Family Shipwreck

EDITION

2022, Shortlisted

school

Universidad Austral de Chile

Time passes differently in the small towns of southern Chile. It dilates and suspends. This, in addition to the temporal dislocation introduced by the pandemic, motivated the development of this auto-ethnographic research, developed in the domicile territory for five months.

In different places in the backyard and unused areas, I distributed garments from each of the inhabitants of my house (Father, Mother, Brother, and myself), which remained in the same place for over a month. Once removed, I photographed the mark impressed on the grass programmatically until its disappearance. In the middle of the pandemic confinement, to print the mark of the inhabitants in their backyard and expose it to its becoming until it is erased is to point out the emptiness and uncertainty that crushed us. The action conjures up a ghost, like a photogram on the grass that reveals that something was lost. More than ever, life was concentrated within the confines of the house. At the same time, in the backyard, the mark continuously transformed its image from within, turning the backyard into an ephemeral map of four islands.

Living in a town of such characteristics has turned me into someone who made a methodology out of waiting. The minimal initial gesture may be the natural reaction to saturation and dislocated time. The only thing left for us to do is to propitiate an art of lasting and waiting.