El Otoño
Sebastián Bustamante
El Otoño (the Autumn) contributes to discussions and questions on identity following displacement. Forced migration continues at an alarming rate, with one of its maximum expressions in the refugee crisis in Europe today.
A civic-military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet seized control of Chile on 11 September 1973, abruptly ending Salvador Allende’s “Chilean Road to Socialism.” The Pinochet regime began an extensive terror campaign against leftists and former supporters of Allende. Dreams of a more egalitarian society ended on that day. Economic violence echoed widespread state brutality, including kidnapping, arbitrary arrests, torture, executions, and enforced disappearances. Exiles who managed to escape maintained the dream of Allende’s short-lived socialist experiment. Sebastian’s own experience as a next-generation exile nurtured a certain longing for Chile in him.
This project attempts to understand the complexities of this fractured place and time, reflecting Julio Cortazar’s seminal 1968 novel, Rayuela (Hopscotch). The figures he encountered in Chile, such as the relatives of the disappeared, experience a different liminality, unable to bury and mourn their missing. The fate of those missing is still unknown 30 years after the dictatorship ended. El Otoño attempts to honour the missing, those who stayed, those who left, and those still trying to build a better future.
Biography
Sebastián is a British-Chilean artist-photographer, curator and researcher based in Abergavenny and Birmingham. Sebastian has exhibited in various venues in the UK including in London, Essex and Bristol and has had his photography published in news media. He has also had his research on art published in academic journals and online academic blogs. Sebastián’s principal research focuses are on memory, place, archives, and identity. Sebastián worked at the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America from 2015-2018 where he researched and taught on art from Latin America as well as curated displays and exhibitions. In 2006, Sebastián began a longitudinal transnational project exploring his identity and the legacies of dictatorships in Latin America utilising archival materials and his photography, incorporating his scholarship on the interstice between art, memory, and activism in his project El Otoño.