Projects

Exercises of memory: Claudia Aravena

Thoughts on the horror, thirty years after the coup

Claudia Aravena. Septiembre 11^th (2002)

September 11th, 1973, military coup in Chile. The video explores the transtextuality of the memory through an implicit critic to mass media and their depiction of violence. The cracking between these two aspects and the fracture among memory, present and historical past are the meeting point of this video.

“…Claudia Aravena’s video seems to constantly move over a multiplicity of levels, on a surface level we can see the images: The planes, the fire and the falling architecture, once in NY and then again in Santiago. On a different structure level we hear the whispering voice, opening up the absence of matter, of a body that is in turn overshadowed by the images, which constitute, at the same time, the condition of its relational existence. Between these two levels we have intertextuality as communicational element – I understand text in a discursive sense (as bearer of a discourse that is not necessarily made out of words) – with Hiroshima mon amour by Alain Resnais. Like Resnais, Aravena mixes various materials, just like in Hiroshima mon amour September 11th provides the possibility of constructing an architecture of memory: A place where constitution and functioning rules are only within yourself. We can also see an image of two bodies and hear a voice repeating the words by Marguerite Duras, speaking of memories, of a skin that reminds of another skin, of two lovers merging into each other. The game of memory dissemination

appears as Deleuze & Guattari rhizome; its possibilities are endless. The fragmentation of this set of images and their reunification in the poetic aspect of the video blur the distinction between private and public, building links and relationships that do not run out in the oppositional game of two spheres. We

rather see a complexity, a framework that must be reinvented fragment by fragment, putting together a puzzle whose pieces never fit perfectly.“ Text by Andrea Kottow

Participant artists

Alejandro Schianchi / Carlos Trilnick / Claudia Aravena / Edgar Endress / Eduardo Molinari y Nicolás Varchausky / Graciela Taquini / Guillermo Cifuentes / Gustavo Galuppo / Iván Marino / Julieta Hanono / Leandro Nuñez / Mariela Yeregui / Raúl Minsburg / Ricardo Dal Farra / Ricardo Pons