Enrique Ramírez
Bio
Was born in 1979 in Santiago de Chile. Since 2010, he lives and works between Paris (France) and Santiago (Chile). He studied popular music and cinema in Chile before joining the postgraduate master in contemporary art and new media of Le Fresnoy –Studio National des Arts Contemporains (Tourcoing, France). In 2014 he won the discovery price of Les Amis du Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France. He has since exposed in some major places as Le Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton or le 104), France (le Grand Café, Saint-Nazaire) and in Central and South America (Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico ; Museo de la memoria, Santiago ; Centro Cultural MATTA, Embajada de Chile en Argentina, Buenos Aires). In 2017, he is invited to the 57th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia curated by Christine Macel.
Enrique Ramírez's work combines video, photography, installations and poetic narratives. Ramírez appreciates stories within stories, fictions straddling countries and epochs, the mirages between dream and reality. This Chilean artist, who lives and works between Chile and France, often uses image and sound to construct a profusion of intrigues and to occupy the equilibrium between the poetic and the political. His imaginary worlds are attached to one obsessional element—his thinking starts with the sea, a space for memory in perpetual movement, a space for narrative projections where the fate of Chile intersects with grand narratives of voyage, conquest and migratory flows. His liquid images speak of the sparkle of a truth in permanent flight, the backwash of history, always repeating and never the same.
Statement
Los durmientes is a work in which images, echoes and sonorities from other works of his inevitably resonate throughout. I understand that Los durmientes seeks to denounce an execrable practice in the history of Chile; of the history of the Southern Cone to be exact: The Plan Cóndor (Plan Cóndor, as in the a large Andean vulture), subscribed in Santiago in 1975 with support of the U.S. in order to articulate the repressive actions of the military dictatorships in the region, exerted an unmasked State terrorism, responsible for the murder and disappearance of tens of thousands of opposition members. Within this context, the method of throwing prisoners into rivers or the ocean (as well as into a lake in the case of Paraguay) was employed. Denouncing such a fact, due to its excessive nature, exceeding the reach of any possible symbol, it requires rhetorical strategies and intense poetics, careful talking around the issue, daring plays, lateral approximations and exact distances. The images point out that which is on the other side, out of the frame of representation. Lacan says that symbols are unable to account for reality, which is un-representable due to its excessive, unknown or traumatic character, but that images can indirectly, briefly approach it.
2.5 x 4m / 98.4 x 157 in
