Invocar los paisajes perdidos desde el exilio: las obras de Elia Suleiman y Walid Raad

Abstract

In this paper, we ask about the link between art, landscapes, fabulated documents, and history with respect to some works by two artists who belong to the same generation and who were born in the so-called Middle East. On the one hand, Walid Raad, Lebanese artist who works mainly from the visual arts and performance on the civil wars in his country of origin. On the other hand, the Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman, who creates films inspired by the history of the Israeli occupation in Palestine. Both artists went into exile in the United States and from their artistic work they look at their places of birth. In this sense, we are interested in taking as a hypothesis Fernanda Caravajal’s proposal to think of exile as a loss of landscape: “If there is a dialectic between subject and geography whose mediating territory is the landscape, from a certain perspective, exile could be understood, among others, as a loss of landscape. Indeed, the landscape often functions as a device for the construction of the national territory.” (Caravajal, 2012, 4). In this sense, it is worth asking: How does the loss of the landscape manifest itself in the works of Suleiman and Raad? What are the artistic operations on their places of origin from exile? What landscapes of their homeland do they construct in their works and in what ways? We construct the figures of “landscape-limbo” and “landscape-fabulated” as possible answers to these questions.