:: CHILE NOTES, 1999-2000

End of my dream.
The geographic location is secondary ; it is the emotional space that is the focus of my search, my destination. By looking at what is here now, i discover the hidden memories and the bad smells of an uncertain future anchored in such a violent past. It is here that all my fears, all my apprehensions, my obsessions find fertile ground.

My loneliness and the proximity of death, the paralyzing presence of physical violence, the evidence of what I hide from myself or try to forget, all find an echo in the heart of a society, deaf to its own history and which, through denial and repression can no longer speak to itself.

Repression, censorship and dictators have combined to create a society too familiar with suffering, violence and death. The family first pillar of traditional society, here has become the last sanctuary of a claimed "normality". Religion, always a tool of warring ideologies and raised up as a kind of mysticism, has now become a way of surviving.

Lonely towns blossom in the middle of the otherwise barren desert, abandoned intact at the moment of the disappearance of their raison d' etre. Separated from towns by miles of gloomy no-man's lands, the barracks of itinerant workers spring up whole from the sites of shutdown mines and factories.

I see just fragments, disarticulated members of a single society who never meet, lost on their own separate trajectories.
The day keeps me in the light, in a consciousness which believes itself objective and neutral. Nights catch up on me, the horizon gets lower, I am thrown to the ground, into the catacombs, into the shadows.
I am looking for the part of the mystery which surrounds the shadow, this world of the secret, the non-said. A deaf suffering; the darker part of things. I am looking for my own shadow who would not be a simple hole in the ray of light, but would have a thickness a glow, a vibration. Like the light itself...

olivia froudkine.