Born in 1963 in Santiago (CL)
Lives and works in Geneva (CH)
1982-2014
25 framed photographs, texts
50 x 40 cm chaque photographie. 40 x 30 cm chaque texte
Year of Purchase: 2014
What happens when an emigrant wishes to study arts?
What is the professional path of an emigrant when she has to learn to communicate in the Swiss dialect and learn German to be able to write?
How is the configuration of work places determined by the process of learning a new language?
How do work opportunities evolve in accordance with the language learning process?
How does the “Architecture of Opportunities” change when language skills improve?
Architecture and Language as Architecture.
It is an autobiographical work composed of 25 photographs and 25 texts dated between 1982 and 2014. The photographs show the facades of different places where I worked after migrating to Switzerland with my family. The texts describe the different kinds of jobs that I did in those places and they show the relations between language skills and changes in the architecture that surrounded me.
When we migrated from Santiago de Chile to the Canton of Aargau in the German part of Switzerland, I was already an adult. In my country, I planned to study Visual Arts at the University of Chile, but we had to emigrate because of the dictatorship and because of my family’s economic problems. Due to that my plans became impossible, because when we came to Switzerland, we had to work in any possible jobs, with Spanish as the only symbolic tool.
At the beginning, I worked in unqualified jobs that didn’t require speaking. When I had a bit more money, I took German classes. Much later, when I was fluent in that language, I could do jobs that included the use of language skills, which allowed me to pay for my studies in Visual Arts in Zurich and postgraduate studies in Geneva.
I started to make this autobiographical project as a visual, social and aesthetic analysis of Architecture and of learning German, documenting the professional path and how the architectural surroundings change as you gain control over your studies and work choices. This photographic work shows that architecture is not neutral, but it reflects the social, professional and political structure. The facades of the places where I worked give a face the social structure; the line of sectors of work that becomes visible when you observe and follow the facades of the workplaces, along with the language learning process.
Ingrid Wildi Merino