LUIS GUERRA

 

In the case of the present project, After 1973, we wanted to build a dreaming-landscape, a landscape rebuilt through memories, a landscape that reminded us a particular emotion of its original form; a kind of memory not clear enough. Probably there is not clear memory ever.

The central “piece” that we are displaying at the gallery space is a group of hanged blankets, sheets with holes and other clothes, hanging from a wire. This piece is a sort of pre-architectural structure, a line of material memory becoming from that vague image of my own infancy, maybe a memory of the family backyard with the hanging cloths… home, the brown color, that brown screen color, which is the color of Chile for me, its sun, its river... in this sense this work is like a dis-archiving memory and, at the same time, as pre-modern, pre-architectural building, a shelter, a veil, a primitive housing, a mushroom architecture. My memory is related to this domestic ghost, to this effect of dictatorship, a visual memory that happens to be hung from me.

When we started to think about this project, we were reading a Chilean Philosopher, Patricio Marchant, and a particular text referring to the concept of unconsciousness defined as a place of an abandonment by the French psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham. That notion was used by Marchant as a way, as a path, for understanding our phantoms, our cultural mixing heritage as Latin Americans, regarding language and philosophy: How to speak, how to write? How to build a language from our particular condition as “Hijos de la Chingada”? this term is widely applied in México as an insult, and it comes from the era of the European conquest of America, Hijo de la Chingada refers to a person who has been born from a rape. The "hijo de la Chingada" is the total figure of abandonment, with no real father, no real mother, in complete abandonment, but at the same time this socio-philosophical abandonment is its complete freedom, as we don´t correspond to any tradition stablished by the Spirit. To be is to be abandoned, exposed by abandonment.