Bernardita Bennett is a Chilean visual artist and photographer. She has studied a Bachelor in Arts in Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile and a Master in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies in Bauhaus Universität-Weimar. Her practice is based on the documentation of places in state of obsolescence to create memory archives. In other works she deals with home as a malleable and portable concept and structure. In her latest artistic practice she embodies through performance different ways of recording reality by walking, roaming and traversing in the urban and natural landscape. She currently lives and work in Berlin.
Dates
Chapter 3
Getting Lost
"The work of artists is to open doors and let in the prophecies, the unknown, the strange; that is where their work comes from", affirms Rebecca Solnit in "A field guide to getting lost". She contrasts the situation with scientists, who "transform the unknown into the known, they capture it like fishermen capture fish with their nets; artists, on the other hand, take you into that dark sea". Getting lost in the sense of "a pleasurable surrender, as if you were wrapped in arms, enraptured, absolutely absorbed in the present in such a way that everything else blurs". Mentioning Walter Benjamin, Solnit states that "it is not to end up lost, but to lose oneself, which implies that it is a conscious decision, a voluntary surrender." Solnit speaks of getting lost in a way that "has to do not with dislocation but with immersion in a space in which the rest of the world disappears."
I handle natural objects. I make believe im doing something productive with them. But im just handling objects. I sensor their coldness and humidity. Through them I get closer to the soil allowing me to breathe the freshness of it. I gather sticks and make them dance. This day there is no long distance walk, I instead handle objects, as a bridge, an extension of my hands, a link in bewteen my body and the landscape.