'The sleepers' awakens 'The flights of death'

Sequence of the video installation 'The Sleepers'. / c7

The CCA Gran Canaria center inaugurates this Tuesday the iconic work of the creator Enrique Ramírez, who on Wednesday will talk about his 15-minute piece

One of the most abominable episodes of the contemporary stage of Chile, the purge undertaken by the
pinochetist dictatorship with the so-called
'flights of death' In whose sinister journeys, innocent citizens were thrown into the sea from military helicopters, some still alive and tied to railway sleepers, inspires the video installation by Chilean creator Enrique Ramírez, 'Los durmientes', which opens today at the headquarters of
CCA Gran Canaria, Audiovisual Culture Center located in Schamann in the capital of Gran Canaria. The Francis Naranjo Foundation and the aforementioned cultural space dependent on the Cabildo present
this triptych on video that simultaneously presents three acts and three different temporalities of this violent event.

On the occasion of the exhibition of the mentioned piece, the day
March 16, at 7:30 p.m.the author of 'Los durmientes' and Eduardo Caballero, head of the Francis Naranjo Foundation, will offer a conference at CCA Gran Canaria in which they will refer to this 15-minute videographic creation, made in 2014, which has been seen , among other places, in the
Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2014, the Museum of Memory in Santiago de Chile, the MATTA Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, the Amparo Museum in Puebla in Mexico, the Space for the Arts in Sao Paulo in Brazil, the Video Sound Art in Milan and at Rencontres of Arles held within the framework of the Ecole National de la Photographie of France.

Enrique Ramírez's work combines video, photography, installations, and poetic narratives. Ramírez appreciates the stories within the stories, the fictions straddling countries and eras, the
mirages between dream and reality.

This Chilean artist, who
lives and works between Chile and France, often uses image and sound to build a profusion of intrigues and strike a balance between the poetic and the political. His imaginary worlds are attached to an obsessive element: his thought starts from the sea, a space for memory in perpetual movement, a space for narrative projections where the destiny of Chile intersects with great stories of travel, conquest and flows. migratory.
His liquid images speak of the flash of a truth in permanent flightthe ebb of history, always repeating itself and never the same.

'Los durmientes' does not intend to dwell on the execrable act of the murders carried out by the Pinochet dictatorship, but to trigger memory so that the past enters into tension with the present.
Its anachronistic staging opens the utopia of memory and keeps it available for the political action and ethical commitment of the Chilean artist, born in 1979, a year after the trips ended.

The politics of exodus, exile and the discontinuity of memory are part of Ramírez's proposal, which investigates the silences of history, balancingly intertwining the poetic and the political. For this reason, its formats used as
videos, photographs and installationsemanate stories within stories, fictions that exceed countries and times, moving between the
dream and reality.

'Los dormientes', possibly one of his most emblematic works, is a project carried out jointly with the
Museum of Memory of Santiago de Chile and filmed on the coasts of Puerto Viejo, Quintero and Horcón. In this video installation Enrique Ramírez explores a historical wound from the point of its dissolution: the sea.