Imbunche

What pieces or projects have you been working on lately?
The work of Imbunche (2022) is a series of analog photography that dates back to my time at the University of Chile. It’s a very intimate body of work, revisiting my father’s lost passion for photography and the melancholy of seeing the world from the perspective of a small being.

What did you learn (or unlearn) while working on them?
One of the things I learned in this work was to experience the phenomenon of conjuring living connotations onto inanimate objects. That sensation grows the more we coexist with them in the same space—the way they gradually become charged with emotional energy, as if they were a mirror of something happening deep within us. Perhaps it brought back that childlike impulse to be emotionally affected by irrational things. An old magical spell that makes this being come to life and blames me for treating it as an object.

What words, ideas or emotions were going through your head?
Childhood, melancholy—perhaps the memory of being very small and walking through downtown Santiago while my father told me, “you have to be careful and stay alert on the street, stay close, because no one looks after children here.” In the work, that feeling appears blended in as an element.

Were there any conversations, movies, music, or books that made their way into that work?
In this piece, I bring together several exercises from different courses I took during my university years. The concept of the imbunche, from Chilean folklore—referring to a kidnapped, deformed, and dispossessed child—was used as a reference to build a provisional model for a drawing class during the pandemic. Around that time, it became a creature that inhabited my home, whose cloth-covered gaze I couldn’t escape in any corner of my room. Something familiarly melancholic made me want to photograph it in its everyday coexistence.

What's been the most difficult thing you've faced recently in your creative process?
For this particular work, confronting the medium was a challenge. So was the emotional weight of the doll once I had to get rid of it—otherwise, its gaze might have driven me mad. I don’t think the project was very well received at my school, which is fair considering I took several creative liberties, from choosing color film to using disordered framing. Even though it’s not a very polished photographic work, what mattered was that I approached it from that childlike feeling—from how I perceived the world in color at a young age; how the world moved in a way that made everything feel like a dream around me.

That’s why I’m very grateful to my professors for evaluating me formally while still giving me the space not to pursue perfection, and to follow this intuition that I genuinely enjoyed. At that time—and even now—I constantly face creative blocks, but I believe I’ve been able to approach them with kindness through my postgraduate studies in art therapy.

What is your favorite restaurant and what do you recommend we order?
My favorite restaurant here in Santiago, Chile… wow, that’s a hard one. But any old-school completo spot—the kind where you see early-2000s Cerveza Cristal ads, where you walk in and it feels like time froze 20 or 40 years ago, where the same songs still play on the radio, with bad coffee and the same woman behind the counter.

If your life were a movie this month, what would it be called and who would write the soundtrack?
After a long time, my life finally has a calmer soundtrack. These days, it sounds a bit like "El loco" by Los Babasonicos.

Recommend one or more artists you follow who inspire you, and tell us what you like most about their work or their way of working.
If I had to mention artists, I’d start with one of my close friends: Duam Día. The kind of talent I envy for their ease in capturing their sensitivity—their way of seeing and pausing everything except the brush and the medium. They simply can’t help but create immediately and don’t waste time on grandiloquent words. There’s an intrinsic need to paint within them.

Another great inspiration is Wiki Pirela, an artist whose installations overwhelm me every time I visit their exhibitions in my country. Their ability to atmospherically transform space through their work is one of those phenomena that make me genuinely enjoy art.