Elena Nustrini – Exhibiting the ‘National’ Landscape: Trans/Regional Realism in Argentina and Italy in the Second Half of the 19th Century

The dissertation project deals with the question of how, in the second half of the
19th century, international exhibitions and world’s fairs both in Europe and Latin
America favored a transregional artistic exchange in the visual arts and how this
exchange contributed to the further development of regional iconographies and
styles. In particular, the project investigates the genre of Realism in Argentina and
Italy in a comparative approach with a focus on landscape representations.
The cultural and political gaze on the landscape in the late 19th century was strongly
shaped by the consolidation of ‘national’ states, but also by the advent of industrial
modernity, practices of colonialization, extractivism and migration movements.
The re-semanticization of landscape iconographies (and styles) in both Argentinian
and Italian art histories were therefore subjected to rapid changes. At the same
time, these artistic innovations were transculturally negotiated in international and
world exhibitions, which came to serve as new artistic border scopes or “contact
zones” (Pratt) of the visual arts. The art-historical project aims to trace the
development of both new iconographic ‘languages’ and Realism as a transculturally
negotiated style in an always already entangled 19th century.
The decentralization of the European concept of Realism in favor of a
‘trans/regional Realism’, which emerged along with the country’s selfrepresentation
and self-assertation on the stage of national and international
exhibitions, will form the core of the project’s research.

Elena Nustrini, MA, is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Arts,
Berlin. In her doctoral dissertation (as part of the DFG-funded project “A Critical
Art History of International and World Expositions: Decentering Fashion and
Modernities”, supervised by Miriam Oesterreich), she investigates the transregional
artistic exchange in the visual arts that took place at national and international
exhibitions both in Europe and Latin America in the second half of the
19th century. In particular, her research focuses on the genre of Realism in
Argentina and Italy in a comparative approach and specifically on the role of
landscape representations in the construction of political and artistic identities in
the context of both the consolidation of ‘national’ states and the cosmopolitan
“exhibitionary complex” (Bennet).
Nustrini graduated in 2022 with a master’s thesis on botanical drawings and still life
paintings by the Dutch artist Albert Eckhout. There, she examined the role of art in
the process of appropriation of the colony of Dutch Brazil (1637-1644) focusing
on the assimilation of colonial botanical drawings into the art of Dutch still life
paintings, as well as on how botanical epistemological observations on the so-called
„New World” were used by the colonizers to legitimize European superiority by
means of a ‚naturalization’ of economic exploitation processes.
Nustrini studied art history, Italian literature, philology, and linguistics at the Free
University of Berlin, the Università degli Studi di Milano Statale (Italy), and Trinity
College Dublin (Ireland) and was awarded a scholarship from the
Deutschlandstipendium and the German National Academic Foundation.
Her academic research fields are the art history of collections and exhibitions in the
19th and 20th centuries, Argentinian art history, 19th-century art in a global context,
art and colonial knowledge and practices, as well as botanical prints and drawings
of the 17th to 19th century.