Capturing Patagonia: Photography and Violence in ThÉo Court’s Blanco en blanco

Abstract

Blanco en blanco (Theó Court, 2019) explores the complexities and legacies of the visual requisition of organisms and things – and their images – in the (neo)colonial setting of Tierra del Fuego and the violent dispossession of the Indigenous Selk’nam. The film embeds photography within the narrative, offering a critical reflection on its role in reinforcing and challenging colonial structures. The film’s intermedial use of photography as a form of remediation complicates the colonial narratives these photographs historically supported. By examining the film’s aesthetics and its engagement with photographic history, I argue that Blanco en blanco revises and remediates photography as both an instrument of domination and space for revision, offering a powerful critique of the colonial gaze and its ongoing legacy in the visual representation of violence brought to bear on the land and its Indigenous inhabitants. The crucial process with which the film engages and for which medial practices play constitutive roles I call “desertification”, a double, historical, technical process that includes the violent ontological and epistemological emptying, of both a territory and a subjective life. It is the force of Court’s film to explore the increasingly indiscernible line between these two deserts in the moral unravelling of its protagonist.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2026 · DOI ↗