Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Claudia Aravena Abughosh was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1968. From 1987 to 1992, she studied graphic design at the Arcis University and audiovisual communication at the Arcos Institute. Her work, produced from the 1990s onwards, often approaches universal issues such as identity, displacements, and memory, always with a particular take that seemingly removes the images from their original contexts, reinserting them into new, subjective ones. In so doing, she establishes an intense interplay between her experiences, the images she produces, and contemporary political and social issues.

She made a series of experimental works, including Panama (1991), Ante-sala (1990), and Dile al tiempo que vuelva (1992). Then, commissioned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France, Aravena made the video Miradas Desviadas (1992). The winner of an award from the Research Commission of the CICT (Unesco) and an honorable mention from the jury at the 1st Biennial of Video and Electronic Arts of Santiago (1992), the work portrays the newfound freedom in post-Pinochet Chile.

In 1996, she presented her video Estación Terminal at the Berlin Transmediale. Two years later, Aravena won first prize at the VideoArt Festival Locarno (Switzerland, 1998) for First Steps, a sort of journal of a trip she made to Bosnia in partnership with Paula Rodríguez. In 1999, she was invited to integrate the artist residency program of the Podewil Center for Contemporary Arts in Berlin, Germany, where she made the berlin: been there/to be here video, presented at the 13th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival. The video marks her return to the theme of displacement, seen through the eyes of an immigrant woman and her relationship with the city of Berlin. In the same year, Aravena made That's not a Loop, that's Real-Time, a video installation that also approaches immigration, this time from the perspective of the wait as a permanent condition for immigrants.

Dealing with the same subjects, but also broadening the scope of key issues in her work, the artist worked in partnership with Guilhermo Cifuentes-a frequent collaborator of hers, and the author of the Essay published in this edition of FF>>Dossier-to make the video installation lugar común/common place (2001). The work focuses on language, distance, and urban landscapes, promoting a dialogue between Santiago (Chile) and Berlin (Germany), against a backdrop of memory and identity issues.

In 2002, Aravena made 11 de Septiembre, a striking video that links two extreme situations: the 2001 attacks in New York, and the military coup led by General Pinochet that brought down president Salvador Allende, in Chile, 1973. Two facts, twenty-eight years apart from each other, brought together by the “fracturing of present and past historical memories,” as pointed by the video synopsis. The work was awarded at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (Germany), 2002.

In 2003, Aravena started developing her Palestina Project, an extensive series of videos and video installations presented in Germany and Chile. Once again, she returns to identity issues, this time with a more critical, political approach, dealing with borders and their representations, territories, and displacements. The project includes the video Out of Place (2005), the video installation Greetings from Palestina (2003)-which received the first prize at the Kasseler DokFest (Kassel, Germany) in the same year-, and the video Beitjala (2003).

Out of Place is the third work in the Palestina Project, and promotes an intense exploration of representation and territory, memory and identity issues. Once again, Aravena's views are torn between personal experiences-represented here by family memories-and historical and political issues, greatly widening the field of significance of the images. Using the resources of video to emphasize perceptions, associate contents, and broaden her reflections about core issues, the artist multiplies her views using sophisticated language games.

This feature is also present in the other works that comprise the Palestina Project, such as the video installation Beitjala (2003), named after the hometown of Aravena's maternal family. In this work, Aravena interviews family members and shopkeepers in an immigrant-populated area of Santiago, where her family owns a store as well. Her interviews explore the immigrants' mental imagery, searching for their memories. Soon afterwards, following the interviews, she traveled to Beitjala and recorded images of places and memories mentioned by the immigrants and their family members.

The final phase of the work was the screening of these recorded images in Beitjala, on the window panes of Aravena's family store in Santiago, for three days in April, 2003. Instead of mannequins and textiles, the corner store windows displayed images of the Palestinian city. The territory was expanded and rebuilt through memory, thus creating-in the middle of Santiago and using memorialistic images-a foreign space.