War has always been a problem of visuality. From colonial cartography and religious iconography to satellite images, drones, and algorithmic warfare, each historical transformation of war has implied a transformation in visual regimes. Latin America has historically constituted a laboratory for the creation and deployment of techniques and technologies of war and visuality. Wars are composed through visual regimes that identify enemies, organize territories, distribute forms of perception, authorize violence, stabilize memories, and project political futures. Images do not constitute a secondary expression of conflict. They are one of the material, technical, and sensory conditions through which war is made historically possible. War produces images, but images also produce war. Von Clausewitz understood war as the continuation of politics by other means. Foucault inverted this formulation by showing that politics could be understood as the continuation of war by other means. We want to provoke another displacement: The image is war by other means.

The objective of this seminar is to explore how different cultural productions think through the intersection of visual technologies and armed conflicts in Latin America. We are particularly interested in discussing different media regimes that include practices such as painting, photography, printmaking, film, and code (from drone imagery to video games). We propose to analyze collectively how these visual dispositifs mediated the emergence of conflicts of resistance to coloniality, the definition of the borders of the nation-state, regional wars, and international conflicts involving Latin American forces. This seminar welcomes interdisciplinary research connecting Latin America with other geographies and cultural traditions. 

We do not limit our scope to the emergence of visual technologies in conflicts fought in Latin America, such as the War of the Pacific (1879–1884), the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), or the Chaco War (1932–1935). We also invite contributions that examine how these dispositifs operated in international conflicts involving Latin American populations, or how the transmedial representation of such conflicts shaped the visual history of the region.