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In 1993 a NASA report declaring quinoa as the perfect space food sparked a health food craze that turned the Bolivian landscape pink with quinoa fields. In the same vein, Addison of our Invisible Territories Division has traced a Paris Hilton Instagram post about her new handbag all the way to the national park it has created in the Bolivian Amazon. A mythical creature from the Amazon jungle comes alive through the power of the advertising billboard as the consequences of small report in London are played out on a territorial scale; transforming a remote community in the TIPNIS National Park, Bolivia into a global attraction. Sightings of this rare animal initiate a protected area in a place threatened by existing illegal extractive activities and a proposed highway construction that will open the door to widespread logging deeper in the forest.
Addison takes us on a journey through a plethora of social media platforms to piece together the story of the Mappinguari. But perhaps the whole discovery is just a myth to protect the forest; an engineered story designed to create wealth for indigenous people. A small report begins in London, a fiction that can have extreme physical consequences stretching across the planet. Here the myth - a perceptive construct – allows us to collectively project an idea of a new landscape.
Culture re-generates values that transform territory and myth becomes landscape.
