A Home is A Lens: Carlos

Emerald Wise 

Andes
2013
















Across two residencies - one at Campos De Guitierrez in Medellin, Colombia, and one at Sky Hacienda in Sucre, Bolivia - Emerald converted a 1960’s Nissan Patrol into a studio and home - that was used to carry out a year long art and research project throughout the Andes. Every component of the fit-out was designed and hand built by her or in collaboration with a local trade - from camping stoves, and crockery, to bed, and study.

She also designed and built a roof tent to act as an artist residency for a pair of international artists, who accompanied the expedition from Bolivia to Argentina and created works that were exhibited on their return home.

On completion, the project was then donated to another set of artists traveling north: Carlos continues to wander the Andes, facilitating wonder.

Carlos was not merely a tiny home or a machine for living, but a machine for seeing and experiencing the physical and sociocultural environments of the Andes. Emerald worked alongside and travelled with a linguist and psychologist - together they explored Amayran concepts of time.

//
The future as behind us, as we cannot see it, and the past in front of us, as it rests in memory like a temporal landscape - extending for as far as the eye can remember.

And, yet our movement is forward, pushing new horizons, extending, connecting places in our memories and in our hearts.

The slow ritual of the road trip detaching the concept of time for that of agency.
//

Emerald explored these ideas through written and drawn works - they continue to inspire her research.