Artists' Books
Files
Download Artists' Book Preview (3.1 MB)
Creation Date
2019
Keywords
artists' books; art photography; black-and-white photographs; oceans; landscapes (environments)
Description
40 unnumbered pages : illustrations (1 folded, black & white. Title from artist's website. "Mayo de 2019" Photography, text, and design by Isabel Fernandez Echavarria. "A series of trips and over seven-year walks along the shores of the Pacific Ocean, steps of a major ongoing drift.. A wink to my pinhole camera and the 4x5" black & white film box in which my Gran Mar negatives and contacts travel with me."-- artist's website. Front cover and first page have a small pinhole opening. Black fabric over cover boards. Illustrated endpapers. English title translation: Great Sea. "At the beginning, it was necessary to go across a shell midden to reach the glowing, white sand beach.. also a small stream that smelled like moss and rocks, like the resinous plants covering the hills. I was a little child, but still remember the edge of the shells on my feet and the water, the hot salt aroma. I knew nothing about Changos or Chinchorros, and even less, that they inhabitated in my pulse. Nevertheless their memory vibrates intensely in my heart. That inner voice of which García-Alix speaks of, amongst thousands of thoughts, pushing to be heard. The light was that of the sun upon the shells. We knew the winter was ending when they began to shine between the huilles that sprout, tinting the hillsides in blue. The shadow was a dark shack builted in the center of the shells fields. La“Queda” Although I was afraid of it, spying through its boards and imagine what they hid, made my heart beat louder. When I was hungry, I ate dried seaweed from the beach sitted on the abalone shells… everyday we ate abalones, chicken was too expensive. Abalones and mushrooms from the hillside, sold by children not older than me. My mother trusted them and used to buy from them with total confidence, she said they knew well which were good and which poisonous. That the the children had known forever, since their ancestors. The same ancestors that since ancient times have built the Quedas as dwellings during the fishing seasons far away from their clans. Precarious, transient housings surrounded by sea shells… keeping count of those who, harvest after harvest, have lived there some nights with their days. Today however, these dwellings are surrounded by bottles, diapers, mattresses or tires. What happened to those sunny, damped morning over the shell fields? How many creeks have disappeared in the course of my generation that were born without dumps and now reigns among them? Recording the coast I have witnessed the change: rocks & shore sown with industrial and domestic waste. Garbage has found me… How do I translate my journey into a document that shows the landscape that we have built? How can I make it visible? How can I raise actions of repair? If we give waste to the oceans, with trash will the tide draw its traces on the sand .. I want to be able to find seaweed, flowers and shells again in its footprint. I hear old voices in my heartbeats. Like the Camanchacos sailing in their seal skin rafts, I wander the shore and wonder what the ocean would be like when it was an oceana, what the Pacific was like, before being the Pacific and I know I want to see clear and chaste Mamacocha’s face again.” --artist's website. Text in Spanish. Gift of the artist.
RISD Fleet Library Catalog Record
Press
Antilhue [Chile] : [I.F. Echavarria], 2019.; Chile : Ograma Impresores
Rights
©Antilhue [Chile] : [I.F. Echavarria], 2019.; ©Chile : Ograma Impresores
Materials / Techniques
hardcover books; black-and-white prints (photographs); pinhole photography
Measurements
11 x 14 cm