Enrique Ramírez. Latin American Encounters 1

Museo Amparo begins Encuentros Latinoamericanos on October 17. This project has its starting point in the exhibition América Latina 1960-2013. Fotos + Textos, presented at Museo Amparo from May 24 to September 29, 2014. This show evidenced the need to create spaces for encounter, dialogue and reflection around the artistic production of the subcontinent.

Encuentros Latinoamericanos will be held annually at Museo Amparo. A curator will be invited to create an exhibition proposal with a young Latin American artist, who in turn will propose the intervention of any intellectual with diverse horizons to enrich and strengthen the encounter.

Encuentros Latinoamericanos is also an editorial proposal in the form of a collection of publications with a uniform format and design. The content includes an interview by the curator, a text from the invited writer, the biography of the three participants, and a broad selection of images of the artist's work.

On this occasion, Museo Amparo will present the first exhibition in Mexico of Chilean artist Enrique Ramírez (b. 1974, Santiago de Chile), el tiempo, el ánimo, el mundo. Curated by Ángeles Alonso Espinosa (b. 1969, Mexico City), with the participation of anthropologist and historian Claudio Lomnitz (b. 1957, Santiago de Chile).

The work of Enrique Ramírez echoes the hybridization of the contemporary world we live in: the hybridization of the plastic languages used as cultural, historical and social references that support his creations, expressed in a crossing of disciplines between cinema, video, fine arts, and poetics, where media and formats dialogue.

An artist in a globalized world, living and working between France and Chile, his origins are the foundations of his work; as he himself points out: "Each person carries his own home." Works like La invención de América (1998–2013) or Al sur de América (2012) refer to Uruguayan painter Joaquin Torres García and his drawing América invertida (1943), with its political and philosophical implications, while the video Los durmientes (2014) reopens the pages of the dark years of Chile under the dictatorship, its summary executions and the victims of forced disappearances.

Exodus and exile also have a preponderant place where the infinite flux of a population that is reduced to mere statistics contrasts with the internal movement of intimate dialogues and biographies. Works such as Horizonte (2009) or Cruzar un muro (2013) mise en scene show lonely individuals looking for hope "to find a land, a house, a home, the heat… protection."

In between poetics and documental realism, the works of Enrique Ramírez are above all an invitation to travel, to the capacity to decenter and look from another side; to question space, geography and its cartographies with the arbitrariness of its politics and borders; to rethink history and its given discourses; to free the word through poetry proposing a plural and subjective reading of time, spirit, and the world.

Enrique Ramírez studied folk music, as well as audiovisual communication focused on cinema, at the Instituto de Artes y Comunicación ARCOS de Chile. He earned a Master in contemporary art and new media in Le Fresnoy center in France. His solo exhibitions include: Los durmientes at Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (2015) and Restos de mar at Die Ecke Gallery (2015), both in Santiago; Los durmientes at Palais de Tokyo (2014) and Cartografías para navegantes de tierra at Michel Rein Gallery (2014), both in París; Cruzar un muro, Loop Fair, at Die Ecke Gallery, Barcelona (2014); Océano at Die Ecke Gallery, Santiago (2013); De latitudes en Portrait at the Jeune Création Gallery, París (2013); Le voyage "inmobil" EROA at the Collège Gustave Nadaud, Wattrelos, France (2013); and Océano, a video installation at the Musée de Beaux Arts of Dunkerque, France (2013). His work can be found in many prestigious collections, such as FRAC of Marseille; the MACBA collection, Barcelona; FNAC Collection, Paris; Richard Collection, France; Juan Yarur's Collection, Chile; Salomon's Collection, París; Lemaître's Collection, France; at the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Santiago, Chile; and at the Itaú's Cultural Collection of São Paulo. Enrique Ramírez lives and works between France and Chile.