The Sleepers (# 1, 2 and 3) (2019)
From A Colder Ocean project (2017- 2019)
Digital print on photo paper
62.5 x 42.5 cm each
BA Collection
Inventory No.: 2019.482.3
Helena Goñi’s Un océano muy frío [A Very Cold Ocean] project t(2017) emerged when the artist travelled to Canada with the intention of crossing the country from east to west and rediscovering a territory linked to her childhood. Although she had barely lived there for a year and a half, her memories are concentrated in that place and with the passage of time it had become a type of utopian space of memory. The project draws on diverse materials – photography, video and text – collected over two months of travel in which the artist wanted to gain a sense the huge size of the country.
The images and audiovisual fragments that make up the work put us in a non-place, a space that escapes from immediate reality to enter a terrain dominated by the dreamlike and the timeless. The trip becomes an exercise in memory exploration, where lived experience is mixed with the subjective reconstruction of memories. Thus, the work does not document a real country so much as a mental territory, in which the times and logics of the past and the present intertwine.
The photographs that accompany the video show specific scenes and encounters, but they appear and disappear as intermittent, fragile and incomplete memories. Accordingly, Un océano muy frio is not merely a travel journal, but rather acts as a reflection on memory, displacement and the reconstruction of identity. The return to the land of childhood does not imply a nostalgic attempt to relive the past, but an approach to the vastness of an interior and exterior landscape that unfolds through images. The work contemplates, in short, how memories and personal experiences configure a geography of their own, made up of both real places and imagined spaces.
Helena Goñi (Bilbao, 1990) is an artist whose work explores photography in dialogue with video, installation and publication. She has lived in Brooklyn since 2021, after being awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the International Center of Photography.