Palestine Project

Abstract

Proyecto Palestina is a body of work that includes the video installations Beitjala and Greetings from Palestina, as well as the video Out of Place. For Aravena, whose father is Chilean and whose mother is Palestinian, the double filiation emerges as the matrix of his work. Beitjala consists of three video projections mounted in the windows of a textile shop located in the busy Patronato, an old Arab-Palestinian neighbourhood in Santiago. The installation in the public space addresses the socio-cultural context of Chile, seeking a creative confrontation with the theme of dislocation, cultural mobility and issues of transculturation. The foundational gesture of the return to the origin: Beitjala and Palestine, makes visible the re-territorialisation of a culture, which has established itself in a place distant from its origins. Greetings from Palestine is based on a dynamic of souvenirs that is brought into a precarious situation and then parodied. An image of a Bethlehem street blocked by a wall is projected onto a wall. The intervened landscape operates as an error and outliner that defines possible and impossible concepts, that enable and avoid. The strategy of the installation involves a confrontation of the gaze of the stranger with this ‘error’. Out of Place promotes an intense exploration of representation and territory, of questions of memory and identity. Aravena's gazes are divided between personal experience and historical and political questions, which broadens the field of meaning of the images, the artist multiplies her points of view using sophisticated language games.