The Danish Triangle

A post-documentary projeca bout national and individual identity in an imaginary area south of Buenos Aires, Argentina, called The Danish Triangle because it concentrates most of the Danish descendants from the 13.000 Danes arrived between 1850 and 1930.

A post-documentary project about national and individual identity in an imaginary area in the south of Buenos Aires province, Argentina, called The Danish Triangle because it concentrates most of the Danish descendants from the 13.000 Danes arrived between 1850 and 1930. The project is performed with a documentary style as anthropological photographic research through portraits and landscapes, plus some reenactments of personal stories performed by the same people who lived them. At the same time, the photos are made with a large format camera to mimic and approach the technique used by the colonial documentarians at the end of XIX century.

I am myself Argentinian-Dane. I was born in Buenos Aires and in 2006 I moved to Copenhagen, where I live and work today. But I am not coming from the Danish Triangle. Since I arrived and started to live in Denmark, I got to know about the importance of this "colony". It is the third most important colony of Danes abroad, after US and Australia. At the same time, since I arrived to Denmark, the importance and internal public debate about national identity and subsequently their immigration policies have been a constant and one of the most relevant issues (today revitalized by the case of Greenland and what kind of relationship Denmark should defend at international level). On the other hand, for Argentina, the question of identity has been a permanent theme since its independency in 1810.

The project tries to look for traces of identity, Danish identity, in todays Argentinians from this area. Paradoxically, because Argentina has developed itself as a country of immigrants, the photographs reflect around its own identity too. The Danish Triangle is delimited by three cities that function as the imaginary vertices: Tandil, Tres Arroyos and Necochea. The area belongs to the "pampa region" maybe the richest agricultural area in the country. The Argentinian governments from mid XIX century promoted the immigration, mainly from European origins, in order to "populate" and "civilize" the new country, implicating the expulsion and repression of the native population living there, mainly from the tribes of Mapuches, Pampas and Tehuelches, a historical aspect that not even today is considered enough and with fairness in the Argentinian identity debate. Work in progress.

J.H.