Francisco Casas studied Literature at University ARCIS, and holds a masters of Literature and Psychoanalysis from the University of Chile. He is author of Sodoma Mía y Yo, yegua, among others. He founded the art collective The Mares of the Apocalypse, developing extensive work around performance, installation, intervention, and photography. He has written screenplays for short and feature films, including the controversial “The woman passenger.”
Ese’eja
Space: Metales Pesados Visual
Merced 316, Santiago, SCL | Phone: (+56) 2 2664 2451
Tuesday-Friday 11am-8pm | Saturday 11am-2pm & 5pm-10pm | Sunday 5pm-8pm
Francisco Casas’ exhibition Ese’eja is the product of an artist’s residency in the southeast Amazon region of Perú, whose forests were at one time an ancestral territory for the ethnic group Ese’eja, a fishing and gathering village whose numbers have been reduced almost to extinction due to diseases and ecological destruction. In this performance — filmed using a 16 mm Bolex camera–, Francisco Casas backpacks along the Tambopata River, descending from the Andean glaciers in Puno toward the mouth of the Madre de Dios River, while in a parallel sequence he progressively cuts his hair in the in the Ese’eja style as part of a performative transfiguration ritual, in a resident’s transformation toward extinction.