The garden of the republic. (post) colonial museum and reason

Abstract

What is decolonization and how it relates to modernity? How the "we" exclusive, ethnocentric, is incorporated into the "inclusive we"-the homeland for all -that decolonization projects? How have we thought and problematized, here and now, this colonized present and how to overcome it? Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2010: pp 60.) This article focuses on the museum of modern art as a disciplinary matrix of the (post)colonial Nation State in Argentina. And as the museum, as representation and materiality, conforms the ideal of nation-building project of the Argentine State generating a series of signifiers that allow us to understand the relations between aesthetic representation, hegemonic narrative fictions about the "otherness" and the population regulation through racialization and gender and sexual inequality. To speak about these relationships, I focus on three narrative configurations, the desert as a place of "lack of civilization", the garden as the modern order of persons and representations and the flag as a means of discipline.