Claudia Aravena Abughosh

A woman receives a postcard from afar. The film is about distance as existence.

This is the story of a man marked by a childhood image. The scene that disturbed him by its violence, and whose meaning he would only manage to understand much later... With these sentences, narrated in voice-over, begins Chris Marker's film La Jetée, and which in this video come to open the question of how does one come to have a memory that one never had? Memory, metonymy, desire, abjection, childhood, belonging and photography appear here as loose pieces of a reconstruction of the scene, where the absence of a body, that of the witness, and the presence of another, a victim, constitute the staging of the way in which individual memory and testimony are complexly intertwined with collective memory. We are not privileged witnesses of the scene, except by the desire for the scene.

"Greater is the hatred that has inspired us, than the sea that separates us from it" reads one of the most significant sentences of Simón Bolívar's Letter of Jamaica. The work revolves around this phrase, whose words appear and disappear in the course of the sequence of images, disjointed from the cohesion that brings them together only at the end of the video to form that programmatic declaration that defends independence. The sentence is thus evidenced as a procedural symbolic knot, the result of a complex history and its possible articulations. The images of the video, in a constant swaying of a boat in the water, open up to the dimensions of the immensity of that sea that serves Bolivar as a metaphorization of the magnitude of the hatred that forces him to revolt against the colonizers. It is a sea in which is inscribed, in turn, a new history, which, as a possible reading, forces us to think of other colonizations and economic dependencies.

An intense exploration of representation and territory, of questions about memory and identity. Once again, Aravena's gazes are divided between personal experience - represented here by family memories - and historical and political questions, which significantly broadens the images' field of significance. Using video resources to emphasize perceptions, associate content and expand her reflections on underlying issues, the artist multiplies her points of view using sophisticated language games.