Mansiones Verdes, or “Green Mansions,” is an intertextual interrogation of colonialism through deftly sequenced drawings.

The title is taken from a 1904 romance novel by British writer William Henry Hudson that follows its hero through the Guyanese jungle, where he falls in love with the native “Rima the Bird Girl.” A troubling tale of possession characteristic of its time, the novel exoticizes the young girl as a thing to be owned and civilized by the white man, much like her native land, the Esequiba territory. The territory has been disputed over for centuries by British colonists and the Venezuelan government, and has continued even after Guyana gained independence, the conflict reaching its height with the Rupununi Uprising in 1969.

Lezama’s drawings play on the exotic, focusing on plants and animals as seen through the lens of colonialism. These are interrupted by two spreads that depict photographs taken in the aftermath of the Uprising, one showing a procession of the dispossessed, the other two of the culprits in handcuffs, surrounded by faceless, rifle-armed figures. The final image shows a shirtless native looking through a camera, its lens fixed towards the book’s fore-edge, as if capturing its contents, reclaiming a long-oppressive perspective and casting it in a new focus.