Angie Saiz

REVISTA

2006|2007

Work project consisting of a video piece, a series of digital photomontages, and a sound installation, produced between 2006 and 2007, and showcased in several exhibition during the work production.

Angie Saiz developed her trilogy Revista based on two references: one visual and one sonic. Both references share two characteristics: childhood and chance encounters. The artist uses both the photographs that come with the classic stories series Revista (Cuentos) and the photographs from a family album as visual references. These items, along with a box of photo slides, were treasured by the artist for years, and are now the only surviving items from a fire that nearly destroyed her mother’s house in 2004. Revista (Diapomontajes). Through the exhibition texts, the artist continually appeals to the viewer’s evocations, as well as to the multiple interpretations that they could elaborate from the work, referring to the past of her own biography, but also to a possible collective one of those who will be able to see the work from a viewer’s perspective.

Revista (Cuentos) is a series of photomontages based on classic German children’s stories. Digital color prints on matte photo paper. 10 pieces, each measuring 50 x 50 cm.

 

However, what is at stake in the work lies in the artist’s evocation, the evocation of a joy lost at some point in the transition from childhood to adulthood. Revista(Ronda) presents a story created from memory, portraying a place in crisis and a place for fiction: a children’s story that confronts the viewer with a world that could be more tangible than reality. This fiction only becomes visible when the crisis of the mechanisms of representation arises, which the work conveys through fragmentation, cutting and manipulation; exhibiting the disturbing fissure through which the anomalous sneaks in, through which anxiety and doubt, skepticism and suspicion, nostalgia for childhood as a fragmentary project in its anticipation of adulthood, are exposed, and thus revealing the crisis of the mechanisms of representation as a crisis of memory.

Soledad Novoa Donoso

Revista (Diapomontajes): HD color video without sound [2’37” in loop], digitized projection of digital slide montage from artist’s family archive.

 

Angie Saiz reflects on her childhood through her father’s photo slides. She pairs them up and projects them using a classic projector. The autofocus system tirelessly searches for the focus of each image, but without success. Through this posthumous appropriation of moments in her life in which the will was nothing more than another manifestation of unfulfilled dreams, the author exorcises a memory of disappointment by vindicating hopes that, however frustrated, eventually built an identity in the interstices of each pair of images.

Mario Fonseca

The work was exhibited in 2006 for the collective shows Selecciones at Balmaceda 1215; Globalización: Matriz Original at the MAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo [Santiago, Chile] and Periférica at the Centro Cultural Borges [Buenos Aires, Argentina]. Also, in 2007 in the collective exhibition Tránsitos y transiciones curated by Mario Fonseca at MAVI, Museo de Artes Visuales; and in the solo exhibition Revista (Ronda) at CCE, Centro Cultural de España [Santiago, Chile] curated by Soledad Novoa Donoso.

Exhibition photographs: Jorge Brantmayer