AUGUST GUINNARD / THREE YEARS CAPTIVEMISFORTUNES OF A FRENCHMAN AMONG THE PATAGONES

Spanish Cultural Centre | Buenos Aires | 2002

Photographs based on the original engravings of the book Three Years of Captivity among the Patagonians by August Guinnard (circa 1870).

CHRONICLE OF AN ENCOUNTER

The story of Guinnard is the chronicle of a violent encounter between cultures.

It is also the story of a 24-year-old man who was taken prisoner in 1856 by the Indians, and therefore became trapped between two worlds.

Since he had no horses or money to pay a guide, Guinnard plunged into the desert along with an occasional travel companion -a European like him- carrying some food, a little gunpowder for hunting and a compass as their only provisions.

Both were surprised in hostile territory. His companion was killed and Guinnard was taken prisoner.

From then on, his journey was a sort of chimera in which his life became an object for trading. From one tribe to another, he was traded for an ox, a horse or severe pieces of fabric.

During this time, Guinnard could only think of his escape.

When the tribes discover his ability to read and write, he is assigned the role of “scribe”. Thereby he obtains shelter in Calfucurá’s tents, who would mediate to save him and whom he ends up serving until the day of his epic breakout.

After three years of grim captivity, he manages to return to his homeland, where some years later he would publish the tales of his American experience, with detailed descriptions of an endangered form of life, evoked with a strange beauty that is at the same time terrible, romantic and whimsical.

IMAGINATION AND REPRESENTATION

Guinnard’s story summarizes the epic essence of one of the episodes that marked the construction of our nation on the basis of an unprecedented violence, sometimes incarnated by civilization, others by barbarity.

The terms of representation lie beneath imagination itself.

Imagination substitutes reality, and together they compose an image that works as an idea or a figure by retaining and recreating our own myths.

It also implies the idea of presenting oneself “as the other person”, taking their place, manifesting their appearance.

The idea itself of representation as image and gesture intersects with the formation of our collective imagery.

The choice of the photographic language allows me to subvert the perspective of the observer, inciting them to discover the alluring uncertainty of visual paradox and opening new semantic orders, always within the field of representation and beyond metaphor or symbol.

Leonel Luna