Viviana Zargón
b. 1958 in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Viviana Zargón
b. 1958 in Buenos Aires, Argentina

ARTISTS
ALEJANDRO CHASKIELBERG
1977, Buenos Aires, Argentina

ALEJANDRO CHASKIELBERG
Work
THE GROWING
LA CRECIENTE
The Paraná River is the second in second in length only to the Amazon River among South American rivers. The name Paraná is an abbreviation of the phrase "para rehe onáva", which comes from the Tupi language and means "like the sea". It merges first with the Uruguay River to form the Río de la Plata, the widest river in the world. At the end of the Paraná the river splits into several arms, creating a network of islands and wetlands, the Paraná Delta.
Alejandro has lived in different islands of the Parana Delta during three years, far away from the city, absolutely connected with the river, nature and the local people living in the island. Influenced by books and projects that tell about the great Paraná River, Alejandro began to observe how the people there lived and worked in a natural environment in which the preponderant element is water. Every day he crossed the Paraná in a motorboat, meeting island residents here and there—on the wharf or in some store or gas station. This allowed him to get to know the islanders sharing with them the same daily life. It took months to gain their trust.
Some of the islanders work in the tree—felling season, they are fishermen, hunters and or farmers, but most are isolated without any kind of communication except the River. The tides control the life of the islanders: with the high tide, they can travel through the small rivers and islands to pick up the wood felled before. With the low tide, they can collect rushes at the shore. The Delta region used to be one of the major fruits producer of Argentina, but after some big floods during the last century, most of the people have left these islands.
This is a community whose existence is often ignored and most of them live under marginal economic conditions. Alejandro has portrayed their everyday lives by staging scenes during long time exposures in the night. Families, fishermen, sailors, loggers, and hunters are part of this portrait of the islands illuminated by the full moon. Working with a large format camera and preferring shots that include people, water, sky and vegetation, creating each photo required long exposure times that forced subjects to remain motionless for as much as ten minutes.
By exploring these places through photography, the artist exhibited the extraordinary visual and poetic impact of the river and the intimate relationship between the Paraná Delta's community and its environment.
OTSUCHI, MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE
Otsuchi Future Memories
Following the most powerful earthquake ever to hit Japan, the sheer scale of the tsunami that smashed into northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011 –together with the nuclear disaster that came along with it -, was unprecedented. Coastal communities were devastated by waves, which at their highest reached 40 meters above sea level, traveling up to 10 km inland.
The fishing town of Otsuchi, Iwate Prefecture, Japan, was probably the most destroyed by the tsunami. There, roughly ten percent of the population was killed or went missing and sixty percent of residential buildings sustained damaged. In the midst of such chaos and disorder, people started to recover the family photographs they found in the debris of city, trying to keep safe the memory of Otsuchi.
This project presents a visual documentation of destruction and loss, by connecting portraits of the Otsuchi survivors with family photographs recovered from the waters, swept away by the tsunami. The survivors of Otsuchi were portrayed in the spaces where their former homes and workplaces were located. The importance of the colors becomes crucial in this approach. The colors from the destroyed photographs - deformed and blurred images, altered by the effects of the salty water, sometimes creating new colors or mixing the former ones - are revalued on an exercise of color archeology, where each of the colors found in the destroyed photographs were used to colorize the portraits of the survivors.
The tsunami caused considerable material damage, killing people and destroying entire communities, but above all, the survivors also face the intangible loss of their own memories and identities, in which family photographs play a fundamental role.
LABYRINTH