Despedimento is a rewriting act of the bond with my mother in a way that makes sense to me… In it dwells my desire to have had the opportunity to accompany her to die, to shroud her with love.
It is made up of nightshirts sewn by her, embossed on Canson Edition cotton paper, medium-format analog photographs printed with photo silk screen and silver ink on Sirio Black paper by Fedrigoni, sewing patterns printed in inkjet on Washi Murakumo Kozo paper by Awagami and postcards of a Dead Trousseau printed in Giclée on rice paper by Hahnemühle.
It was conceptualized along Javiera Infante’s Project Development Workshop and designed & produced by me at my studio and Taller Lautaro guided by Constanza Jarpa. I thank both of them for their contributions and support throughout this creative process, as well as Alfredo Méndez Etchepare for the photographic work “Ajuar de Muertos” that we made together in his studio, and Martín Estol for his valuable feedback on this book.
Wak'a is an artist book, part of Harvard University Fine Arts Library and The Fleet Library of Rhode Island School of Design, Baylor Book Arts Collection and University of Miami Special Collections. Wak’a is also a 2023 finalist on La Luminosa-FELIFA Publication Prize.
It is an observation journey on the territory I inhabit: the external, internal and cosmic. It attempts to portray the supernatural forces that manifest in Santiago de Chile, in the spot where cerro Manquehue and río Mapocho meet establishing a sacred space, a point of concentration of power and energy, a channel of connection with the ancestors who inhabited this place before me.
Wak'a seeks to make tangible that which is sacred in this territory, through photographs, rituals, and psychomagical actions contained in this book created within the framework of Campo Fotolibros, an online program to promote thinking and production of photobooks.
A series of trips and over seven-year walks along the shores of the Pacific Ocean, steps of a major ongoing drift... A wink to my pinhole camera and the 4x5" black & white film box in which my Gran Mar negatives and contacts travel with me.
Letting go of moorings is to meet bewilderment and fear while in paradise. It is above all an experience, the result of my creative residency at Perla Blanca, Brazil, invited by Copperbridge Foundation in September 2019.
Dreaming of what the Great Sea might reveal to me, I walk the seashore trapping the light in a tiny hole…
Thirty photographs made with a pinhole camera and black & white film, printed on salted paper, a silver & salted water photosensitive emulsion, gold toned... Seven years of traveling along the Pacific coast through different coastal countries.
The opposite of Pandora's box, Caja Negra (Black Box) is one that instead of spreading plagues and miseries when opened, it oxygenates, illuminates, and its content no longer threatens me.
Similar to the one on airplanes, that records everything and can serve as a source to investigate causes of aeronautical accidents, Caja Negra sets out to exorcize unsettling or disturbing memories from my early childhood, and which could explain a few things.
Black Box is a series of 4 different boxes made on 2020, each one of them named under the episode I am recalling.
2012. I travel to a remote island in the middle of the Pacific whose closest references are the moon and the stars. I flee from a present that I don't know how to approach and I board an island where the past awaits me... I am held by a precarious light traveling through a tiny hole pierced in my cardboard camera.
Argentic notes to open my eyes...
Silver and light, that of the sun. Water and salt. The sea...
Originally intended as an exercise to learn Retchoso Japanese sewing, Mata Ihi is a book made with discarded copies on salted paper and vandyke, silvery notes to open my eyes...
Mata Ihi collects dreams, oracles and a love story born in the light of the dark room, as well as the mourning for my dead brother, lived in the penumbra imposed by the photosensitive emulsions that assemble this book.
