Pescador

As a company, our methodology has been to develop our productions from fieldwork, by observing the delicate intricacies of daily human life. In March 2016, we went to Constitución touring the Maule fishing coves in the aim of getting to know, live with and soak up the life of the fisherman we had imagined and remembered.

We went in search of artisanal fishermen aboard their lonely wooden boats. We traveled through coves, markets, and bars. We rode on barges that seemed like floating homes, they invited us to try fishing, to knit nets and told us about some of their adventures.

We found fishermen with an open heart and the willingness to open up their world to us. The character that we were looking for, however, was not there; we didn’t find him. 

They weren’t the way we had pictured them, but they were what remained, what is left for us. There’s no doubt it wasn’t what our character would have wished to bequeath us with, it wasn’t his legacy nor his tradition. It was, however, our course, the one that corresponded to us, to a country that seeks development at any cost, be it lives, be it devastation. 

In our innocent search for this idealized character and after suffering the frustration of not finding him, we do value the relationships that we forged with the heirs of this national tradition. 

Enveloped in a spell of naïve romanticism we wish we could somehow stop time, and this supposed development and find this man from our dreams, unearth his deepest feelings and the true nature of the artisanal fisherman.

The fisherman is a character who lives in his own silence, exposed to the vastness of the sea, like the miner caught in the subterranean void. Our work stands as a silent homage, as silent as oblivion, as a burial or a drowning; a tribute to a tradition we long for; to the human, the worker, the trades that are being lost and that have been key to our development as a country, even though, today, they may seem marginal, forgotten, buried, drowned, silenced by us. 

A gathering in silence in all its shapes and forms,  a gathering in the dance of silence.