Victor Arroyo
Portrait of a Nation
This work reexamines José María Velasco’s pastoral landscapes, situating them as instruments of surveillance and colonial violence. By rephotographing Velasco’s landscape paintings with a surveillance camera and re-staging them in the Indigenous Purhépecha region of Mexico, the installation produces depictions of landscape inaccessible to the ordinary gaze, situating video recording and landscape painting as technologies of violence. Arroyo’s video addresses Mexico’s complex racial geography while rendering landscape painting and video technologies as surveillance assemblages.
This video piece was produced with support from a residency sponsored by a Globalink Research Award at El Colegio De Michoacan, Centro de Estudios en Geografia Humana in Mexico.
About the artist
Victor Arroyo is a video artist working in the cross field between cinema and contemporary art. His work has been most recently exhibited at Kasseler Dokfest, Sheffield Doc/Fest, RIDM, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Cinémathèque Québécoise, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Cinemateca do Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, BIENALSUR, Japan Media Arts Festival, Uppsala Kortfilmfestival, Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe, among others. A recipient of several awards such as DOXA Documentary Film Festival Award and the Mitacs Globalink Research Award. His most recent research was published by DIO Press (New York, NY).
