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 Installation Views Copyright © 2019 Jorge Brantmayer.  Copyright © 2019 Patricio Aguilar Diaz. Copyright © 2019 Denise Lira-Ratinoff. All Rights Reserved

post installation

chronometer -cronometro

CHRONOMETER

To contain, to transfer, to care for, to feed...choking, vertigo, 
precipice, anguish, fear, silence, life, death, reflection, wait, time, 
vibration, odor, feel, half-light, breath...experience, consciousness...
Some of the sensations that come to mind upon experiencing CHRONOMETER, 
an installation composed of solid residue bails installed from floor to 
ceiling, delimiting a space in which only a narrow corridor is left, 
where the viewer circulates, feeling the choking from the residues that 
surround him.
Maintaining the walk, within this labyrinth of residues, he meets glass 
that closes his way through, where a photograph of a glacier can be seen 
attached to a black wall. Under the photograph of the glacier, there is 
a digital chronometer that indicates the passage of time. The pulse, the 
palpitation of the constant threat.
All of this listening to the stunning environment and marvelous sound of 
the sound of the chant of the whales.
This installation, site-specific, has to be felt, experienced, looked 
at, with just one person entering at the time, in order to isolate 
oneself in the silence of the architecture, composed by the bails of 
residue as a deterrent of any noise, in order for the sound of the 
whales to dialogue with the inner-self of each human being.
This installation provides awareness and educates with information 
regarding the oceans, their contamination due to plastic residues and 
the growing threat that this means.
I hope that this project will be a small contribution to encourage 
awareness regarding damage that human activity can do to our planet - or 
habitat - and create a consciousness regarding the need to avoid it and 
look for solutions...now !!!

The big industry is filling our planet with plastic, material of very 
low degradation, that mostly ends up in the ocean, which contaminates 
the water and affects in the life of that environment, from microscopic 
beings to large mammals such as whales and with that our whole 
ecosystem, mea- ning the planet that we inhabit, apart from being 
threate- ning due to climate change and deforestation, also origi- 
nating from industrial activity.
Chronometer is an installation that intends to contribute making the 
danger that threatens us visible, helping cons- ciousness about the need 
to decrease the production and use of disposable plastic and caring for 
our oceans, so im- portant to bio-diversity and ecological balance.
An important factor is time, since the industrial production os plastic 
has rapidly grown, along with the daily use of containers, bags and 
other articles.
For this reason, it is essential to raise awareness to pro- ducers and 
consumers of the damage that we do to our planet and the need to reverse 
this process looking for solutions that will protect our flora and 
fauna, our natural resources and the environment in which we live.
The time is now !
And, do you know how plastic affects the planet?

Denise

THE LEGACY

Everywhere in the world there are voices that are extinguished daily.
When a person dies, their departure rapidly becomes news that has 
emotional repercussions to those who were close, other times the 
departure has dimensions that measure the level of importance the person 
had.
When hundreds of cetaceans die aground in the harbor , it just becomes 
news disguised as a natural enigma, as if human beings were not 
responsible for their lifestyle, with the cult towards what is 
disposable and for the unmeasurable ambition of becoming rich.
Listening attentively to the beautiful and upsetting voices having a 
dialogue among the large cetaceans, I feel a manifestation of the magic 
of that immense creation, of the creation exempt of religions or 
philosophical beliefs, yet at the same time I can not stop thinking of 
the cruel legacy of the human race.
Standing next to the ocean I think of how we, as humanity, are dumping 
into it a totally uncertain destiny close to making it barren and 
condemned for ever to the silence of its magnificent inhabitants.
We get ready to represent the ocean for its painful complaint.
We decide to cry out for justice for the horrible damage that the noi- 
ses of industrial activities provoke in their highly sensitive audition.
We want for this artistic exhibit to make visible the departure of these 
animals drowned in plastic who disoriented keep running, leaving blood 
steles that come out of their ears, bursting due to the explo- sions 
searching for oil.
If we keep thinking that this is a future problem and that someone is 
going to come and fix it for us, we simply do not realize that it will 
be us the ones that will be running away.

Patricio Aguilar Díaz
Production Designer and Director/ Special Effects Supervisor for Cinema 
(SFX)

EXPLORING THE EXTREMES

The artist’s work adapts itself in regards to what each one of us knows 
but somehow avoids the distressing destruction of nature that man 
generates and specifically of the oceans.
By means of a vigorous and dramatic production, Lira immerses us into an 
asphyxiating laby-rinth that feigns the lack of oxygen and locks us into 
the ocean of plastic.
Built with obsessive precision, the project recreates the artist’s 
force, who is able to convey her unease and her anxiety stemming from 
the evidence of the environmental disaster only through her photography 
and her installation.
The sounds of the whales resembling even human moans enforce the 
upsetting content and sometimes ambiguousness of the exhibit.
There is a combination between accusation and critical provocation where 
the artist conveys the intensity with which she has traveled through 
ice, sand and waters exploring the subjects of the cycles of life, in 
the staging of her grief in such a way, that she finally grants an 
aesthetic value both, to waste and to the revealed natural disaster.
This double interpretation expresses the ambiguity, where life’s impulse 
is shown in order to give us an unforeseen beauty within the suffocating 
climate of the environmental disaster.
The polarity between the silent beauty of the untouched landscapes and 
the relentless bom-bardment of man towards nature are impeccably shown 
in this forceful installation.
This avid hunter, has recorded natural landscapes, going deep into 
inhospitable sites where survival becomes fraught with difficulties for 
the human being, exploring its own extremes.
Maybe this is what we can explore as a subtext in each one of her works, 
that present them-selves as a grand work in progress. Lira, as a great 
survivor, again and again, chooses life to have a dramatic turn, without 
any concessions for her or the public.
Behind her tireless work there seems to be an urgency for not waiting a 
minute of her life in this planet.

María Irene Alcalde
MAVI Curator

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