ANDRÉS SALAS

✦Después del oro -- (After Gold)✦

Images dissolving, appearing and disappearing: memory, repetition, loss, silence. Material and immaterial territories melt in the promise of a stationary, alien, and transcendental wealth. The thirst for gold does not change, but the name of the conflict does. While the mineral is ripped from the mud to be piled in distant vaults, the history of cultural, political, and environmental genocide reaches the bloodstream. It turns into the extinction of species in the Magdalena River, into toxic gases invading unborn beings, into promises of capitalistic progress. In Colombia, armed conflict has lasted for over sixty years, and has to be understood as an ecosophic conflict as much as a sociopolitical one, where the desire for wealth leaves us with the question: What remains after the extraction?

✦1000✦

Is a video installation about the now extinct lake Poopó, once the second largest in Bolivia. From a series of images taken by NASA between 2002 and 2016, the image of a fragmented lake that vanishes confronts the viewer with a long history of disappearance in Latin America - from the colonial genocide in Indigenous America to the continent's complex contemporary political and economical landscape - to question contemporary geopolitics, its impact at local levels and the challenges it represents for the future of the planet. The installation is accompanied by the piece Cantos de tierra by Bolivian composer Cergio Prudencio, performed by the Experimental Orchestra of Native Instruments

✦Invisible lines✦

The barn swallow crosses oceans and continents every year to nest and breed. Present in each continent, in less than 30 years has adapted its cycles and migratory habits in such a way that today, stimulated by the expansion of urban areas, can be seen increasingly nesting under bridges and houses in Buenos Aires and other cities of Argentina. Swallow migration refers to the temporary and repetitive migration of stationary workers traveling from the south of the continent to work on farms in the US and Canada, isolated from the communities where they live, without any integration. The sound of the Aymara tarka played by the Argentine musician and composer Jorge Vasquez and the electronica interpreted by Andrés Salas, speak of adaptation, evolution and collaboration that does not know border lines. The images react to the music in real time.

✦Je me souviens✦

Is a video installation about five Colombian political refugees living in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Inspired by the theory of recognition developed by the philosopher Axel Honneth, each participant used a video camera to explore three "spheres of interaction" - love, rights, and solidarity - These video recordings are connected to audio-visual portrayals of Sherbrooke and Colombian cities, through dreamy visions and echoes of a past-present mixed reality. Voice-overs of the characters, together with different soundscapes form the voice of the film. A video-editing algorithm mixes images and sounds in real time, presenting a new version of the piece at each projection. This technique of eternal editing builds up a film without a fixed duration, speaking of exile as a continuous déjá vu where memories, presents and futures are mixed.


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