2019 Gran Mar / Santiago de Chile / Corporación Cultural de Las Condes / Corporación Cultural Cámara Chilena de La Construcción / El Mostrador
2016 Ka’Ara Te Mata / Rapa Nui / Fundación del Patrimonio Rapa Nui
2015 Ka’Ara Te Mata / Santiago de Chile / Corporación Cultural de Las Condes
2014 Mata Ihi / La Paz, Baja California Sur, México / Instituto Sudcaliforniano de Cultura / Galería de Arte Carlos Olachea
2012 Laboratorio de Imagen / Santiago de Chile / Galería Espora / Colectiva Taller de Emulsiones Fotográficas
2010 Sersajes / Santiago de Chile / Corporación Cultural de Las Condes / Colectiva Alejandra Raffo
2010 Desde un Objeto / Santiago de Chile / Universidad de Talca / Colectiva Taller Jaime León
2009 Un Recorrido / Santiago de Chile / Centro Culturale Vittorio Montiglio / Colectiva Taller Jaime León
2009 Aquí & Ahora / Santiago de Chile / Observatorio de Lastarria / Colectiva junto a Ana Milans del Bosch y Pilar Valenzuela Raby
“La Queda: temporary shelters for fishermen and seaweed collectors, assembled with residues and debris dragged by the rivers down to the rivers' outlets.”
This work addresses the comprehension of built spaces. However, not from the perspective of architectural theory or structural techniques, but from its most primitive dimension, the idea of the dwelling as a transitional shelter, in this case, inherited from the nomadic peoples that inhabited the Pacific coastline.
In this contemporary society, hyper-technologized and stimulated by massive volumes of data, as architects, we design everything virtually and from pre-established narratives. The relationship with matter and its ephemeral condition is generally limited to experimental allegories to reflect on technique and the meaning of the practice. Unlike the fishermen in the north, -in the city- we rarely experience the real need for the self-constructed, an extreme example that allows us to consciously understand the limits between inside and out, as an extension of our own body, as a line tracing the landscape, exactly the moment we stretch out a cloth to shield us from the sun or the rain.
This is how La Queda invites us to reflect on both time and occupation, and as Martin Heidegger stated, the acts of building and dwelling are indissolubly intertwined; “Building is not only a means and a way to inhabit a space. Building is already in itself dwelling.”
La Queda, from its own weightlessness, raises an epistemological question concerning ways of intervening the territory; from the perspective of the early Camanchacos, the shelter was not intended to leave any trace; its permanence was directly related to the very temporality of being, what they left behind were not the ruins of their cities, but the traces of their existence.
Diego Baloian Gacitúa | Architect
A platinum palladium exhibition commissioned by Luis Poirot, Centro Cultural La Moneda, and Consejo Nacional de Cultura y las Artes, the National Council for Culture and Arts. A photosensitive production in sixty-five palladium platinum images in collaboration with Fernanda Larraín.
La Queda in a special version commissioned by Copperbridge Foundation’s “Dialogue Through the Arts” and a fleeting & self-supporting exhibition at Patricia Ready Gallery for the American Institute of Architects’ 2018 Committee on Design International Conference’s visit on October 2018.
In a joint effort with Puro Papel, the cases were printed in letterpress at their Florida based studio located in Miami Ironside, and the photographs were made by me on Vandyke.
Book for the Handy Books exhibition, international call for entries from the University of Iowa, Center for the Book, USA. An invite to be inspired and work with an assigned book from their Special Collections and Archives of antique and rare books.
China Muerta consumed by fire
In two weeks the araucaria tree dies
and the güiña and the pudú escape.
Mutilated forest
A turtle dove nests in the emptiness of a burned trunk
Life in an egg promises expansion
Let the forest return, calls the chucao
Jardín Negro Barcelona (Black Garden Barcelona) is a project arising from Fernanda Larraín's ambrotypes exhibit at Víctor Saavedra's Gallery in Barcelona in 2017.
Perhaps Ojos Negros may have been the result from a shared glass of wine in Paris and the desire to work with small bookmakers in Europe.
2010. Códice Maya (Mayan Codex), my first book.
6x7 is a book that contains, displays and supports the photographic work produced by Ricardo Tzichinovsky in 2016 and submitted to the Hartford Art School while pursuing his MFA.
Encuentro Cósmico (Cosmic Encounter) comprises a book and box-like support to house a compendium of small-format artwork interchanged between the artists grouped in 2004, around a creative instance organized by Universidad de Talca, called Pinceladas del Maule (Brushstrokes of Maule).
2012. Aguatierra (WaterEarth) is my first commission.
