Dinastía

The representations of the tropics or territitories defined by global imaginaries such as exotic, are a common theme in Ana Maria Millan’s work, who uses as reference audiovisual and cinematographic discourses that belong to mass culture to comment and different scenarios of colonialization and also to revert those uses of otherness made by hegemonic cultures.

Inside fictions of mass consumerism such as cinema, it is common to depict tropical landscape inspired on notions that have been received from colonial times and that have straight connectiosn with christian mithology. The tropical, the jungle, the uncknown and in this series more preciselly we see how the new territories were identified with the notion of hell received from the jew christian tradition.The heat, the noises, the diversity and monstruocity of species bring a perverse attention to a world where traditional and civilized laws do not apply. A space where otherness rules and there is an anarchy difficult to understand for eurocentric cultures.
Western history has created a savage tropic in which the white civilian has perished in its constant and anxious intent to reorganize it following is cultural parameters. Following the above, Millán proposes a model that destabilizes the logics of systems of representation of the tropical landscape, specifically pointing out two german film productions done in Colombia.

Using the same strategy as James Bond that manages to liberate the water in Cochabamba, Bolivia in the movie Quantum of Solace, the german director Werner Herzog has referred to the conquest of the natural resources of the continent and has used landscape as a metaphor for the material and spiritual realization of the self.

Territories without law and order ( also known as no man’s land) are open for explotation, either from a material point of view or on a representational level; this inevitably brings us to the comercialization of landscape and its comodification as part of the folcklore where the appropiation of the primitive, of the indigenous is a form of power aswell as a way of purging historical guilt.