Patria

“On June 9, 2020, I got a call.
On this side of the Atlantic, it must have been ten o’clock, yes, it must have been ten o’clock.
He’s dead,” she yelled at me. I found him dead.”

On June 9, 2020, the artist Oleñka Carrasco learns through a video call that her father has died. The book Patria is the moving account of this mourning, of the questions of identity that it raises, and more generally of the history of Venezuela and its exiles since 2015, the date of the artist’s last trip to her native country.

Human experience par excellence, the confrontation with death is told here through the artistic reappropriation of family archives; photographs, videos, audios … thousands of documents sent by WhatsApp on which the artist intervenes and creates works in themselves. In addition, Oleñka Carrasco takes pictures of her living space in France, the “loaned house”, shots that she transforms, manipulates, alters by using a typewriter. The typed text dialogues with the images and seems, as the story is told, to reveal the mystery of these human lives while intensifying it.