Latin America and the World's Fairs, 1867-1939

Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, 2010

JOURNAL OF IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES 2020, VOL. 26, 3, 205–212 , 2020

The present dossier collects a series of multidisciplinary empirical essays on the entangled relationship between Spanish identity and exhibits. Since the nineteenth century Spain has been both a participant and a venue for universal exhibitions, confronting itself with an imagery dramatically divided between traditional representations and an advocated modernity. Despite being a country incapable of competing economically with other western imperial powers, the case of Spain has a particular interest because of its cultural diversity, nostalgia for a past great empire and presentation as an exotic frontier between West and East, North and South of the world. The research studies carried out here mostly focus on the international scope of exhibitions and cover different transnational phenomena, inserting different imagined communities in wider and more ambitious spaces in Europe and Latin America. Notably, some exhibitions convert into special instruments for shaping collective identities in an interconnected Hispanic world in which postimperial Spanish national identity is a reference to link countries and continents. Ultimately, all the essays move away from the examination of exhibitions as public arenas of symbolic conflict between different identity proposals as singular places of collective memory.

World Fairs and the Global Moulding of National Identities, 2022

As part of the celebrations of the IV Centenary of the discovery of America, Colombia participated in the Exposición Histórico-Americana de Madrid in 1892, as well as the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. On both occasions, the focus was on pre-Hispanic objects. Through the glorification of an indigenous past, the organizers of the exhibitions sought to provide the country with an ‘antiquity’ of its own, comparable to the ancient civilizations of Peru and Mexico, and to project the image of a modern nation through the academic treatment of such vestiges of the past. However, in an environment marked by Hispanism and conservatism, this kind of ‘scientific Indianism’ did not imply the integration of indigenous cultures into the national narrative. During preparations for the Parisian Exposition Universelle in 1900, the government planned to represent the nation through a national pavilion adorned with huge pre-Columbian figures, thereby indicating a more inclusive nationalization of the indigenous past. However, this turn towards a new form of Indianism was hindered by war and financial crisis, and the organizers were forced to abandon their plan. It was not until 1929, after a long period of recovery, that the process of combining Hispanism with Indianism finally culminated in the construction of the national pavilion at the Exposición Ibero-Americana in Seville.

In Nuncius, vol. 31/3, pp. 673-675, 2016

Reviews in History, 2017

s Great Exhibition of 1851, world's fairs and international expositions have been an important global cultural phenomenon that has defined progress and modernity for hundreds of millions of visitors. They have displayed the achievements of industrial civilization and the latest technologies, while at the same time reinforcing national and ethno-cultural hierarchies, with exhibits ranging from scientific discoveries to human zoos. The world's fairs have also generated an impressive amount of documentation and material artifacts. The sheer variety of materials produced in tandem with the fairs is well represented in this online resource, which makes accessible an abundance of digitized materials relating to the world's fairs from archives and libraries in Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, including the vast Donald G. Larson world's fair collection at California State University, Fresno. World's Fairs: A Global History of Expositions comprises not only official documents, correspondence, catalogues, and other publications from the fairs, but also diaries, souvenirs, posters, postcards, songs, music scores, and sound recordings of interviews and music. The interviews are fascinating and offer insights into how visitors experienced the world's fairs, or at least how they remembered their experiences.

RIHA Journal , 2024

In 1929, Mexico presented itself at the Ibero-American Exposition in Seville, Spain, with a pavilion architecture that replicated the aesthetics of 'Mexican antiquity', referring back to ancient Mexican construction types. Starting from this staging, this article examines the indigenist exhibition architectures in terms of the strategies used to represent the indigenous in the context of establishing a national canon of aesthetic forms. The example of Mexico enables a discussion on how 'peripheral modernism' was imagined at international exhibitions and world’s fairs, how it – in turn – was linked to exoticisation and auto-exoticisation, and which forms of staging were used, especially since no similarly large exhibitions took place in Mexico itself. In broad terms, the pivotal question is to what extent the world’s fair format provided a unique stage for negotiations between the poles of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, tradition and modernity, periphery and center. A special focus will be on the question in which architectural and artistic configurations these negotiation processes became visible. This entails retracing and reappraising the contexts of such indigenist aesthetics. DOI: https://doi.org/10.11588/riha.2024.2.92572

Journal of Material Culture, 2009

The 'Age of Exhibitions' included the newly independent Latin American nation-states almost from the very outset. This article studies the complex strategies of material and visual display, architecture and writing through which representations of Argentina and Brazil were fashioned at the world fairs. It argues that, as peripheral affiliates of the emergent capitalist worldsystem, Latin Americans had to negotiate the material and symbolic value of their commodities and cultural samples with a host of agents, including not just foreign audiences but also exhibition organizers, artists, architects, and so on. National pavilions, therefore, rather than being seen as material texts authored by state governments, could be understood as 'contact zones', performative spaces for the exchange of objects, gazes and words. The article concludes by comparing the world fairs with trade and industry exhibitions held in Brazil and Argentina themselves. In these, it observes the emergence of a dissident figure of national modernity as 'development', challenging hegemonic regimes of value.

2014

UNA Europa - Heritage Hybridizations, 2021

Contribution for the proceedings of the UNA Europa PhD Workshop "Heritage Hybridisations. Concepts, Scales and Spaces", eds. Maria Gravari-Barbas & Isidora Stankovic, Paris May 10-12 2021. UNA Europa European University Alliance - Cultural Heritage program