SANTIAGO COLLECTION

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Media :
HD color video, 6 min.
Wet plate processed photographs (Collodion)

The fortuitous encounter with a photo album at an antiquary located in Santiago (Chile) triggers this documentary project. This album contains 5 photographs with a man in a white apron holding human fetuses.

Inquiries lead us to discover the man is Osvaldo Valenzuela, a professor of anatomy and the fetuses part of a collection kept today in the underground floor of the medicine faculty of the University of Chile.

With this premise the documentary begins; retracing the story of a collection confronted with its own obsolescence, within an ethical context that denies its existence and banes the possibility of its exhibition. Our idea is to photograph and store this collection, tracing an alternative path towards finding its place in the cultural memory of Chilean medicine and restoring its scientific heritage.

The photographs were taken with the Collodion wet plate process, in which chemistry defects of this early photographic technique overlap with evidence of anatomical pathologies generating a correlation that invites us to explore new assessments on imperfection.