with the collaboration of the Indigenous P’urhépecha in Mexico, this video piece addresses the complexities of the political geography of race in Mexico, situating video technologies and landscape painting as surveillance assemblages.

Credits

Portrait of a Nation
Single Channel Video
B&W, Stereo
SD Video
11 mins.
2019

A video by Victor Arroyo

Re-photography by Oswaldo Toledano
Post-production supervising by Oswaldo Toledano
Sound design by Christian Olsen

Preview 3 mins.