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Earth and Elsewhere | Contemporary Works from the Collection 13
12 Earth and Elsewhere | Contemporary Works from the Collection
Drawing together works from throughout the Queensland Art
Gallery’s contemporary collections, ’Earth and Elsewhere’
features artists whose works frame the past and help shape
our understanding of the delicate and often paradoxical
synapses between memory and history, empathy and reception.
Like Guzmán’s film, the exhibition asks why we are drawn
to, and grounded by, acts of remembrance. This question is
connected to the creation and reception of art itself, conjoining
the processes of retaining and reviving impressions of the past
with the motivations for making physical that which cannot
be reconciled by memory alone. Art becomes a site in which
the experience of memory is given primacy, and to borrow
Guzmán’s expression, embodied as a ‘fragile present moment’.
‘Earth and Elsewhere’ tracks a path across the planet’s
surface and atmosphere, mapping an interpretation of the
human condition through a series of poetic and philosophical
associations. From fissures in memory, to structures of
interpersonal relations, and the in-between spaces that
have the capacity to transport us from here to elsewhere,
the exhibition is presented in three interconnected
constellations of works — ‘The cracked earth’, ‘Personal
cosmologies’ and ‘Farewell to the sea’ — that begin on the
ground before taking to the stars.
‘The cracked earth’ brings together works that make symbolic
connections between bodies and landforms, revealing the
imprint of lived experience and the complexities of returning
to a past that is now beyond our grasp. Some artists excavate
individual and collective trauma by showing the earth broken
and damaged, while others summon spectres from the past to
I am convinced memory has a gravitational force. It is constantly
attracting us.
For documentarian Patricio Guzmán, memory is in an ongoing
process of seeking us out, leaving ciphers to be encountered
in the everyday. In
Nostalgia de la luz
(
Nostalgia for the
Light
) 2010, Guzmán observes this lure at play in the vast
open expanses of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.
Here, archaeologists have uncovered artefacts and human
remains that have been immaculately preserved by a climate
with zero humidity; astronomers utilise its clear skies to
observe stars and solar systems located billions of years
ago; and a group of women continue the search for Chile’s
desaparecidos
— loved ones assassinated during Augusto
Pinochet’s 17‑year military dictatorship, whose bodies are
believed to have been scattered in the desert.
1
Nostalgia de la
luz
unites these different attempts to connect with the past by
balancing that which defines one’s personal experience of the
world with the larger narrative of how and why we remember.
In
Nostalgia de la luz
Guzmán affirms that the human condition
is fundamentally activated by its engagement with memory,
observing in its closing sequence: ‘Those who have a memory
are able to live in the fragile present moment. Those who have
none don’t live anywhere’. The exhibition ‘Earth and Elsewhere’
asks how we might perceive this ‘moment’ in contemporary
life and art. Guzmán’s poetic film essay provides both an
introduction and coda to the exhibition, linking ideas of historical
consciousness, cosmology and trauma. Within this context it
emphasises the way art can provide memory with a material
presence, while also acknowledging the experience of complex,
intersecting pasts in the everyday.
Earth and Elsewhere
José Da Silva
Patricio Guzmán
/ Chile b.1941 /
Nostalgia de la luz
(
Nostalgia for the Light
) (production still) 2010 / HD Video, colour, Dolby Digital, 90 minutes, Chile, Spanish/English
(English subtitles) / Director/script: Patricio Guzmán / Cinematographer: Katell Djian / Editors: Patricio Guzmán, Emmanuelle Joly / Courtesy: the artist and Icarus Films, New York