Energy and Aesthetics of Landscape in Latin America: On the Art of Carolina Caycedo and Jeison Sierra

Energy fuels a global network that makes possible technology, capitalism, and contemporary subjectivities. However, the experience of this network differs depending on where energy is consumed and where it is produced. Two contemporary Colombian pictorial works, Jeison Sierra’s Ríos de oro y plata (2016) and Carolina Caycedo’s Dammed Landscape (2013), confront this question by problematizing the pictorial notion of landscape. Landscapes conventionally depict nature as a subject that is observed and dominated, serving the global control of territories and resources. Caycedo and Sierra take up the formal elements of this tradition but put them into crisis. They depict landscapes of Colombian territories affected by energy production. Sierra uses coal to paint the landscape affected by mining, while Caycedo prints a satellite photograph of a river altered by a dam built for a hydroelectric project on concrete blocks (as the ones used to build the dam). Through the use of coal, satellite photography, and concrete blocks as their artistic media, Sierra and Caycedo challenge the ways in which nature is violently forced into the cycle of energy production and subvert the distant, controlling perspective that traditional landscapes have historically offered. Thus their aesthetic projects question both the local and global scales to understand energy and its conflicts.