Patria

On June 9, 2020, the artist Oleñka Carrasco learns through a video call that her father has died. The book PATRIA is the moving account of this mourning, of the questions of identity that 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.

Human experience par excellence, the confrontation with death is told here through the artistic reappropriation 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 pictures of her living space in France, the “loaned house”, shots that she transforms, manipulates, alters by using a typewriter. The typed text dialogues with the images and seems, as the story is told, to reveal the mystery of these human lives while intensifying it.

It is an artistic but also an emotional process. This work, which mixes writing as much as visual art, allows Oleñka to live the disappearance of her father despite the distance that separates them (he dies in Venezuela, she is confined to Paris, in the middle of a pandemic), thus renewing the links with her family and her homeland, distended by exile. 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 multiple: mourning for the father but also for the homeland, for identity, for childhood in a place, a country that has disappeared forever. The artist explores through her artistic practice the loss of the loved one, the loved home, the loved country. The book PATRIA offers an exemplary work on an intimate history, the visual archives of a family, asking the question of memory and oblivion, of the reappropriation by art of the past and memories.