
Patria
- Publisher
- The Eyes Publishing
- Year
- 2023
- ISBN
- 979-10-92727-55-5
- Specifications
- 21 x 29.7 cm, upright
96 pages
Sewn in the school manner
French, English and Spanish (separate editions)
Art direction by Yann Linsart, The Viewer Studio
Published alongside the exhibition Patria at the Rencontres d’Arles, 2023
“On 9 June 2020 I got a call. On this side of the Atlantic it must have been ten in the morning, yes, it must have been ten. He is dead, she cried at me. I found him dead.”
That day Oleñka Carrasco learned by video call that her father had died. This is the account of that mourning, of the questions of identity it raised, and more widely of the history of Venezuela and of those who have left it since 2015, the year of her last journey to the country where she was born.
The confrontation with death is told here through an artistic re-appropriation of the family archive: photographs, videos, sound — thousands of documents sent over a messaging app, on which the artist intervenes to make works in themselves. She also photographs where she now lives in France, the borrowed house, and transforms, manipulates and alters those pictures with a typewriter. The typed text talks with the images and seems, as the story is told, to reveal the mystery of these lives while making it deeper.
“I decide to tell and describe this violent and painful experience: to build a mourning in a childhood home lent by others.”