Dibujo, archivo y paisaje: Hacia un contraarchivo gráfico en la construcción de lo animal

Abstract

This article examines how certain contemporary artistic practices, understood through an expanded graphic logic, can operate as critical tools for revisiting imaginaries of animality and landscape, while questioning the presumed neutrality of scientific illustration. Focusing on the Casa Amarilla in Tenerife —considered the world’s first primatological research station, initiated in 1912 and active in Puerto de la Cruz between 1913 and 1918, and linked from the outset to the transfer of chimpanzees from Cameroon, then a German colony, as well as to European scientific circuits of observation, visual recording, and archival knowledge— the article takes the artistic project «Memorabilia» as its central case study. Developed from this historical and visual archive, «Memorabilia» allows expanded drawing to be proposed as a methodology for artistic research. Within this framework, landscape, archive, and drawing are articulated as interwoven dimensions of a single critical operation: landscape as a historical site and a territory shaped by patrimonial ruin, tourist pressure, and the contemporary spectacularization of animality; the archive as a regime of visuality; and expanded drawing as a logic of montage, inscription, and rereading within a situated artistic practice that, in this first visual essay, takes on a photographic and object-based form. Through the assemblage of photographs, historical documents, and documentary images, «Memorabilia» activates a graphic counter-archive that enables a critical rereading of the regimes of scientific visuality associated with animality and landscape. By bringing primatological records, the visual memory of the Casa Amarilla, and the tourist spectacularization of the island territory into dialogue, the visual essay reveals continuities in the anthropocentric gaze. The article concludes that drawing, understood as grafía and montage, opens a way of producing a situated and critical reading of these visual materials.