Loss

Loss. Intaglio, Chine-Collé. 45cm x 45cm. 2022. 

Loss is the tenth print in my artist's book. The losses indigenous people in the Chaco have experienced throughout the colonization process are unimaginable to me: a loss of land and territory, a loss of culture, a loss of a way of life, a loss of a sense of identity, a loss of autonomy, of freedom, a sense of power, a loss of an understanding of the world. This was a difficult piece to do: I am keenly aware that I'm attempting to express someone else's experience and the portrayal of a kind of victimhood can be problematic, but I believe that feeling empathy for others' losses is an important process towards understanding. To me, acknowledging the losses and wrongdoing is an essential step towards any kind of reconciliation and healing process. 

The grey dripping cloud, repeated from the first piece of Remembering (an obscuring and fading of memories), evokes this sense of loss and grief. The translucence of the groupings of figures suggests a non-solid, precarious presence and marginal existence, a fading past or a non-materializing future. The shadowy figures in the cloud allude to a parallel invisible society from the past. 

Ursula and Verena Regehr write about the role that missionaries and churches played in this monumental loss of culture: "Through evangelism, the missionaries taught new values and practices. They called the [indigenous people] 'heathen' and condemned their previous life as 'bad', 'false', 'vicious' and 'guilty'. With great verbal pressure (with the threat of social exclusion, illness, God's punishment, the final judgment, the end of the world, etc.), with violent actions (the destruction of ritual objects, the disturbance and prohibition of ceremonies and parties, songs and shamanic sessions) and with promises of a new life (of healing and recovery, of salvation from sins), with the construction of churches and settlements, they tried to persuade the [indigenous people] to renounce their worldview and ethics, as well as the practices and rituals associated with them. (Regehr, Ursula, Verena Regehr. Reconfiguraciones – Vida Chaqueña en Transición. Ed. Fernando Allen. Asunción: Fotosíntesis fotografía + editorial. (2018). 107).