Patria - On June 9, 2020, artist Oleñka Carrasco learned via video call
that his father has died. The book Patria is the moving story of this mourning,
the identity questions that it raises, and more generally
of the history of Venezuela and its exiles since 2015, the date of the last
the artist's journey to his native country. \n \nA human experience par excellence,
the confrontation with death is told here through re-appropriation
artistic family archives; photographs, videos, audios… thousands
of documents sent by WhatsApp on which the artist intervenes and creates
works in themselves. In addition, Oleñka Carrasco takes pictures of her
place to live in France, the “borrowed house”, clichés that she transforms,
manipulates, alters by the use of a typewriter. The text
typewritten dialogues with the images and seems, as the story unfolds
tells, revealing the mystery of these human lives while intensifying it. \n \nA
Through the intimate story of a mourning, a broader reflection opens up on the
filial ties, exile, homeland, belonging to a country, a culture, a
civilization. The mourning revealed by Olenka's work is multiple: mourning of the
father but also of the homeland, of identity, of childhood in a place, a country
gone forever. The artist explores through his artistic practice the loss of
the beloved, the beloved house, the beloved country. \n \nThis book offers a work
exemplary of an intimate story, the visual archives of a family, posing
the question of memory and forgetting, of reappropriation through art
past and memories.
