In ‘You Transform Everything into a Boat’, Camila Galaz uses painting and video to explore her Chilean heritage through the lens of post-memory – a historical memory of events or places transferred over generations, both individual and collective. This begins with two moments from her father’s life: his move to Valparaíso as a teenager to join the Navy on conscription and when he subsequently became part an armed leftist guerrilla organisation fighting against the Pinochet regime.
I once asked my father if he joined the navy because he liked boats or if he liked boats because he joined the navy. He didn’t have an answer but said that when he went back to Santiago after Valparaíso he couldn’t remember his room being so small, that the bed barely fit with space to move. As a child it had felt like the ocean.