Betraying Amnesia: Latin America Video Portraiture

You Are What You Are Born For features three blind sisters who sing for their survival on the streets of Campina Grande, Brazil. By providing personal testimony about the intimate details of their everyday experiences, these women bring into question the act of seeing and perceiving. The piece opens with a collage of abstract images, a sequence of rotated landscapes. As viewers, we are subject to what Berliner describes as a, "Vertigo provoked by vision," an alternative vision that invites us to consider how perception affects our identity.

This title is only available on Betraying Amnesia: Latin America Video Portraiture.

Veronica Majano depicts the character of a street in the Mission District of San Francisco. This street is personified as a fifteen year old Salvadoran/Ohlone girl on a search to understand the changes brought on by colonization, dislocation, and more recently, gentrification. Tracing the history of the Mission from its first residents, the Ohlone Indians, Chula explores the effects of re-colonization on memory and memory loss. For Chula, memory loss is a birthmark that was passed down to her from her ancestors. Calle Chula is Majano’s way of addressing the causes and consequences of cultural amnesia.

This title is only available on Betraying Amnesia: Latin America Video Portraiture.

An experimental video about immigration. Looking at the potato (which was first cultivated in Peru) Papapapá paints a picture of a vegetable that has traveled and been transformed—following the migrating potato North where it becomes the potato chip, the couch potato, and the french fry. Papapapá simultaneously follows another Peruvian in motion, the artist’s father, Augusto Rivera. The stories of the two immigrants, the potato and Papa Rivera, converge as Augusto becomes a Peruvian couch potato, sitting on an American sofa, eating potato chips and watching Spanish language television.

This title is also available on Betraying Amnesia: Latin America Video Portraiture and The New McLennium.

Incorporating appropriated television footage as artistic experimentation and social critique, Chilean artist Magaly Ponce retells a history of violence and repression from her point of view. Magnetic Balance is a self-portrait of the artist as a member of a generation she terms the "children of Pinochet." Recalling the circumstances surrounding the execution of a family friend in 1973 at the onset of the Pinochet dictatorship, Ponce reexamines her relationship to Chilean society. The opening image, the disassembly of an audio tape, opens up a poetic space where Ponce explores the reconstruction of memory and relative truth.

This title is only available on Betraying Amnesia: Latin America Video Portraiture.

This dreamlike, poetic video provokes the viewer to question the nature of the most human of experiences. The collage aesthetic exposes how human relationships—between men and women, men and men, women and women—are mediated by dominant ideologies as represented in the mass media and religion. Bobe posits no theories and draws no conclusions, leaving the viewer with a truly postmodern conundrum about life, love, art, men, women and death.

This title is also available on Betraying Amnesia: Latin America Video Portraiture.

The question, “Who am I?” has been asked over the centuries in many different ways. Videomaker Carlos Nader adds another approach in his investigation into the nature of the individual by taking the work beyond self-examination and asking it of others. What is revealed is the impossibility of rational thinking to understand the essentialism of human identity. Nader describes this work as a “non-autobiography-video” about its author; a video about nothing.” Exploring notions of the irreducibility of identity to one’s color, nationality, or politics, the tape “wants to be anyone’s biography. It wants to speak about our oneness—or is it our zeroness?”

This title is also available on Betraying Amnesia: Latin America Video Portraiture.