La Memoria Verde

2019 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

13:00 minutes

Enrique Ramirez

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:

• nature.n.03
• ecology.n.01
• environmental.a.02
• country.n.02
• memory.n.01
• immigration.n.02
• trauma.n.02
• black-and-white photography
• collective history
• color photography
• conflict
• chilean