Bernadita Bennet

Statement

The common denominator in her work is photography used in different ways. Her subject matters of interest are identity aspects of persons and urban exteriors, which she registers systematically to generate documentary series under different premises. In them, the orders are given by factors as similarity, reordering the images giving them poetical signification in the visual organization. In other works she researches about different technical possibilities of photography, manipulating it to create series in stop motion and photomontages, revealing subjects as identity and transformation. With these alterations she reveals aspects of strangeness in the image, with the ominous character this type of interventions allow. She has participated in several group shows in Santiago and in other countries such as Germany and Poland. She has participated in art residencies en Lima/ Peru, Berlin/ Germany, Gdansk /Poland.

GlogauAIR Project

My proposal is based in a further research about old and “about to dissappear” arquitecture in Berlin. As many constructions are been replaced for new ones, I would like to use multiple tools of study to capture the process of changing of the urban fachades and interiors of abandoned builings: a) audiovisual media (photographs and video); b) recollection of objects (pieces of stone and cement;) c) printing with paper and chalk (over the same textures and traces of the walls). The aim is to create a historical/personal cadastre of the traces of time using the city as the canvas and subject of work.

One interest that have crossed my past artworks, is how the city mutates from one shape to another, a characteristic of the contemporary world in which time is perceived in a different and faster way, and so along the way in which the conception of real estate is designed and built. On time, less persistant materials are used turning the city into something disposable, a loyal expression of liquid modernism. In that matters I have collected some referents as the spanish artist Marti Llorens. He documents the demolition of a industrial área (near where he lived) in Barcelona from 1987 until 1992. The result is a social document that started by a the intimate relationship he had with his neighborhood. His works explains how the economic interests invades city zones to create efficient and vertical towers “His images contain someone that tragic quality of wagnerian cosmology, in which two armys crush into each other, idelogy against economic interest.” (J.Fontcuberta) Berlin is a container of history and so are the constructions that had inhabitated its space. As a foreign artist I am an observant that come and goes, that circulates randomly into this scenery. For this reserach I will get lost into the city, without a walking path and therefore, document it like an urban archeologist, taking notes of the buildings and walls “about to be destroyed” for the replacement of something new, something rentable, the way in which gentrificaction and the capitalisation of the square meters is shown.

The process of death of this old structures will be studied through bidimensional media but also through the direct contact with de materia, recollecting glass, stones and whatever I find so I can reorganice it in the studio, creating a sort of archelogical archive of all this observations. At the end I project this reaserch showing it like a museographic study, showing objects like a precious discovery. A visual reference of this idea is the chilean artist Maria Edwards, which makes her own interpretation of the cosmos by notes and drawings of her vision about astronomy.

CV Summary

Bernardita Bennet (Chile) is bachelor in Visual Arts in Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile and Master in Arts ans New Media in Universidad de Chile.

Solo and group exhibitions in Chile and the rest of the world, such as:

• “Habitares II” (2017) El Internado Gallery, Valparaiso, Chile.
• “Collective exhibition Chile, Corea, Iran” (2017) un Mommsen35 Gallery, Charlottenburg, Berlin.
• “Expanded” (2017) Somos Gallery, Kreuzberg Berlin.
• “Chilean Pavillion” Nordart, Rendsburg, Germany.
• “On the Mind’s Eye” (2016) Takt Gallery, Friedrichsain, Berlin.
• “Habitares” (2015) solo show on Estacion Mapocho, Santiago, Chile.
• “Exercises” (2014) in Gallery AFA, Photography national workshops (2013).
• Balmaceda’s Young Artists Price in Museum of Contemporary art of Santiago (2011) between other exhibitions.

Art residencies

• 2014 “El Borde” art Residence in Center of the Image of Lima.
• 2015 Laznia art Residency in Gdanzk, Poland (exhibited a video work in the collective show “influences”).
• 2016 Takt, art residency in Berlin, Germany.

Awards and scholarships

• 2015 First price in Photography in the council art contest of Santiago.
• Santander Master scholarship for studying at Goldsmiths University in London.

Other

• Develops photo projects workshops as a professor in University in Santiago, Chile.

Gallery