SEGUIDORES DEL DILUVIO (FLOOD FOLLOWERS) - 2018

During the past three years, I have compiled news footage about floods: Climatic events whose recurrence puts the traditional news narrative in crisis. Today, thanks to the Internet and global communications, it has become easier than ever to notice that floods happen practically every day of the year: Which forces us to consider the global nature of these type of events and -in a wider sense-, to ask for what constitutes a catastrophe within this global context, and how it could be narrated.

"Followers of the Flood" is a series of pieces -and an exhibition- based on these questions: Proposing a reflection on memory, oblivion and the possibility of inhabiting the distance that divides subjective experience, from climatic and social events (both global) that appear to mirror each other.

An ungraspable playlist of news about floods compiled since 2015, intertwined with digital recreations of these catastrophes: their anonymous protagonists turned into ghosts and humanoids, rivers transformed into simulations, all of this sharing the exhibition space with Youtube Kidfluencers thirsty for attention. And the digital reconstruction of a child, myself some 30 years ago, trying to remember what it was like to be a teenager in Chile in the early 90´s: where, in an extended moment of transition, I conflated the visit of the Halley comet and the Pope, the arrival of fast food and the referendum, within the euphoric flood of consumption that defined our return to democracy and that somehow reflects global issues nowadays.

nonfluencer

Exhibition View with a closeup on the reconstruction of a 10 year old self-portrait talking about the 90’s in Chile, and our obsession with development and Miami.

angels

General view of exhibition at Museum of Visual Arts, MAVI, the monitor has one of the three kidfluencers that are deep into the Internets: AKA the children of Christmas future and past.

floodlist

Exhibition view centered on the playlist of flood videos combining different narrative tropes of flooding events with 3D reconstructions and YouTube reimaginings. And some Apple WWDC that seemed relevant within this context.