For the Transe section, Argentine-born artist Emilia Estrada land her drawing on the moon in a revisionist and fable-like gesture. In the “Andalucia” series, she exercises a comparative reading of lunar cartographies and European imperialist expansions, analyzed through a migrant perspective. Made popular in the 17th century for scientific dissemination, the lunar maps, like the terrestrial cartography, are products of their own time and space, notable in their differences in surface mapping, reliefs, composition, and, specially, nomenclatures. The association of names designating lunar zones and nationalist projects reflects modes of celestial appropriation shaped by negotiations and aspirations, often manifesting as ambiguous aims. This is the case of six craters titled in memory of ancient astronomers from Al-Andalus, a region now between Spain and Portugal occupied by Muslims during the 8th and 15th centuries. The road connects territories by bringing to light myths related to the founding of the city of Córdoba, Argentina, Estrada’s hometown: founded in 1573 as Córdoba de la Nueva Andalucía, it was named by the Spanish colonizer Jerónimo Luis de Cabrera in honor of the promise made to his wife and as a tribute to the land of origin of his family, “where the people are tall and dark, like in Andalusia”.
On large linen fabrics, the artist draws the lunar craters Arzachel, Ibn-Rushd, Alpetragius, Al-Bakri, Ibn Firnas, and Geber, departing from their photographic observation through history. Right after, she detaches herself from them, creating a poetic cartography where graphic mapping and science fiction meet. The solidity of the charcoal is softened in expansive gestures that are overlaid with layers of gold leaf; the material is also repeated at the edges of the drawing, creating a frame where Hispanic-Arabic geometric motifs originating from the Alhambra meets the Pampa guards, traditionally associated with indigenous Argentine cultures. Combined with the decorative (in short, floral) patterns of the fabrics, the interplay between transparency, opacity, image, and symbolic interpretation blurs the distinction between figuration and abstraction, territory and symbol, brightness and opacity. Whether through the concrete materiality of the works or their shifting temporality, the Moon is multiplied by the artist as if seen through a fragmented, fractal mirror, where human agency encloses it in the desires of a particular era, increasingly distant from the original referent.
The Moon itself may not have changed, but humans in different times and places have viewed it in the light of their own time. From its prehistoric and divinatory observations, through its medieval correlation with human moods, to Meliès’s first cinematic images of the Moon and its inhabitants—the Selenites—to the exploratory programs of the USSR and the USA during the 1950s and 1970s, the Moon has been permeated by different hierarchical conditions toward the Earth and its inhabitants. In her work, Estrada singles out the moment in which this relationship is conditioned by the logic of the Plantationocene — a period in which colonial exploitation turns the planet into a resource market and in which, as we see, the Moon becomes yet another stronghold, mirroring the colonizing processes through the institutions dedicated to its mapping.
Lucas Albuquerque
