Text for Elainealain / The Rhythm of Return by Joseph Del Pesco & Enar de Dios Rodríguez
All inquiries have a moment in time. This moment is moved by the changing winds in Enrique Ramirez’ life, that are being redirected thanks to a new compass: his recently arrived daughter. Her presence has precipitated a new series of almost existential questions about his artistic practice. While the past has been a recurring motif in Ramirez’ work—his personal history, that of his home country, even the Global South—this moment marks a turn toward the future. It’s an invitation to consider the world that his generation will pass on to the next. Will his daughter be stranded by the climate crisis, or is there hope? In one of Ramirez’s text works, he points to “A flag searching for the wind so that we can move forward…” The flag here refers to those attached to the mast of the ship – that serve as an indicator of the wind’s direction. With the climate already a background and context in much of his work, perhaps his daughter is like that small flag, a point of attention, a flicker of suggestion moving the ship in a new direction. In other words: is the arrival of his daughter leading Ramirez to change course in search of the possible?
Like any personal revolution, with the onset of fatherhood, there is within it a sense of repetition, a rotating motion – a seemingly straight line forward that, if followed carefully, might just form a circle. As part of a generation born under a dictatorship, Ramirez’ line starts in Chile, a country that formed his understanding of the world and which cultivated his close bonds with the landscape. The land and motifs like “carrying the homeland with you” later became significant features of his work with image, film, sculpture and sound – but often in relationship with water, or at the edge of a lake or sea. The distance between his current location and Chile has always been measured in oceans.
For Ramirez, the home studio is his place of work, now in the periphery of his daughter’s wide-eyed observation, as he also keeps an eye on her. This routine of care, this generational cycle can’t help reminding him of his own childhood in Chile, and how he watched his father Hugo carefully dismantling sails, puzzling out how they are made, leaning over his sewing machine, assembling new patterns or repairing battles lost with the wind. The symbolism embedded in the act of reparation has an unexpected power, as one thinks about a generation in Chile recovering from a national trauma – rebuilding a future. This observable act of daily creation and transformation, Ramirez now understands, was very influential for his life: “It shaped my relationship with the world and the objects around me; at the same time, seeing how something can be taken apart, how something can be made anew, encouraged me to experiment.”
Although he currently lives in France and has spent a substantial portion of his life outside of Chile, he has always felt the need to trace the line back, navigating to the place that made him who he is. For a while this rhythmic motion of return shifted to seeking the land-beyond, toward new horizons – yet always with the word “foreigner” sewn inside his collar, regardless where his travels may have led. The temporal atmosphere of his early years in Europe, of being a visitor and then an immigrant, of a persistently unresolved sense of citizenship, and the feeling of one’s status in limbo has had a substantial imprint on his work. Perhaps the metaphor of adrift at sea with no land in sight, approaches the emotional uncertainty of such a state. Yet now, thanks to the family that conceived him and the family that’s presently in its early years of becoming, he has two anchors—in Santiago and in Paris.
As we walked along the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris on a cloudy day in mid September 2024, speaking mostly in English but switching into Spanish and French as needed to fill in the gaps, we talked about the future and the past. I asked about his first artwork that featured a sail, presented in Paris, but sourced from those collected (in the box pictured at the beginning of this text) by his father. The original sail was submitted for repair to Hugo’s taller (workshop), but upon inspection he found it to be paper-thin and thus unrepairable. After transporting the sail to France, the sail was installed upside down, to reference the shape of the South American continent, and tiled into equally sized frames that might, if stacked, fit into a suitcase. Inscribed on its surface is a subtle topography, each tile like a full-page spread of a book. Ramirez found the sun-worn material of this particular vela profoundly beautiful, a metaphor for the struggle of the voyage, and the courage needed to reach the destination. The gridded format is suggestive of attempts at orientation, like the longitude and latitude of a map. Hugo pointed out a zig-zag stitch adjacent to the ‘window’ of the sail, that was made by his original sewing machine, a Singer, back when Ramirez was a child. This mark leads back to the days when the taller was intertwined with their home in Santiago. “I saw him working with sails at home, all the time, and for me they were nothing special because they were always there. The sails were like everyday life, it was only later when I started studying film that I realized that working with sails was going to become a very important part of my life, and my work.” The inscription of a zigzag stitch, of Hugo’s history of work with the sail, and a marker in time of Enrique’s childhood becomes key:the sail as a living archive, one that is well worn and after a long life on the ocean, comes back to tell its story.
