Francisco Navarrete Sitja participates in BIAM 2018

From June 16th to July 29th, the artist in residence Francisco Navarrete Sitja participates in the 15th Biennal d’Art Ciutat d’Amposta / BIAM 2018 with the project “Your materiality is the confluence of all things”. An investigation and artistic production realized in the town of Colbún, in the province of Linares, in the south of Chile.

This is a work that puts into dialogue the eradication of the families of farmers who lived in the flooded areas after the construction of the “Embalse Machicura” (ENDESA), with the trajectory and materiality of the rocks that give shape to the western parapet of the reservoir; a retaining wall with more than 5 kilometres of extension, made up of rocks extracted after the excavation of the tunnels diverting the course of the great river Maule. This dialogue between extracted and translated rocks and eradicated community is articulated from the artist’s need to speculate on the origin of the name “Machicura Reservoir,” which in Mapudungun (tongue of the earth) means “machi stone” (machi: woman spirit, healer, revealer, curator). Thus, starting from that own denomination and utopian narrative that superimposes reality and fiction, this piece proposes to infiltrate a personal reading of the modernizing narrative of the “Embalse Machicura” and its historical context, connecting the journey, materiality and symbolism of the submerged rocks, with the journey of the eradicated peasants and the search for a possible “machi stone” that transforms the history of the town of Colbún.

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