ACÁ, LEJOS
SInce 2020
“For those who leave without regret and without the desire to return, the place they have just departed
matters less than the destination they will reach.
From now on, they will no longer live ‘out of this place,
but will move forward on the road that leads to a ‘placelessness,
towards that other place that will forever be beyond their reach.
Like a nomad, they will be ‘at home’ wherever they set foot”.
Véra Linhartová
Acá, lejos is a project that originated from the registration of places that myself, as an artist, have inhabited in Chile and Mexico between 2019 and 2023, as a result of the economic instability that Chile experienced right after the social outbreak a few years ago, and the subsequent pandemic. The need to transform this alien architecture quickly and urgently into a home that has become a refuge amidst the state of limbo and dislocation that the multiple transitions have created as an intimate context also functions, from a personal perspective, as a metaphor for theuncertain economic and social situation, as well as the migratory crises that are taking place today.
The project is ongoing and will include more works and an exhibition in 2024. As a first action, it presents a series of 10 digital photomontages that merge images of residential places in Santiago, Huiro, Valparaíso, Cochamó, and Horcón in Chile, and in Mexico City, Cuernavaca, and Acapulco. The images are altered and linked without a clear narrative, revealing the confusion and dismemory that now prevails in every place and time, and the inability to keep an emotional and real account of the nomadic period experienced.
The first output of the photographic series is a set of postcards in an edition of 70 copies published in 2022 –and through an ongoing distribution–, and which includes at the time of delivery improvised haikus that I wrote as an artist based on the daily experiences of transit and the state of perpetual limbo; in each group the verses “I was gone long before I left” and “I still learn to return” are repeated.