Over the years, Ramirez has also borrowed methods and practices from Hugo, a testament to a bond sustained despite the distance. In the images above: on the left, one finds the slate-black tile floor of Hugo’s taller in Santiago, upon which he makes marks and notes as he measures and pieces-together a sail – like a chalkboard that’s marked and wiped clean. In a phone conversation with Hugo, he notes “the whole floor acts as an extension of the sewing machine.” A representation of this floor appears in the form of black paper in a performance Ramirez staged at the Centre Pompidou, using red and white marks to inscribe outlines and poetic phrases in French and Spanish. Transforming Hugo’s original approach to marks and measurements, Ramirez noted directional markers and traced sections of the sail to establish a timeline. Among others, the phrase Norte Claro, Sur Oscuro, Aquacero Seguro appears here, first as a mnemonic device, a rhyme to read the skies, especially critical when sailing at sea where little is of greater importance than the weather. North Clear, South Dark, Downpour for sure, is also a double entendre referring to historically stormy relations between the Global North and the Global South, a motif that resurfaces in Ramirez’s work.
“A sail[boat] is an island on the sea, it’s a story left stranded…” To recognize a sailboat as subject to the forces of nature, moved only by the wind—as a collection of all of its voyages, all of the languages spoken aboard, the waves that crashed upon its deck, the people and things it has carried, and the storms it has survived—this is to understand the sailboat as an epic story. When I asked which of the many sails that Ramirez has made over the years was pivotal for his thinking, without hesitation he pointed to No. 5, The International Sail. The work was finished on-site, for an exhibition in San Francisco, and was the first time the surface of the sail included a hand-drawn cartographic layer. When I asked him about the name, he mentioned being moved by a headline in a San Francisco newspaper: We Are Not Immigrants, We Are International Workers. At the time Ramirez was approaching the end of a three-year period with a carte de sejour, or residence card in France, and he was feeling a distinct affinity with immigrants, amid news highlighting migrants arriving in crowded boats to various corners of Europe. The argument for an upgraded terminology to the status of international worker rather than immigrant, resonated with Ramirez. This shift in language is indicative of the fundamental need for dignity and respect in the context of a dominant, and for somehostile or confounding, host culture for anyone living abroad. No. 5also includes arupture piercing the glass of the frame: a small red flag, made with Hugo—en busca del viento perdido – that appears at the southernmost point of the transformed sail. The flag is planted at the center of a white five-pointed star surrounded by blue that references the flag of Chile—a pin in the map noting a point of origin. The stitches and marks added by Ramirez imply an alternative political geography in the South American continent, and clumps of cut-out stars and bright graphic lines are suggestive of new flags, and other formations of borders and countries—perhaps suggestive of the Bolivarian dream and historical aspiration of a united states of Latin America.
Creative forces are like the wind, they rise and fall, and like the purpose of the small red flag that Ramirez made with Hugo, they are always in search of the possible. But other forces are constant, like the son’s undeniable attachment to his father, a connection Ramirez no doubt seeks to nurture in his young daughter. Hugo keeps one of these small flags at his home in Chile, made of sections cut from the very first sail he produced in 1980, as a memory but also a reminder, a long thread of connection to his son, who has distributed other small sections of this sail, as part of projects around the world, including No. 5, The International Sail. The flag can be seen as a metaphor for orientation, Ramirez recounts, for being able to heed the precise direction of the wind, and thus for finding a way to navigate the present moment in a shifting context. In the end he confesses that, “working with sails is a form of recognition and love for my father.”
Beyond the symbolic reference to migration, the sail is also suggestive of the act of expedition, of travel, which is another constant in Ramirez’s practice. One that’s being challenged in the face of his new anchor. One might argue that it’s impossible to imagine his work without some form of travel—of walking (as in the widely exhibited film Un hombre que camina) and many other depictions in film and photography of the voyage. This restless and peripatetic spirit, of meandering and movement, was also inherited from his father, who traveled with their family across Chile. “He took us, every year, to a very special place, a small lake near a volcano in southern Chile. We always traveled by sailboat, and that relationship with travel was inherited 100 percent from my father. The only difference is that I went away and my father never left the territory of Chile.” From the multi-faceted project “Océan, 33°02’47”S / 51°04’00”N”, a more than 25 day-long film that captures his journey in a cargo ship from Valparaiso (Chile) to Dunkirk (France), to “Tidal Pulse”, an audio work whose protagonist is the noise of a navigating boat, travel not only shapes Ramirez’ practice but is the shape itself of the work, the pattern through which the piece comes into being.
Within the current changing winds of fatherhood, a point of recalibration or una travesía todavía incierta, his daughter now travels with him, continuing the circle of inherited movements. “I am living through something that I have never lived before” Ramirez explains, “I’m here on this new boat in front of the wind and the sail, trying to see where it will go, with many questions and with the beauty of seeing someone who wants to see what I would like to show her, which is only the good in the world. Everything bad loses meaning and everything good becomes stronger when you have a child, and I think I can take that into the realm of art.”
From a distance, a sailboat is a barely visible mark on the horizon, upon approach it is revealed: all the stitches in its sail speak of endless acts of return and reparation, of how a transfer of knowledge imprints and reimprints, how a practice is transformed through alterations, and how a history of experience on uncertain seas, with shifting winds can redirect the future.