On Not Being at Home, Part 2: The Echo of Songs

So much of Doris Salcedo’s work engages with the imminent threat of leaving—leaving one’s home, leaving one’s personal belongings and shelter, leaving this world, leaving loved ones behind. Forced migration and its consequences figure prominently in her work; beyond focusing on the causes of migration, such as political violence, she examines the experience as a social phenomenon. Her works explore how people come to terms with this reality and how spaces mutate to reflect the haunting state of loss.

During the run of the exhibition Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning (November 4, 2016–April 9, 2017), the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Harvard Film Archive, and the Harvard Art Museums collaborate to bring you a three-part film series that looks at the conditions behind displacement and forced migration, in Latin America in particular. Each screening will be followed by a discussion of the issues that the film confronts and the broader international migration crisis afflicting the world today.

About today’s program:

El Eco de las Canciones (The Echo of Songs) (2010)
71 min., color; Chile, Spanish (English subtitles)

After the coup in Chile in 1973, many people went into exile, including director Antonia Rossi’s parents. Rossi’s parents settled in Rome, where Antonia was born. When democracy was re-established in Chile in 1989, most expatriates returned to their country with their children, some of whom, like Antonia Rossi, had never seen the country. Such circumstances shift the question from asking what it means to come back to asking what identity is based on: is it based on a language, a place, or a memory that has been passed on? What does exile bring about for those who come after? How do people build their own mental representations? Drawing from her personal experience, Antonia Rossi considers every thread one by one, in an introspective tale that questions the historical burden of such places and images.

Following the screening, director Antonia Rossi will be in conversation with Sergio Delgado, associate professor of Romance languages and literatures at Harvard University. Their discussion will take place in Spanish, with an English translator.

Visitors are welcome to view the Doris Salcedo exhibition from 8 to 9pm.

The screening will take place in Menschel Hall, Lower Level. Please enter the museums via the entrance on Broadway.

Free admission

Complimentary parking available in the Broadway Garage, 7 Felton Street, Cambridge.

Support for this program is provided by the Richard L. Menschel Endowment Fund. Modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.