In the centuries following the conquest, many imaginary spaces in the region of Latin America were created by different writers. Probably El Dorado, is the first known, but the list is quite long and reveals an attitude that could be compared to Said's term "Orientalism" in relation to this part of the world. The search for paradise, which people had lost in an unknown point in the Middle East, was transferred to an unknown point of the continent with the discovery of America. Colon's letters and his hypothesis of the earthly paradise, whose inhabitants would be an emigration of the descendants of Noah, aroused the interest of Theodor de Bry, Jacques le Moyne de Morgues, John White and others to show different images of what they claim to have seen on their travels. The publication of their drawings became, as printing spread, the most important image Europeans could see of the Americas. The physical representations of the natives under the sign of sexual savagery in the majority of the drawings will be fundamental in portraying the emerging European nations as caste, catholic, and civilized. The processes of "discovery", conquest and colonization will be constitutive of a new planetary modern formation in which Europe is not an independent system but the center of the world. Literature has also responded to the joyful hope of a paradise or alien space. Thomas More's Utopia, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, The Travels of Gulliver, Emilio Salgari's Two thousand leagues under America, Jules Verne's The shipwreck of Jonathan, and the lost world of Arthur Conam Doyle, the inspiration for Jurassic Park and other earlier films, are examples of imaginary stories and spaces that emerged after the installation of the first idea of utopian space on American territory.

Dr. BEA TOMŠIČ AMON

She was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she graduated as an architect from the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism in 1987. In 1988 she moved to Slovenia and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Ljubljana in 1993. She later earned a Master of Science in Sociology of Culture at the Faculty of Philosophy in Ljubljana. She is an Associate Professor of Didactics of Art Education at the Department of Art Education, Faculty of Education in Ljubljana, where she defended her PhD thesis on Experiential Learning and Spatial Design. Her areas of interest are art education, pedagogy of architecture, spatial perception, architectural theory and interdisciplinarity with special emphasis on inter-American studies.