The representation of physical territory has a vexed history in art. The genre of “landscape” painting has long been defined as much by what it excludes as by what it includes; it is perhaps fittingly ironic that the term itself is now appropriated to describe a visual orientation of an image of any kind. If anything can be a “landscape”—viewed from this level of abstraction, even seascapes are landscapes—what must a contemporary notion of “landscape” in art include to overcome the limits of the genre’s past and its present, all-inclusive blankness?
The work of Cian Dayrit, multi-media artist from the Philippines, argues fiercely for the necessity of the inclusion of the narratives of contention that define land, landscapes and territories. Dayrit’s works interrogate the ways in which art has privileged some narratives over others in the depiction of physical spaces, and how, very often, what is hidden beneath the surface image of a territory is what truly defines it. A subgenre of Dayrit’s works, known as “counter-cartographies,” explicitly examine the ways in which extractive depredations define geographies, and the ways local communities resist their exploitation. We spoke to Dayrit about how art can render the concealed visible, and the ways artists can challenge cultures of extraction.