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Claudia Aravena Abughosh

Birth : 1968-10-21, Santiago, Chile

History

Claudia Aravena Abughosh, visual artist. She was born in Santiago, Chile, on October 21, 1968. Between 1987 and 1992 she studied Graphic Design at ARCIS University, Santiago, Chile; and in 2001 she graduated as an Audiovisual Communicator at the Arcos Institute, Santiago, Chile. During 2012 she is a candidate for a Master's Degree in Cultural Studies at the University, ARCIS, Santiago, Chile. She has worked as an undergraduate academic for the Video workshop at the School of Art and Visual Culture at the University, ARCIS, Santiago, Chile and in the Film and Visual Arts Seminar at the Film School of the same University. She has also been an undergraduate Academic for the Video and Multimedia Technology Workshop at the School of Visual Arts of the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile. In 1994, she was Curator of the Chilean submission for the short film exhibition Mostra Courtas Cinema, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and of the XIV Festival Franco-Chilean de Video Arte, Santiago. In 1995 she was in charge of the production of the 2nd Video Biennial of Santiago, Chile. In 1999, she was also curator of Crossing the Border, an exhibition of videos by artists from Argentina, Brazil and Chile, at the Center of Contemporary Arts Berlin, in Podewil, Germany. In 2001, she was a member of the jury for the V Biennial of Video and New Media in Santiago, Chile. In 2004, he was a member of the jury for the Golden Cube Award at the XXI Kasseler Dokumentarfilm & Videofest, Germany. Between 1997 and 2007 he lived in Berlin, and developed his work both in Germany and Chile.

Movies

Director

This is the story of a man marked by a childhood image. The scene that disturbed him by its violence, and whose meaning he would only manage to understand much later... With these sentences, narrated in voice-over, begins Chris Marker's film La Jetée, and which in this video come to open the question of how does one come to have a memory that one never had? Memory, metonymy, desire, abjection, childhood, belonging and photography appear here as loose pieces of a reconstruction of the scene, where the absence of a body, that of the witness, and the presence of another, a victim, constitute the staging of the way in which individual memory and testimony are complexly intertwined with collective memory. We are not privileged witnesses of the scene, except by the desire for the scene.

Director

"Greater is the hatred that has inspired us, than the sea that separates us from it" reads one of the most significant sentences of Simón Bolívar's Letter of Jamaica. The work revolves around this phrase, whose words appear and disappear in the course of the sequence of images, disjointed from the cohesion that brings them together only at the end of the video to form that programmatic declaration that defends independence. The sentence is thus evidenced as a procedural symbolic knot, the result of a complex history and its possible articulations. The images of the video, in a constant swaying of a boat in the water, open up to the dimensions of the immensity of that sea that serves Bolivar as a metaphorization of the magnitude of the hatred that forces him to revolt against the colonizers. It is a sea in which is inscribed, in turn, a new history, which, as a possible reading, forces us to think of other colonizations and economic dependencies.

Director

We live in a society that, to a certain extent, allows itself to be ruled by an Empire of Fear. The origin of many historical events can be traced back to repression, to loss, these events converge to form a catastrophe of such magnitude that the wounds never heal. A vicious circle is thus created, which contributes to the preservation of fear. The idea here is to construct a new context for the images; to imprint on the images a personal perspective by virtue of which they can be transposed to a subjective level. In this way, to raise the question of whether the events can be read from one's own perspective, from a different place.

11 de Septiembre

11 de Septiembre

Director

September 11, 1973, military coup in Chile. The video explores the transtextuality of memory, while at the same time implicitly criticizing the mass media and its representation of violence. The fissure between these two aspects, the tension between present memory and historical past, is the place from where the video is installed.

Berlin: Been there / to be here

Berlin: Been there / to be here

Director

Numerous filmmakers and video artists have attempted, with varying success, to produce visual representations of memories. The eye of memory does not see things in the same way as the physical eye, and many artists have come to regret this difference. Aravena Abughosh's attempt belongs to the category of successes. He has managed to account for the fragmentary and associative character of memory; for the vague emerging and dissolving of images, and even for the feelings that are so intrinsically linked to it.

Screenplay

A woman receives a postcard from afar. The film is about distance as existence.

Editor

A woman receives a postcard from afar. The film is about distance as existence.

Director

A woman receives a postcard from afar. The film is about distance as existence.