La Memoria Verde

2019 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

13:00 minutes

Enrique Ramirez

year born: 1979
gender: male
nationality: Chilean
home town: Santiago, Chile

Enrique Ramirez’s La Memoria Verde is a work of poetry, politics, and memory created in response to the curatorial statement for the 13th Havana Biennial in 2019, The Construction of the Possible . Other well known works by Ramirez feature the movement and endless symbolism of the sea—like the simultaneous engagement and retreat of the tide—but La Memoria Verde takes the land, plant life, and its human inhabitants as its subject. The film begins with a soft, green, algae-like image that waxes and wanes in focus, then gives way to swaying treetops blowing in a soft wind. The calls of jungle insects and other fauna blend with intermittent notes played by a man on a saxophone, and the landscape on the ground, invoke lush, fertile, deep greens as if to color even the brass-made timbre. A woman describes, in a soft but deliberate whisper, a series of declarations that cite the plight of the land and the immigrant, the task of memory and of identity, of resistance and survival. La Memoria Verde calls upon the vibrant but dreamlike imagery of unstable memories, drawing the viewer into a hazy world encompassed by low light and dark hue. The work explores a verdant world through sight and sound, navigating the surviving variations of life, both human and rooted. Using lushness and overgrowth as a gesture of assertion and resistance, Ramirez connects the constant conflict and fluctuation of survival that both nature and man have in common. The film tells of imprinted traumas and the ways in which they become visible as scars, or manifest in movements that either protect or enhance their memory. In La Memoria Verde these gestures consume both flora and fauna.


Enrique Ramirez’s highly politicized practice engages both personal recollections and gathered stories, questions notions of exile, displacement, loss of memory, and a changing sense of place. Growing up in Santiago, Chile, his father was a sail-maker and Ramirez’s process often returns to the sea to bolster his investigations of movement, discovery, and geo-politics. The artist describes art and filmmaking as methods to communicate the ways society moves in cycles, sometimes backward and sometimes forward, especially regarding issues of immigration, border politics, and national identity. His seductive films and installations are sites of contemplation and imagination in their depiction of boundless space and expansive landscapes.


Colors:



Other related works, blended automatically

n°5 The International Sail
© » KADIST

Enrique Ramirez

2017

Ramirez’s The International Sail is the fifth in a series that features an upside-down worn out, mended and fragmented boat sail...

100 Hand drawn maps of my country, India
© » KADIST

Shilpa Gupta

2014

These hand drawn maps are part of an ongoing series begun in 2008 in which Gupta asks ordinary people to sketch outlines of their home countries by memory...

Untitled (Don’t See, Don’t Hear, Don’t Speak)
© » KADIST

Shilpa Gupta

2008

The three monkeys in Don’t See, Don’t Hear, Don’t Speak are a recurring motif in Gupta’s work and refer to the Japanese pictorial maxim of the “three wise monkeys” in which Mizaru covers his eyes to “see no evil,” Kikazaru covers his ears to “hear no evil,” and Iwazaru covers his mouth to “speak no evil.” For the various performative and photographic works that continue this investigation and critique of the political environment, Gupta stages children and adults holding their own or each other’s eyes, mouths and ears...

Drawn and Quartered
© » KADIST

Claudia Joskowicz

2007

The primary interest in the trilogy is Joskowicz’s use of cinematic space, with long tracking shots that portray resistance to habitual viewing experiences of film and television...

That’s That’s Alright Alright Mama Mama
© » KADIST

Mark Soo

2008

The two large-scale stereoscopic photographs in That’s That’s Alright Alright Mama Mama depict a recreation of Elvis Presley’s recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee...

Untitled (Sword)
© » KADIST

Shilpa Gupta

2009

In Untitled (Sword) , addressing histories of colonialism with abstraction, a large steel blade extends from the gallery wall...

Re: Looking
© » KADIST

Wong Hoy Cheong

2004

Re: Looking marks a new phase in Wong’s work which connects his region’s history with other parts of the world...

Black Hands, White Cotton
© » KADIST

Hank Willis Thomas

2014

Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...

Bread and Roses
© » KADIST

Hank Willis Thomas

2012

Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...

100 Hand drawn maps of my country, Tel Aviv / Jerusalem
© » KADIST

Shilpa Gupta

2014

These hand drawn maps are part of an ongoing series begun in 2008 in which Gupta asks ordinary people to sketch outlines of their home countries by memory...

La manzana de Adán (La Palmera, Santiago)
© » KADIST

Paz Errázuriz

1986

La manzana de Adán (La Palmera, Santiago) by Paz Errázuriz is part of the celebrated series La manzana de Adán (Adam’s apple) that spans 5 years (1982-1987) of documenting the lives of transgender sex workers in La Jaula and La Palmera brothels in the Chilean cities of Talca and Santiago...

Floor, Legs
© » KADIST

Elad Lassry

2013

In establishing a deliberate distance between viewer and subject, Lassry raises questions about representation itself and how all portraits are, in effect, fully constructed objects that only gain meaning once we ascribe them with our own personal associations and emotions...

Untitled (City Limits)
© » KADIST

Allen Ruppersberg

1970

Untitled (City Limits) is a series of five black-and-white photographs of road signs, specifically the signs demarcating city limits of several small towns in California...

A meditation on the possibility…
© » KADIST

Daniel Joseph Martinez

2005

Martinez’s sculpture A meditation on the possibility… of romantic love or where you goin’ with that gun in your hand , Bobby Seale and Huey Newton discuss the relationship between expressionism and social reality in Hitler’s painting depicts the legendary Black Panther leaders Huey P...

Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother
© » KADIST

Wong Hoy Cheong

2009

Created for the tenth Lyon Bienniale, in Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother, Wong’s ongoing negotiation of postcolonial globalization takes aim at French society...

Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam
© » KADIST

An-My LE

2010

The print Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam (2010) features an Asian Buddhist monk and an American Navy Solider on board the Mercy ship –one of the two dedicated hospital ships of the United States Navy– sitting upright in their chairs and adopting the same posture...

Nachbau
© » KADIST

Simon Starling

2007

Invited in 2007 to the Museum Folkwang in Essen (Germany), Simon Starling questioned its history: known for its collections and particularly for its early engagement in favor of modern art (including the acquisition and exhibition of works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse), then destroyed during the Second World War, the museum was pillaged for its masterpieces of ‘degenerate art’ by the nazis...

Karachi Series 1 (Ken DeSouza, 7:42pm, 25th August 2008, Ramadan, Karachi)
© » KADIST

Bani Abidi

2008

The threshold in contemporary Pakistan between the security of private life and the increasingly violent and unpredictable public sphere is represented in Abidi’s 2009 series Karachi ...

Untitled (Grate I/II: Shan Mei Playground/ Grand Fortune Mansion)
© » KADIST

Adrian Wong

2012

Untitled (Grate I/II: Shan Mei Playground/ Grand Fortune Mansion) is part of a series drawn from architectural objects that mark the boundary of public and private spaces Wong encountered while strolling in Hong Kong...

Ghost games
© » KADIST

Anri Sala

2002

Ghost Games , follows the enigmatic dance of crabs “steered” by a flashlight in the night of darkness of a South American beach...