Dispossession

Dispossession. Intaglio, Chine-Collé. 45cm x 45cm. 2022. 

Dispossession is the seventh print my artist's book. The imagery mimics the earlier print Neocolonial landscape. (That's the beauty of printmaking - the repetition and reproducibility of image elements to tie the images together). Not only has the landscape changed, but also the ownership. Ownership of land is a European capitalist concept, completely foreign to the indigenous people of the Chaco, who lived in a sharing economy. Again, the grid reflects the surveying, parcelling, and privatization of the land. The dripping vegetation evokes a sadness and a loss. The blank figures of indigenous people appear to have their presence erased in a way, but they also convey strength in their appearance and their stances. The leading female figure on the right, referencing a stronger female presence in the social structure of the community, overlapped with the bottle tree, almost disappears. Will her presence prevail or will she melt away, too? Dispossession does not only refer to being dispossessed of land, but also of culture. The forest, printed upside down in the upper left hand corner, represents an inversion of a natural order. 

I feel the text excerpts below speak for themselves about the process of dispossession. It is a complete failure against human rights that the Paraguayan government sold every acre of the Chaco to land speculators, to pay for the debt of war no less (the War of the Triple Alliance), without reserving any lands for the indigenous populations. Later, the Paraguayan government saw a "need to populate and occupy the Chaco, which prompted the search for foreign settlers to integrate this immense region not only into sovereignty but also into the national economy." [Vázques, Fabricio. Geografía humana del Chaco paraguayo – Transformaciones territoriales y desarrollo regional. Asunción: Ediciones ADEPO (2013). 37]. Time and time again, political decisions have rolled over the indigenous lands without taking the people living in it into consideration.  

I think the Mennonites absolve themselves from any guilt of dispossession by claiming that they purchased the land from others, i.e. the indigenous land was already sold. However, they were well aware that there were indigenous people living on the land before they purchased it, and the mere thought that they could buy the land with some food, clothing and sweets is utterly ridiculous (if it wasn't so serious). It is completely understandable that indigenous people would have considered those things as gifts from the visitors, and not a form of payment for land, which didn't even exist as a commodity in indigenous understanding. I don't think I heard the term 'dispossession' until I was an adult. In the public discourse, the settlement process was always described as a peaceful encounter. Hannes Kalisch writes, "The settlers' firm belief that their immigration was peaceful is understandable. They hardly felt the force of the collision of two worlds. After all, this violence was not directed against themselves, but consisted in the Enlhet being deprived of freedoms. Their own interests, on the other hand, prevailed." [Kalisch, Hannes & Ernesto Unruh. Wie Schön ist deine Stimme – Berichte der Enlhet in Paraguay zu ihrer Geschichte. Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro: 2014.]