Ana Luisa Bernárdez Notz

Cuerpos de Agua ~ Bodies of Water, 2020

Cyanotype on cotton fabric, video projection with sound and digitized VHS tapes.

This multimedia installation explores body-land relationships, as Bernárdez looks into her experience as an uprooted body. Emigrating from Venezuela has transformed the ties she holds with a specific territory, and through this work, the artist explores her relationship to the Venezuelan-Caribbean coastline and the liminal space of its beaches, where she grew up. The installation includes photography, a video projection, sound and archival footage. Some of these elements depict the beach while others were materially produced on location, yet they all reflect interactions that she and close family members had within this landscape. The video projected on the wall shows a record of an interaction between the artist and a body of water, while the cyanotype’s physicality becomes an index of her body in contact with photographic chemicals, the sun, ocean, salt and sand. The digitized VHS shows footage of these beaches shot by the artist’s close family members, which she explores and edits, looking into the intergenerational history and connection to the coastline. These interactions are exchanges that can be seen as rituals to cope with displacement and a means to stay grounded.

“When I am away from it, the tie that binds my body with the land is not broken, but rather transformed and reconfigured” A.L Bernárdez Notz.

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