GONZALO JAVIER MORALES LEIVA
Visual Artist - Chile.
STUBBLE 2019 -2020
Archive of objects found and scanned during the Social Outbreak of Chile, 2019 - 2020. Born from the community, crossed by my own experience and with the vision of being a public access archive, for artists and researchers interested in social issues in Chile and Latin America.
Composed of around 270 pieces, in this file you can find stones, pellet cartridges, tear gas bombs, lemons, shoes, gloves, masks, bulletproof glasses, religious figures, among others.
Stubble:
Set of remains of stems and leaves that remain on the ground after cutting a crop. Stubble is often confused with remains of little value. However, stubble is a favorable resource to protect the soil from the impact of erosive precipitation and the subsequent runoff.
On October 18, 2019, an unprecedented social revolt began in Chile since the return to democracy in 1990, after a 17-year military dictatorship. Television, photographic and cell phone cameras recorded the confrontations between protesters and law enforcement, documenting the explicit violence of the social protest.
I decided to stay on the street at the end of the demonstrations and walked at night, paying attention to the ground, looking for objects that caught my attention. My intention was to find the implicit violence of the objects that were left lying in the streets and digitize them with a scanner to create an archive.
I searched lonely barricades, stone-strewn streets, and destroyed establishments. From that long map of action, I sensed an emotional relationship with these objects that would intensify my awareness of them, enable their aesthetic experimentation and their valuation as evidence; weak evidence of great poetic potential.
While walking home, I stopped to look at some lemons lying on the street. Lemons cut, stepped on, bitten, left. I picked them up and could see that one of those halves had teeth marks and blood. It was no longer an object or food, at that time it was more of an abandoned shelter, street silence, a vestige of an attempt to regain one's breath.
