In Search of the Andes
Artists in Dialogue

In Search for the Andes: Ambiguous Loss and the disappearance of the Mnemonic Landscape

In Search for the Andes is born from the need to go deep in the experience of immigration beside the politics, economics, and social aspects. What is the experience of losing memories and losing also the referents that allow you to connect with the loss? 
A disembodied loss that disjoints your identity and what you knew to be familiar and stable?

THE PROJECT 

This is a project that explores the experience of instability brought by the lack of referent to recall identity. I have been recording interviews with South American immigrants to the US and people that had been relocated due to industrial developments or contamination. The core of these conversations are the vivid attempts to bring back what is lost in memory and the missing pieces that build a complete sense of self. Today, Guillermo Mena and I work, from this failed attempt to retrieve memories, to create inside the exhibition space a new place that resists consumption and points to the emptying of memory. We are working from the exhausting experience of relocation and displacement.

Guillermo Mena and I are working with and from drawing, a language that is familiar to both but made foreign through collaboration. We are using copper to create each mark, pointing to the origin and history of the material in the Andes region, its many economic and political transitions in ownership, its history in relation to urban development and displacement, and the characteristics of the its mark. Copper sits on top of the surface rescuing all its accidents highlighting the memory and history of the walls that now host it. The drawing takes over the gallery space tilting it and pointing to the instability generated by the disruption of memory. The time-consuming process of the metal point refers back to the laboured landscapes of this industrial sites and its complex history. The audio of the exhibition is an accumulation of testimonies, audio of the Andes, and recordings of the making of the piece, a different but reciprocal type of mark in the space.

Familiarity and displacement are the tension that lies at the foundation of this project.
Javier Bustos comes into the project bringing his expertise as musician and sound artist, manipulating audio files and creating new ones. It is in the midst of a creative dialogue that we all attempt to give body to the experience of Mnemonic loss.

Three distinct and unfamiliar voices attempting to create just one sound to represent home.