Imperfect media and the poetics of indigenous video in Latin America

In May 1998 the Eighth International Congress on Mental Health, Alcohol, and Drugs, held in Santiago, Chile, promoted its agenda with artwork featuring the image of a Mapuche woman superimposed on that of a brain. The woman's image had been grossly recontextualized, cut and pasted from a classic ethnographic photograph taken in the early 1920s. The Coordinara Nacional Indianista de Chile delivered a strong public response to the organizers of the conference: “We were stripped out of our land. We were deprived of our gods and language. We were brought alcohol and venereal diseases. And after all the plunder, now they want to appropriate our images and treat us like drunks, criminals, and drug addicts. Our faces and ways of seeing has been taken away. Besides negating our images and usurping our archives of dreams, they have colonized our imagination through the mass media.” While cases like this are commonplace in the region, the colonization of an Indigenous imaginary only recently became an issue of debate among scholars and media activists in Latin America.