Graciela Silvestri, El lugar común, una historia de las figuras de paisaje en el Río de la Plata, Edhasa, Buenos Aires, 2011, 404 pages, $145.00 paperback. ISBN 9789876281171.

Cultural studies have the virtue of distancing themselves from a Hegelian evolutionary understanding of history. Instead, they recognize that knowledge emerges within a finite context and embraces discursive formations that are culturally and historically specific (Foucault, 1997). Within this framework, national images (and representations in general) can thus be understood and studied as social and cultural constructions that are temporally identifiable. Graciela Silvestri’s The Common Place: A History of  Landscape Representations of Río de la Plata  can be situated within this context. “The importance awarded to images in this book does not imply, for sure, their isolation from the discursive storyline in which the images take on meaning” (page 18), argues the author, an architect and historian from the University of La Plata (Argentina).

An important aspect of the book is that it allows one to understand that space is a result of practices which imbue it with sense and meaning. In The Common Place, abstract space thus turns into a landscape; it becomes symbolic and founded on an aesthetics that is temporally as finite as it is dynamic.

In this context, to ask oneself as Silvestri does, “How do we form the territorial image of a country?” is to question, as Bourdieu (1988) did, if it is possible to develop concepts of spatiality without asking oneself how and under what logic they are defined. In other words, it means asking whether it is possible to visualize the spatiality of a country without attempting to understand its historical-cultural conventions.

Silvestri develops a book, as erudite as it is beautiful, that confronts us with a process (or with a history) that deconstructs the making of the “cultural identity” of Argentina. From this perspective, the images and stories, analyzed in the book (including maps, routes, geography lessons, architectural, military and engineering projects, tourist postcards, amongst others) act as mechanisms that form a specific way of seeing and understanding Argentina. They create a collective geographical imagination that ends up defining, orienting, framing, and finally rationalizing, or as Foucault would say, normalizing, the country. And finally, these mechanisms, as indicated by the title of the book, cause this nation-space to transform into a “common place”, which ends up being community and shared physical space. “The term common”, Silvestri argues, “means not being exclusive to anyone, belonging to all; it introduces public space, space that brings us together, joint action; an expansive, multi-scalar, mixed and transregional idea of the country” (page 24).

In this sense, Silvestri’s book avoids falling into a naturalization of the nation-space of Argentina, that is to say, into the idea of an objective territory which has “always” belonged to the nation. By contrast, the country is understood as the result of, as Cosgrove says, “the geographic expression of social and cultural identities” (2002), or, in the author’s words, of “radical historicity” (page 24).

Although this approach can be applied to a national scale, Silvestri concentrates her attention on Río de la Plata, the vast area in which Buenos Aires is located. During the nineteenth century, Silvestri argues,  Río de la Plata was not only the main commercial harbor of a vast interior territory, but it was also the cradle of national discourses. In other words, this area acted as the contextual frame from which the story of the nation emerged. Expressed in yet another way, it acted as the hierarchical location where the discursive production that links the landscape with the homeland took place: “It is in Río de la Plata that the possibilities and the limits of a utopia projected over 'vacant' space, created by words, emerg[ed]” (page 27). In order to invent its future, Argentina needed to reconstruct its past. This was done by establishing the meaning of a second nature, as the author cleverly calls it. Of course, nature existed as an available good, but it was necessary to project another nature that reflected the nation´s new story. A key landscape of this second nature or “national language” (page 243) was the pampa, a landscape that was initially perceived as empty and desolated, but later became narrated as sublime and attractive: “Of course, this Pampean nature is nothing more than an intellectual construct, a landscape created by words …, the new pampa may not be real, but plausible” (pages 246 and 293).  But the pampa is not the only patriotic icon in Silvestri’s story. So are the Puna, the Mendoza Andes, the Iguazu Falls, and the South Lakes (pages 336-37).

This national story, masterfully presented by Silvestri, has its roots in the eighteenth century, when the processes of rationalization of space began. By the end of the century, as he passed through Buenos Aires, traveler Malaspina, for example, articulated beauty and truth through aesthetic conventions established by earlier painters and illustrators. The author discusses this in the first chapter, aptly titled “Natural Beauty”. Harmony and equilibrium were susequently replaced by the sublime, which exaggerates everything and exalts “nature in its extraordinary manifestations”. This new nature supported the patriotic feelings that shaped (and continue to shape) the nation´s landscape. Just as in Chile, whose nation was constructed along the sublime Andes Mountain range, always covered in snow, always imposing, marking boundaries and offering a home, in Argentina an eloquence of images – the immense desert, infinite horizons, furious waterfalls, imposing lakes – personify and fix the expressive panorama that marks the footprints of the new nation, establishing a convention, a common place, around a landscape that is fixed in the cultural eye of the epoch. Thus, the sublime of the pampa, of the waterfall, of the deserts, becomes “the” nature of the new Argentina. As indicated by the title of the second chapter, The Oscillation of Sensitivity, the nineteenth century gives way to the invention of the majestic landscape called nation.

Silvestri tells us that this cultural understanding acquires a range of “national landscapes”. This patriotic language ends up maturing during the first half of the twentieth century, in some kind of “homeland destiny”, the title of the book´s third chapter. Thus, the image and meaning of nation intertwine in a research that, as mentioned, highlights the production process of national identity. In other words, we are faced with a book that searches for the social genesis of such identity.

How do landscapes acquire the characteristics of national landscapes? When and how does a landscape become a “national landscape”? These are questions that Silvestri addresses throughout the entire book. In the end, this book unveils the socio-cultural discourses that established a geographic horizon in the homeland, in the nation, and which became the common place.

Without a doubt, this is a must read for those interested in visualizing processes of space production, in the construction of collective geographical imaginations, and in turn, in understanding the icons through which images and landscapes become reality for a community, in this case for the Argentinean society. 

References

Bourdieu P (1988) Cosas dichas. Buenos Aires: Gedisa.

Cosgrove D (2002) Observando la naturaleza: el paisaje y el sentido europeo de la vista. Asociación de Geógrafos Españoles 34: 63-89.

Foucault M (1997) La arqueología del saber, 18th ed. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores.