Repetitive Representations

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez Released in 1967, the epic is a key piece of magical realism, a literary genre where supernatural events are described as reality, with the reality of human life taking on the absurd. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, time is not linear; it is cyclical. We see the trials and tribulations of the Buendía family, tracking their fortunes and misfortunes over seven generations. We encounter the repetition of characters' names, as they are doomed to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors.

One Hundred Years of Solitude (2023-present) is an ongoing series by Irish artist Alan Butler. This body of work sees Butler comment on the recurring appearance and representation of the American landscape, in particular its flora and fauna and how they have been created and displayed by an ever-growing array of image-making technologies. The artist employs wet-plate collodion photography, a process developed in the 1850s that was used in the then-emerging field of landscape photography. Butler’s scenes and landscapes are drawn from the virtual world of video games, specifically those that feature topographies from the period the process was originally developed. These source images, some of which are from games in the 1970s, exist in digital realms but have been pulled into the physical realm through their conversion into silver on black glass...Read the full article in the printed issue. Get OVER Journal 4