Patrick Hamilton’s Residence. Colchane-Pisiga Project.

The dynamic of Patrick Hamilton’s residence, on the one hand, made conjectures about the idea of living in latitudes that demand physical effort (living at 4000 meters above sea level) and, on the other hand, projected an acute overview on the setting of our natural-geographical border (The Andes).
This way, Hamilton moved to a little village called Colchane, belonging to the homonymous municipality crossed by a traffic-congested highway that divides Chile and Bolivia. In that occasion, the artist’s narrative sought for a change on his own experience as a visual artist among the fields of artistic action, mostly in cities, museums, galleries, and so on. Likewise, it can be said that while this residence was carried out, particular migration movements occurred in the Chilean plateau prior to the winter solstice, moment in which ancient rituals are carried out. From various adjacent places herders and traders came with the aim of commemorating the new year of the Andean people, therefore our contextual attention focus would be centered on two concepts: rituality and cosmovision.
The rituality has undertaken, in a hardened way, to settle among the same compatriots - with great effort – part of the ethnographic process spreading largely in the plateau that is currently divided by borderlines among Chile, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina.
On the other hand there is the cosmovision -- a ceaseless formative philosophy in the consciousness of these people that paves an acute and, to some extent, schematized overview of Hamilton’s work. Now, the contextual point is the incorporation, from Hamilton’s perspective, focused on certain century marks of communication without limits. It seems that in this border place only one objective has coordinated his expectations on how to survive when facing with structures that are not involved with its cosmogony. However, unfortunately each day nothing is more far beyond than the Andean wind itself and the recognized pre-Columbian sensibility.
Hamilton has participated in several exhibitions around the world with his shaped themes displayed in photos and installations of urban cover, and elements that shred the decorative space, leading us to think about the consumption and its implication in the shape and mode of its existence. The irony regarding the consumption-oriented society, the architectonic practices and the current urban adornment extends a conceptual visibility.
Likewise, the conceptual approach in Colchane bends and impregnates the exsiting smuggling in the border called Pisiga, and at the same time reviews the Chilean-Bolivian migration networks. Constantly in the Chilean plateau, a derisory and rough cosmetics is secularly required by Hamilton.
Smuggling, traffic, selling and exchange are recurrent issues in Tarapacá’s border. And this board: Colchane-Pisiga Project, counts with certain criteria which is necessary when inspecting an Andean border, increasingly urban and technological. Daily, a particular effect of the Andean borders is the participation in this system of fraudulent capital: making money and obtaining power in the Andes. For a few days the high Andean plateau gave us a particular way of seeing and analyzing the plateau life, which is summarized in these pictures.