My first work in Australia, an overview on colonisation outcomes and the contemporary situation of the Australian Aboriginal people, their struggle and disadvantage behind the successful image that coats the modern Australia.
INDOMITE
Having presented Modelo Ralco in Galería Metropolitana in, Santiago, Chile, 2002, I won a contest organised by The South Project –which CEO was Kevin Murray (Garland Magazine)– to come to Australia –where I've lived since 2006– as an artist in residency with Monash University, Melbourne. I arrived to this continent full of wrong ideas about its big modern cities, some information about the abuses against Aboriginal people while developing modern Australia i.e. Stolen Generation, Deaths in Custody; but mainly a big ignorance about many aspects of the harsh reality lived in Australian Aboriginal communities. Nowadays, having being a media trainer in the ‘remote area’ –I've lived in Alice Springs, Northern Territory, for 12 years now–, I have had the opportunity to visit many communities and to establish some level of mutual trust and friendship with some Aboriginal people. Material collected while preparing INDOMITE, and that collected for another version of INDOMITE, shown at Galería Metropolitana, Santiago, Chile, in January 2007, accumulates as my process of learning.
In May 2006, I brought living native plants of Aboriginal significance with me from Alice Springs, Central Australia, to my artist in residency studio Caulfield, Monash University, Melbourne, to be used as a representation of the rich knowledge held by desert people. To the video interviews of Aboriginal activists I did in the main cities, including Mr. Mick Dodson, who represents Aboriginal Australians in the United Nations Permanent Forum On Indigenous (UNPFIIO); Mr. John Coe, at the time Chairman of the Tent Embassy at the loans in front of the Old Parliament House in Canberra; members of the Mundine family in Redfern, Sydney; a member of Stolen Generation at the Tent Embassy; and Aboriginal elders in the Northern Territory, including a Militjari family elder, who features in a sequence gathering and preparing irmankga-irmangka at Mimili Community. Then, I took the plants, along with timers, electric cables, hoses, water and chemicals and set up my "device for self-reflection", the video-installation INDOMITE. See the video component of the video-installation here.
The transit between the Western cities, which I consider as the core of my own culture, to the very outer boundaries of our world, where we can find those "others", deeply rooted in something different, and sit down with them and communicate about our approaches to reality, is the main material I base my work on. I try to document diverse human subjectivities in a world that tends to homogenise our experiences. I try to rescue difference in a time when equality has stopped being a real humanistic value. My works are the chronicles of a man living in the late period of an unfinished and cruel colonial epoch.