Dislocacion Project
Arica, Norte de Chile - No Lugar y Lugar de Todos [2009-2011]

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CHILE 2010
03 sept. -- 15 nov.

Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende
República 475
Santiago, Chile
http://www.museodelasolidaridad.cl/
Curado por / Curated by: Ingrid Wildi Merino

2011 SWITZERLAND
18 mar. -- 19 jun.

Kunstmuseum Bern
Hodlerstrasse 8-12
3000 Bern 7, Switzerland
http://www.kunstmuseumbern.ch/
Curado por / Curated by: Ingrid Wildi Merino & Kathleen Bühler.

Arica and the North of Chile – No Place and Everyone’s Place

As the starting point of her video essay, Ingrid Wildi Merino (b. in 1963 Santiago de Chile and migrated to Switzerland in 1981) takes the problems of how regional identities develop, if they are bound to territory, and how they fit into local history. In three projections Wildli Merino displays her travels in the multicultural region of Arica, accompanied by interviews with people who live and work there. The artist focused on North Chile because this region is a major economic hub and has always been multicultural.

Early in the 20th century it was the saltpeter mines near Iquique for manufacturing fertilizer and explosives that attracted international concerns and economic migrants; now in the 21st century it is copper mines, tourism, the fishing industry, and drug trafficking that determines life in the mediumsized city and the region. But also cultural tensions between Bolivians, Peruvians, and Chileans impact the morale among the people living in the area. It is difficult to find someone who has a local family history here, as the city only belongs to Chile since 1929. Prior to this was heavily fought over for the rich mineral resources in the region and its major commercial port. The extensive footage in Wildi Merino’s video of Arica evidences the specific beauty of the districts that suddenly appeared from nowhere. 

Her photographs of the paved and built over environment are contrasted by interviews with representatives from the authorities, sociologists, economists, and anthropologists who voice their opinion on the history and identity of the place. What they share – in the shape of available and public space, the beach, a climate one would expect in paradise, and, by appearances, great tolerance – becomes palpable in the rhythm of the images and the easy pace of the conversations. What at first sight seems to be a typical globalized no place proves to be a place for everybody. Of course this is not meant without irony, as, due to globalization, we find winners and losers all over the world. Ingrid Wildi Merino subjects various instances of highly political, social, and regional issues to an exacting analysis. According to her findings, regional identities may be based on specific geopolitical and historical demarcations but are primarily the result of social and economical processes.


Ingrid Wildi Merino 1963

Was born in Santiago in 1963, and lives in the country till she was 18 years old. She migrates to Switzerland on 1981. She studied at the Haute Ecole d’Art et de Design in Zurich and after that she made a post graduated on Visual Arts at the University of Geneva. As a teacher of the University of Geneva her work researches and explores the problems linked to migrations, memory, identity, dislocation, social and cultural movement.

I work placing tension to current symbolic situations present on migration and identity processes through complex articulations of placements out of the action field, in order to install my audiovisual speech on the frontier that is established between the real and the created, between what is said and what is stated, in order to set on the imaginary certain contemporary problems about migrant identities, flowing and without territories. I place my work under the denomination of video-essay to recompose a critic space somehow distant to the documentary, trying to set another pole of reading, another analytic view about the dissolution of social links and the fractures of affiliation operating a non journalistic practice of the interview, emphasizing the play of silence, the ravings, the judgment suspension, the stories dominated by the threat  of exclusion. My work allows me to combine and articulate fragments, giving place to a new narration. This narration answers the demand of dialectic staging the strong moments of statement determined by the usage, apparently rash of the speech groups conducting the generative usage of new fictions.

www.ingridwildimerino.net

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