Ojo Salvaje (WIP)

Ojo Salvaje is a lecture-performance (work in progress) that brings together film material, unpublished archives and scenic devices emerging from more than six years of research carried out in Tierra del Fuego, Chilean Patagonia. The work follows a series of expeditions undertaken by artist Sebastián Escalona, conceived as contemporary replicas of the anthropological missions led a century ago by priest and ethnographer Martin Gusinde.By reconstructing the original photographic camera used by Gusinde, the research reactivates an old device of observation in order to produce new images of the territory. In the process, an unexpected connection emerges between the Selk'nam people, erroneously declared extinct, an artist from the German Bauhaus movement, and a penguin endemic to the southernmost reaches of South America.The lecture activates a network of relationships that transcends historical reconstruction. What begins as an investigation into the past is transformed, through the event itself, into an experience in which memory takes shape and exceeds the boundaries of the narrative.