Oscar Lara en cheLA
After an intensive process in la Patagonia and invited by cheLA – Centro Hipermediatico de Experimentación Latino Americano, I moved to Buenos Aires to the area of Parque Patricios (suburb of Buenos Aires). After two weeks of living the city of Buenos Aires and getting used to its rhythm, I was interested in researching human groups who are the most affected by discrimination in Argentina because of their race or nationality. After two weeks of interacting with construction workers, cleaning and personal service employees, the nationalities that were more and more affected by discrimination according to the opinion of these groups were Paraguayans, Bolivians and Peruvians.
This was quite a turning point in my process being Peruvian myself and a temporary immigrant of the capital of Argentina, I felt that my focus should be directed towards this matter. This is how I met Lenin and José, two Peruvian guys from Lima, from the same neighbourhood and even from the same high school. After their teenager time they lost contact and twenty years later they found each other again in the streets of Buenos Aires casually.
From this situation I decided to produce a video piece that could touch the relocation processes they have had but with the intention to produce work that they would feel comfortable with, without having me designing a strategy but on the contrary to work as a sort of distribution platform for whatever they wanted to express. This process was more sensitive and even nostalgic at a personal level but perhaps even for a wider audience who might share similar situations in life.
I believe that after this Argentinian experience the focus of my research shifted into more personal look. I consider myself an immigrant who hasn’t acknowledged the circumstances of his own relocation. In this regard, I am now trying to expose myself proposing pieces which are still social and political, and that aim to point out certain traumas from the societies I happen to interact with, but contrary to previous processes I am trying to put my temporary immigrant eyes as subject of research.
Recycled Beings, a project by Oscar Lara 