You Transform Everything into a Boat

video, 2017

I once asked my father if he joined the navy because he liked boats or if he liked boats because he joined the navy. He didn’t have an answer but said that when he went back to Santiago after Valparaíso he couldn’t remember his room being so small, that the bed barely fit with space to move. As a child, it had felt like the ocean.

You Transform Everything into a Boat is a video work that uses gesture and storytelling to explore the idea of post-memory within diasporic communities. Focusing on my Chilean heritage, this begins with two moments from my father’s life: his move to Valparaíso to join the Navy on conscription and when he subsequently became part an armed leftist guerrilla organisation fighting against the Pinochet regime. The text subtitles are a separate narrative to the spoken audio, and was constructed from dialogues with my father.

“I think what it is for me is that Valparaíso is not what it is; it’s what it was for me. Not as a city but as a place where I kind of developed my social conscious and my political views and had the opportunity to go and do something effective against the dictatorship in those years. So it’s more like the romantic view of the city more than the actual city itself… So that’s what it is, but the beauty is that wherever you are, you look out to the sea and you see the ships and the cargo and whatever fishermens, see this is just a better place.”