This series of 12 paintings draws inspiration from the photographic archive of Austrian priest and ethnologist Martin Gusinde, who documented life in the Chilean-Argentine Patagonia between 1919 and 1924.
His work represents one of the few existing records of the now-extinct Selk’nam, Yámana, and Kawéskar tribes—peoples who had suffered near-total extermination during the four decades preceding his visit. Livestock companies, primarily British and supported by the governments of Argentina and Chile, waged a war of extermination, paying shepherds and hunters for killings and captures.
Gusinde recounts how hunters “sent the skulls of murdered Indigenous people to the Anthropological Museum in London, which paid four pounds per head.”
To the Store of Nelson Hernández
Gallery
