Miguel Norambuena is a Chilean psychiatrist who heads the Racard Center in Geneva, but he is also a writer and artist whose current installation is on at club Ulitsa O.G.I. on Ulitsa Petrovka. The exhibit “Anthropological Totemism. Intensive Subtractions” began when Norambuena was a young man growing up in Chile in the 1970s.
“I was born in the times of Salvador Allende,” said Norambuena, referring to the Chilean president who was ousted in a military coup in 1973. “Young people went on field trips to remote places around Chile, and one day we went to where the Mapuche lived.”
The Mapuche are one of the indigenous inhabitants of central and southern Chile, and it was among them that Norambuena saw native totems.
In the exhibit, his handmade totems are on display in a video presentation that shows them standing in a country landscape. A blurred figure stands amid the totems. Norambuena made the totems at his dacha, or, as he calls it, his El Terruno, in a village close to Geneva.
“Urban life is about growing apart from oneself, and life in the country is about reappropriating your body and your soul,” he said.
“I worked like a real handicraftsman. At some moment, I put my ear to the trunk I was cutting and tried to hear what it was saying,” he said. This sparked the idea of creating a soundtrack from the wood, and he asked Gianluca Ruggeri, from the Institute of Electro Acoustics and Computer Science in Geneva, to join the project.
“I liked the simplicity, the humbleness if I dare to say, of those totems,” Ruggeri said. “They emanated a sort of atavistic aura that fascinated me.”
The sounds — some transposed, some expanded — can be heard accompanying the pictures of the totems and the mystery figure.
As well as working at the center in Geneva, Norambuena travels to Moscow to work at a psychiatric hospital, and it was in Moscow that he noticed similar themes of urban and country alienation.
“I got used to observing huge, black, four-wheel drive jeeps, along with tiny trucks, that belong to wild migratory merchants selling greens and vegetables,” he said. “They come from a completely different world. They are circulating at completely different speeds.”
The country for him is a way of escape, as it is for many Muscovites.
“The best spare time of a Muscovite is having shashliks in the open air,” he said. “Living in the country is when you can avoid the velocity [of life].”
“Anthropological Totemism. Intensive Subtractions” is on till March 13. Club Ulitsa O.G.I., 26/8 Ulitsa Petrovka, Metro Kuznetsky Most.