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Paper short abstract

The article examines landscapes by Spain's Instituto Nacional de Colonización, a technical organization that built a supraterritorial infrastructure focused on food production. Analyzing its outcomes helps understand a singular vision of modernity linked to 20th-century authoritarian regimes.

Paper long abstract

Over three hundred new settlements were established across Spain's main river basins in less than twenty-five years. Military aircraft captured aerial images that informed a detailed plan in which each plant, animal, and distance was designed to serve a political and technocratic goal: constructing a national food-supply infrastructure. This also aimed to create an efficient workforce aligned with the political principles of the regime. The Instituto Nacional de Colonización carried out this ambitious project.

This research explores Latour's critique of modernity and Griffin's idea of alternative modernity, situated within the context of 20th-century European authoritarian regimes. It investigates the modernisation of rural life during the Franco regime through the work of INC. It was responsible for implementing a territorial design programme aimed at radical modernisation, guided by the political principles of Francoism. Within the INC, different disciplines established new synthetic environments subject to scientific rigour, with the aim of developing new environments focused on agricultural production.

On the one hand, the focus shifts to a single case study—in Galicia—the practical application of the technical and scientific principles of agricultural modernisation, analysing the infrastructural system in which agents of different natures perform specific roles. It is necessary to clarify this modernisation by examining the differing elements to identify the unique features of an authoritarian regime. The malfunctions of this carefully constructed environment, many of which still persist today, allow us to reconstruct, from the traces, the blind spots of a modern, cold vision born of technical and vertical blindness.