ENRIQUE RAMÍREZ

(Santiago, 1979)

Enrique Ramírez’s films, installations, and photographs intertwine personal stories with the social memory of his home country, Chile. Taking Chile’s geography as his leitmotif—particularly, the ocean— Ramírez uses a lyrical language that is often fragmented, and through which he recounts traumatic historical episodes that revolve around exodus and loss. In Breezes (2008), a man wanders through downtown Santiago, arriving at and walking through La Moneda, Chile’s presidential palace. The title and script of the video allude to emblematic sentences: “las brisas que te cruzan” (the breezes crossing you) which echo the national anthem and the anthem of the armed forces, while “el hombre libre que camina por las alamedas” (the free man walking along the boulevards) evokes Allende’s last speech from La Moneda in 1973, before he committed suicide. The spoken narrative converses with the locations visited by the character: the voiceover promises “breezes that travel between land and ocean will bring oblivion and healing.” Yet the memories contained in those landmarks reveal that it is impossible to simply cleanse charged places.