Cartography as a visual strategy of colonial power.
Maps, plans and views of Buenos Aires (16th-18th centuries)

PhD. Marina Gutiérrez De Angelis

Contact: mdeangelis[a]filo.uba.ar

Unlike its American counterparts, Buenos Aires was not imagined from urban scenes or important battles. It was a strategic port next to a precarious city that travelers' accounts described without great praise. From its first foundation until the end of the colonial period, the only images that are preserved and known are plans, maps and topographical views of the port, except for the crude scenes in the engravings of Theodore De Bry, the result of Pedro de Mendoza's expedition to the Río de la Plata. This fact is relevant if we consider that it was not until the end of the 18th century that the first view of the city from the river appeared, with the Malaspina expedition. The absence of images referring to urban life and its inhabitants is striking, since both the Spanish monarchy and rival powers were obsessed with the collection of information and the value that this knowledge had in political and economic terms. That the first images of Buenos Aires were cartographic is not a mere detail, since its development and circulation of maps generated an intense political debate about the colonies, which promoted the deployment of a mixed system of representation of power. This mixed system combined the royal image as a succession of portraits of the Spanish monarch with the representation of the territory as a representation of the Empire.

This project seeks to question some ideas regarding the role of these images in the Rioplatense territory. Firstly, because it incorporates into the study a heterogeneous set of image media ranging from cartography, military engineering to Atlas editions, beyond the artistic ones. These technical images are not considered as representations, documents or historiographical evidence, but as true vehicles of the visual strategies of colonial politics. The type of information offered by Spanish maps was linked to the need to organize the colonies, while the publications edited in northern Europe responded to a commercial interest. The marked anti-Hispanic spirit of these editions gave rise to an external view from the port and almost non-existent on life in the city, which supports the hypothesis about the impact that cartography had on the representation of the territory. The city seen from the river for two hundred years never ceased to be considered as an empty and exterior space, a door to the Indies.