BAphoto | Main Section – Booth P.25 | Buenos Aires, Argentina

VIGIL GONZALES is pleased to announce its participation in the Main Section of BAphoto 2023, with works by Enrique Ramírez and Nicolás Janowski. For this edition, the iconic video Alerce, by Ramírez, has been selected by Irene Gelfman, Global Curator of Pinta Art for the program Video Project.
The selection of works creates a dialogue between territory and history. From the vision of the extreme south of Argentina, where the color blue becomes the ultimate horizon, to the Chilean spaces that encapsulate political power and legitimacy. As we move forward, we also explore migration and displacement in the chaotic contemporary landscape, where borders are blurred and identities are reconfigured. Each of these works invites the viewer to interrogate historical constructs through the visual and to reflect deeply on their own identity and the choices that shape their perception of the world.

Nicolás Janowski
Brisa 2014-2016.
Adrift in blue, Ed 3.
Inkjet print on archival paper.
167 x 105 cm

The series Adrift in Blue by Nicolás Janowski is based on the geographical and visual imaginary of the Yagán people, in the extreme south of Argentina. Our end of the world is blue, unlike that of other cultures. In a return to belonging, Janowski's optic advocates for surrounding the way of seeing of the first inhabitants and settlers. Battiti highlights the semantics of color that speaks of drifting, and comments that "Adrift in blue, (...) implemented from a multimedia platform (...) explores an extreme territory, surrounding with the lens its myths and legends in a compendium of visual stories ranging from the chronicles and travel logs of European expeditions to the current scenario dominated by extreme conditions and the increasing exploitation of natural resources".

Enrique Ramírez
Serie Calais. 2009.
Inkjet print on archival paper.
90 x 60 cm (each)

In the series Calais, named after the northern French port city where the Sangatte refugee center was closed in 2002, artist Enrique Ramirez testifies to the subsequent occupation and reappropriation of that territory. The contemporary world is going through a chaotic state of indiscriminate migration: just as the Latin American people have the United States as their horizon of progress, the African people develop a similar relationship with Western Europe. In the informal colony, indirect dependence is one of the implications of the preceding formal colony, sustained by the weak currencies of the periphery that are governed by the market of the center. Thus, uprooting is common currency among migrants.

The work El Cruce de Las Alamedas convinces us that we can cross a space of power. The Palacio de la Moneda and its antechamber, La Plaza de la Ciudadanía, to which civilians are forbidden to enter, condense the symbolic power of political legitimacy objectified in Chile. The composition gathers a double succession of stills from the film Brisas (2008), where a ford in history is suggested: an enunciative and reflexive space where the fluid current of recent history is remanent so that we can grasp, model and assimilate it.

Enrique Ramírez
El Cruce de Las Alamedas.
Ed 1/5. Inkjet print on archival paper.
71 x 52.5 cm

Enrique Ramírez
Alerce, 2017.
[Still frame] Video.
Film 2K, stereo sound.
6'55'' minutes.

Video Project is the section of Pinta BAphoto dedicated exclusively to the moving image, curated by Irene Gelfman. In its seventh edition, the common thread is the relationship of bodies with the environment and the notion that in every act of looking there is an expectation of meaning, where the important thing is not seeing, but the way we process and relate things. The nine selected projects expand the physical and conceptual materiality of video and invite the viewer to relate and interact with the works on view. As a result of the coexistence of these images, the idea emerges that no statement can be made without the presence of a voice, of a surface, without becoming a body in a sensitive element and without leaving a trace in a space or in a memory.

Alerce, in the words of Daniel Dobbels
"The black trunk and the bark of time have lost their way. Time rises and rises towards its point of ascent and, without having to reach it, discovers along this long slowness the splendors it has sculpted, purpled and cut beyond all wound. [A dead time that has to start from the bottom to reconstitute itself, and that would continue to fail if the gaze of a man does not help it to sustain this impossible task; a time that is forced to resume its course with the most imperative and extreme slowness; time constrained to slow hours, to relaxed hours. [At the top of the arboreal spindle, the camera takes off into the immense space. Lover of time, it feels magnetized by another immensity where other unheard solitudes play with death and manage to rise a step above the felled destinies. A forest of dark lives overcoming the silent lament in which days and nights are folded. A spindle, not a branch, of existence that sees the sky bend so that torment does not become the atrocious support of movement."