Earthworks

Abstract

Since the mid-sixties, contemporary art has developed a specific practice, the so-called Land Art or Earthwork (earth movements) which involves rigorous observation, activities on different territories resembling those of ethnografic studies, and exhaustive record and collection of archives dealing specifically with areas affected by uncontrolled capitalism expansion. Particularly, the American sixties avant-garde not only recorded the transformation of space produced by the postwar urbanization boom but also developed a transdisciplinary means for landscape shaping. In this regard, this paper analyzes what is referred to as documentary narrative, i. e., the widening of literature boundaries in some present writing practices. Its authors keep on searching for ways able to represent reality from an entropic approach in order to attain views of the displacements and the transformation of the landscape in areas in which neoliberalism becomes a building boom linked to extractive activities such as Argentina’s soybean agricultural business which has introduced transgenic crops from its outset. This article takes texts of Argentine writers Sergio Chejfec and Daniel García Helder as models of documentary narrative.