Some memories have never had words, have never been named as memories, but exist as it were between the lines. They are images, atmospheres, feelings, stories without clear beginning or end, and in their skimpiness they are difficult to find again in the memory. You forget them, but even if you do remember them, they change while being remembered. Sebastián Díaz Morales seems to be playing with a similar idea here. Starting point for his memory is a town in an arid area in Patagonia: Astra. It is not the images of the town but the fragments round them that we see in threadbare shots. Moreover the camera seems to be too far away, then too close again, but the image will not become sharply defined. Memory floats through this on the corresponding stories, and for a moment it seems as though the images are telling the story of the surroundings and displaying a world, but it seems they do not want to become attached, and the connection does not hold. The images fade to snippets and to the very pixels out of which they are built: when dissecting the image to its basic elements the original image is lost. Recreating the image from its basic elements changes it and there is a struggle to make the whole from the parts and with this to see the organized connection. Just as with a memory, each time you evoke a memory the image revises something that leaves its traces. In Astra's struggle for existance between all the images in the memory, the digital process seems to have driven away the original image. Then chiefly the image of the barren landscape remains, dried out and changed into particles. What once was can no longer be retrieved.
– Carla Hoekendijk
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Sebastián Díaz Morales ° 1975, Buenos Aires (Argentina)
Lives and works in Buenos Aires (Argentina)
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