Traveling and researching scientific expeditions in Peru, Mantilla and Chaves came across the book Los secretos de la Amazonía: Manual de supervivencia en la selva (Secrets of the Amazon: Survival manual for the jungle). This text was published in 1981 as an account of life in what the author, César Huamán Ramírez, calls “semi-civilized” places. Using a slide projector—a pointedly outdated technological device—Mantilla and Chaves reproduce the book’s claims about life in the Amazon alongside details of grainy, black-and-white photographs of the region. Rather than present the stereotypical colorful images of the region’s natural abundance, the artists render the Amazon as “a kind of anti-landscape”—a series of grayish, bookish, pointillist images devoid of romanticism.

Gallery label from

Chosen Memories, April 30–September 9, 2023

Provenance

Revolver Galería, Lima
Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York and Caracas, 2013
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2017

Medium Two sets of eighty 35mm black and white slides
Credit Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros through the Latin American and Caribbean Fund in honor of Juan Carlos Verme
Object number 675.2017
Department Media and Performance

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