In dept portrait of Argentinian video artist Sebastian Diaz Morales who grew up in wild Patagonia where the wind blows 150 km/h. It was the experience of a stranded whale which made Diaz Morales aware of the language of video art.
In-dept interview with Sebastian Diaz Morales who presents some of his most important works and tells the story of how he became an artist coming from the small city Comodoro Rivadavia, a “wild place in the middle of Nowhere” in Patagonia, South Argentina. “This place marked a lot of my being, of my identity and therefore the language, the narrative and the topics I uses throughout my films”.
Sebastian Diaz Morales encountered video when he was given a VHS video camera as a child and started to document family events, but also started playing with the medium. The young Diaz Morales found that it was important that his family and his friends also liked what he filmed, that he had to please a certain audience.
Diaz Morales used the wind as a character in his early films “as metaphors to talk about other things, criticizing this environment but in a constructive way”. “These societies are very young. We come from immigrants, we are a mix, and we don’t know who we are and where we belong.”
“I am very interested in the notion of reality and fiction. I understand reality as something we construct and as something we can also deconstruct and rebuild it into whichever shape we want to give to it. My work explores the boundaries between reality and fiction”, Diaz Morales says.
He presents a trilogy of Pasajes (2012-13) that are simple ideas: ‘Pasajes I’ where a man walks through rooms of Buenos Aires, ‘Pasajes II’ where a man is climbing stairs in buildings and ‘Pasajes III’ from Jakarta, Indonesia where a man is crossing streets packed with traffic. Diaz Moreales also talks about ‘Oracle’ (2007), ‘Lucharemos hasta anular la ley’ (2004) and ‘Insight’ from 2012.
Sebastian Diaz Morales (b. 1975) is an Argentine visual artist, who belongs to a new generation of Latin American artists. His work has been exhibited widely at many prominent venues, such as the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Bienale Sao Pablo and the Sydney Biennale. In 2009 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Sebastian Diaz Morales was interviewed at his studio in Amsterdam, February 2014, by Christian Lund, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
Photographed by Sandder Lanen
Editing by Kamilla Bruus
Produced by Christian Lund
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, produced by Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2014.
Supported by Nordea-fonden
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