The Water Letters videos are an exercise that allows the artist to expand the possibilities of both visual perception and sound, where Claro seeks to express the written language of water.

Within these experimental practices and in transferring the movement of the waves and currents, Claro identified certain forms and signs that water reveals and represents, which resemble, at a visual and conceptual level, Chinese writing characters as if contained there in an alphabet of its own, a sense that tries to be decoded to show itself in the exterior. Taking the relation between how the ancient alphabets were linked to cosmologies, Claro has been building her own alphabet replicating water forms.

The digital archive serves her as a witness, once back at the workshop, remembering the multiplicity of images seen associated with a unique code of deformation that seems to be written on the surface of the water itself. This set of signs written by light and movement constitutes her work motive, from non-verbal experiences, from which she has extracted the phonemes of the water language. The particular similarity between these aquatic ideograms and Chinese calligrams is no coincidence, since – in the words of Ezra Pound – “Chinese notation is much more than arbitrary signs. It is based on a vivid shorthand image of nature´s operations … The truth is that acts are successive, even continuous; One is the cause or the succession of another.” In this way, the photographic sequence is a story that contains information about nature, as well as water figures that have been cut and exposed.

In her creative process, these traces have been transformed into ideograms that the artist has called AGUAGRAMS, detonating an investigation around the writing, where the artist tries to “read” or “listen” the visual messages that these waters reflect. Reflections that look random, but can produce a regular mark system. Claro takes a step beyond this nature replica, to propose, from fiction, water letters that are still abstract and are dark in certain layers to our understanding.

In these three new video projections; Water Letters # 1, # 2 and # 3, 2016, ideograms emerge from water and become part of abstract texts that are assembled / disassembled, in some species of water cards to the viewer, thus taking her artwork one step further beyond reality and penetrating poetic resources.

Claro´s Aguagrams point to the ancient sources of sign creation and to the basics of the way we communicate amongst ourselves and the environment. Her images depart from the strict evidence of historical documents. Its beauty, fascination and inspiration remind us that the history of media and communication are much more than mere signs, symbols, letters and words, and are framed in processes that are deeply linked to the study of man towards nature, the efforts to make sense of origins, to explain the past and to understand our ever-evolving present.

The sound proposal is based on the search for an abstract composition based on a deconstructed piano. The strings of the piano were intervened with various materials from where the sounds are obtained. From a classical instrument such as the piano, and without the use of electronics, the idea was to search new sounds by refining the instrument.

Cartas de Agua Trilogy , 2016
Type of Work: FullHD Video, color, sound
Durationn: 10 min each
Direction, camera and illustrations: Patricia Claro
Sound: Max Zegers
Animation: Patricio Veloso

The Video “APRIL 16” was presented at solo exhibition “Time and rivers don’t flow back” at Animal Gallery, Santiago, Chile. This exhibition is the fruit of a study about water and it’s characteristics where rigorous observation of reality has given the artist more insight about the natural laws that determine the particular properties of this element.

In conjunction with the aforesaid, the artist conducts a study on the concept of time, in which she explores the internal mechanism that allows water to flow permanently. The video is a complement to the pictorial representation and a synthesis of this study. It demonstrates a variation of light intensity throughout the day, revealing a series of changes that water experiences in its natural setting. The sequence of images uninterruptedly delivered by the river evokes the idea of infinity, as water continues to reflect and mirror, going beyond the limits of the framing and temporality of the chosen captions. This temporality (which represents a non-existing instant at present time), contrasts with the idea of the eternal flow of water and is the substratum of the author’s reflexion with respect to time. The artist’s strategy starts from filming from a fixed angle that is manipulated through flipping, direction change and synchronized clips, among others. The objective is to recreate the presence of the river in the most vivid possible way. The video is a mise en scene of the river as the origin of the paintings also included in the ehxibition.

The idea of time present in the videos as well as in the pictorial sequence connects with the theory of Heraclitus where movement is considered as the characteristic phenomenon of all that exists. The famous saying “no one bathes twice in the same river, extracted from the work of this pre-Socratic philosopher, alludes to the changing condition of all reality, starting from anything defined in a particular space and time, and mutating in accordance to the changing process of both factors. Heraclitus uses the image of a river to represent the temporary nature of reality, the river being the best proof to the passing of time and the singleness of every lived instant. This paradigm supports the title of the exhibition. The evanescence of the mirrored images in the water with its unique and unrepeatable character grants a sort of sacredness to the piece of river chosen by the artist, for one is facing a scene that only occurs in that time-space and exists only once.

Patricia Claro
APRIL 16, 2011
Type of work: FullHD Video
Format: BLU-RAY
Duration: 15 min.
Sound composition by Max Zegers, color, sound, 15 min.

“AGUA” is the result of an experimental study about the dual quality of this liquid scenery and the coexistence of opposites: light and shadow being simultaneously present, discovering the tridimensionality of an image that is not perceivable by the human eye. The objective is to return the glance towards reality, to nature itself; in this case: the water.

The water, transformed into a natural mirror, gives us the first mediatized image of the surroundings, and by means of a vertical glance, the space depth is allowed to be managed between the bottom and the surface, always in and from the water.

The video plays with the infinite capacity of the water, in its state of continuous movement, to re-mirror and mirror itself, transforming what has been filmed in an inexistent model. The timing of the water flows is in charge of merging these fleeting images of virgin waters from the south of Chile into this great liquid magnifying glass. At the same time, it puts us in front of a reflection screen to review our relationship/intervention towards nature. This fusion develops a particular technique of codification towards the landscape.

SOUND
This piece, composed especially for this exhibition, uses the Water as a main source of sound. Different types of recordings were made from water movements such as: still water, drops and even underwater recordings. All of this raw material was later electronically processed in diverse forms, obtaining an ample sonic palette that was used as compositional material for the piece.

Just like at one determined moment water can simultaneously have different manifestations, the aim was to build a sound that represented this characteristic based on different “sound layers”, simultaneoulsy played. That way, in the water one can find the movement, the reflection and the transparency associated with its surroundings and simultaneously manifesting in both a visual and auditive dimension. This piece represents the “artistic projection” of this condition.

Patricia Claro
AGUA, 2008
Type of work: FullHD Video
Format: BLU-RAY
Duration: 28:33 min.
Sound composition 5.1 by Max Zegers, color, sound, 28:33 min.