Patria

Patria – On June 9, 2020, artist Oleñka Carrasco learns from a video call that her father has died. The book Patria is the moving account of this bereavement, of the identity issues it raises, and more generally of the history of Venezuela and its exiles since 2015, the date of the artist’s last trip to her native country.

A human experience par excellence, the confrontation with death is recounted here through the artistic re-appropriation of 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 photographs of her home in France, the “lent house”, which she transforms, manipulates and alters using a typewriter. The typed text dialogues with the images and, as the story unfolds, seems to reveal and intensify the mystery of these human lives.

Through the intimate story of a bereavement, a broader reflection opens up on filial ties, exile, homeland, belonging to a country, a culture, a civilization. The mourning revealed by Olenka’s work is manifold: mourning for the father, but also for the homeland, for identity, for childhood in a place, a country that has disappeared forever. Through her artistic practice, the artist explores the loss of a loved one, a beloved home, a beloved country.

This book offers an exemplary work on an intimate story, the visual archives of a family, posing the question of memory and forgetting, of reappropriating the past and memories through art.