At the water’s edge, a figure stomps and sweeps the damp sand to the rhythm of a cueca that foreshadows the nostalgia of a return from exile and the unbearable distance from the sea that seals that farewell. From a very early age, the artist Enrique Ramírez understood that the world could not be understood up close: one had to move away to observe it. His constant curiosity to move and create distance fostered a sensibility that, even in his childhood, projected travel as a central form of interpretation and action in his life. That urge to set sail—to observe from another place—brought him to Europe for the first time in mid-2006. Since then, his work has unfolded across languages, territories, and tides, in a constant coming and going.
My Chilean Friend presents, for the first time, part of the artist’s audiovisual archive. Produced in collaboration with the National Museum of Fine Arts, on the occasion of I Create You, Landscape—his largest exhibition in Chile, curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti—this exhibition offers a counterpoint from the Archives Room at Il Posto. The interviews conducted by the artist between 2014 and 2023 bring together the voices of those who welcomed Chilean exiles in France and of judges who investigated crimes against humanity hidden in the sea. The ocean runs through both narratives.
