New Brothers 

"Neue Brüder" is staged in the south of Chile, a territory which was settled by European immigrants in the late 19th century, and has since been intensively exploited by various industries and infrastructures at the expense of the indigenous Mapuche people.

The film emblematizes landscape itself as the protagonist of some carefully chosen single shots. Through the weaving of interviews conducted with a variety of people from those regions – which convey a plurality of visions and a polyphony of discourses –, the viewer is eventually brought to perceive a critical deconstruction of the landscape. Freed from any naturalism, the landscape becomes a medium. The role of the early representations of the colonized territories by  romantic German painter Carl Alexander Simon is critically questioned and confronted to the appropriation of indigenous imagery happening nowadays.

The contemporary perspective that Neue Brüder casts over the Chilean landscape is the starting point for an artistic research project. Which contributes – through different discourses coming from diverse disciplines such as anthropology, ethno-history, history of art and artistic practice – to the emergence of a postcolonial concept of landscape. This research project has been developed at Geneva University of Art and Design – HEAD – and funded by the Competence Network in Art and Design of HES-SO.