The Gallatin Galleries, New York
11.09.2023
Title: La niña de sus ojos
Artist: Marisa Cornejo
Genre: Slide show
Duration: 30 min.
Curated by: Keith Miller
Assisted by: Stéphane Fretz
Venue: The Gallatin Galleries, 1, Washington Place, New York 10003
Date: 11.09.2023
Support: Pro Helvetia
As a child, I often attended the slide projection sessions my parents organized for their friends and acquaintances in the various places where we lived in exile—our apartment block in Bulgaria, our social housing in Ghlin, and later in Puebla. It was a way for them to make friends, to talk about who they were and what they loved. […] Sitting through the projections, I saw and heard all of it, and it made me dream: it was paradise lost. I could feel the melancholy emanating from those ruins left behind by conquest. This lost world, in fragments, came back to life before my eyes through the slides and my father’s stories, through the records of Los Jairas that served as the soundtrack for those sessions. Violeta Parra and an entire generation of artists found in this melancholy the inspiration to bring something back to life—by creating, through music, images, and collected objects, an encyclopedia of Andean vernacular culture. A living archive.
