Attempt to Fix an Image That Keeps Disappearing

To understand memory as an open, flexible, non-hierarchical process—always poised to rewrite its beginnings and endings. To see it as something to be studied, remade, and strained by new hypotheses. Within this framework, through smoke, image, and object, a process of construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction of memory is activated—one that mirrors material decay. This open archive dissolves the possibility of rigid memory, proposing instead a memory that is activated through erosion, residue, and fragility.

This intersection between smoke and the discarded is closely tied to the territory where this project is based: Traytrayko, Nueva Imperial, in Gulumapu. There, smoke is part of the everyday landscape, the result of wood-burning stoves used to withstand the cold and rain. In this context, smoke is not just residue, but a living substance that inhabits the territory, moves through it, transforms it. At the same time, those very climatic conditions—cold and damp—are responsible for the deterioration of these object-debris.

I was drawn to develop, through printmaking, a technique as fragile as smoke itself—one in which the image could fade with the slightest touch. The images I etch onto these broken-down objects come from my personal and family archive. In them appear my father, my mother, my grandmothers, close friends, myself as a child, and the places that shaped my daily life—both in Nueva Imperial and, now, in Santiago de Chile. I sought to strain these images by setting them in dialogue with even more unstable surfaces: rotting wooden planks, a torn mattress, rusted parts from wood-burning stoves. In that contact, all the elements intensified one another’s decay.

Thus, beyond the material possibility of preserving an image, what endured was the action itself: the gesture of trying to fix it. Memory did not reside in the object, but in the persistence of that gesture; the object became merely an evoker, a trace of that intent. That is why the images are unique—there is no serialization, no polished finishes. Some are barely distinguishable, and that is precisely the point: they are not meant to represent, but to embody. They are traces of a will to make presence, more than images to be seen.

This project poses the question of whether a material memory might endure insofar as it is enacted—practicing presence as a persistent act of will, driven by affection. In recognizing memory as an unstable process, it offers a series of smoke-etched essays on the discarded, aiming to build an intimate archive—one that invites us to consider that the possibility of remembrance lies in the gestures we craft to resist the looming threat of forgetting.