Arnold Arnez

Professor Alexander
COMP 37057
April 3rd, 2019

What I plan to do is to follow the topic "Nature elements and forces: crystallization of

natural symbols" through Andean-Incan folkloric art. This project will consist of analyzing the

need for a new ontological relationship with nature due to climate change being as an existential

threat to humanity. First, the critique of modern scientific rationality has its presumptions of

creating a simulation of nature through the use of CO2 filters, replacing the power of whole

forests to convert CO2 into oxygen, or the use of mirrors to reflect the sun away which seem in

its reminiscence of cartoon solutions rather than a harmonious relationship with nature that

science hoped to provide. On the other side, the logic of environmentalism has its own limits.

The movement “Extinction Rebellion” calls for people to be “humble” towards the “unbelievable

complexity” of Earth as an interconnected set of environments. However, there is no prescription

to how one would view the world this way. Where the humility is expressed in recounting

statistical data sets and explanations of climate science, this abstraction lacks the possibility of

engendering an awe-inspiring experience that is symbolic of Earth’s power in action.

From this quandary, I jump into the study of Indigenous Andean art and its possibility for

creating this model of having one confront the sublime power of earth. The first set of art will

deal with depictions of mountains. The mountain in the Andes is used to invoke a sublime

imagery of the earth as powerful and of returning humans into a supportive, rather than a

protagonist, role within the Earth. Guillermo Francovich, a Bolivian philosopher, describes how

the natural environment in Bolivia is able to transport people’s sense of temporality towards a

pre-historical mythological time where “gnomes, miners, and underground blacksmiths are

beings more ancient than man”. In addition to this, I use the Bolivian poet Franz Tamayo’s ode
to the tutelary mountain of Bolivia, Mt. Illimani, to show how the sublime experience of

Mt.Illimani overwhelms a purely rational analysis of the mountain. Inverting the Cartesian

notion that rationality precedes experience, Tamayo seeks to make the simple claim that

experience itself is more viscerally powerful because the physical Earth itself creates moments

where symbolism and poetry are the only ways to accurately express our need to be in harmony

with nature. In one of the paintings of Roberto Mamani Mamani, a woman is contemplating

Mt.Illimani from atop a hill. However, she begins to blend into the hilltop, demonstrating one’s

continual harmony with nature as one bears witness to Illimani as a site for mythological and

philosophical contemplation.

I will then continue with Heidegger and his critique of technology. Heidegger’s critique

of instrumentalization is based on our relationship towards viewing a natural object as a source

for energy or quantifiable output which must increase continuously. In contrast, Antonio Huillca

Huallpa, a Peruvian artist, shows the symbolic similarity between the condor and a modern

airplane, and how this form of technology can situate itself poetically as an animated metal

animal rather than a lifeless set of chemical reactions. Also, the demonstration of the sun, moon

and symbolic king in the background of the piece shows that the lifestyle of the Indigenous

peoples in is mediated through a respect for how nature wants things to be done, rather than an

anthropocentric domination of nature.

I will then conclude by connecting how the symbolic nature of Mamani’s and Huillca’s

art show that modernity and industrial technology can itself be situated within a harmonious

relationship with nature, but must be done so by seeing technology as an extension of natural life

and human rationality as an extension of the experience of a powerful and beautiful nature.