“You can say something false without lying,
but you can also tell the truth with the intent of deceiving
which is to say, lying.
But you are not lying if you believe what you say,
even if it is untrue”.
Jacques Derrida

In the waiting area of the San Juan de Dios Hospital in Santiago (Chile), Francisca Aninat (1979) waited for final verdicts, alongside relatives and friends, attentive to the possibility of death, life, or semi-life announcements made by doctors, as hours went by, about the fate of their patients.

To pass the time—a torment in such “scenarios”—Aninat invited people waiting to create something that she would then collect. Drawings, phrases, memories in a mess of color, intimate compositions delving into the deepest recesses of an emotional and mental state that only crumbles down in resistance inside a hospital waiting room.

For her exhibition at Arróniz, Aninat records, edits, and arranges part of these materials given to her by those anonymous people who waited. The title of the show is Tres habitaciones y el viento (Three Rooms and the Wind). Mounted on walls, shelves, and floors, are the results of her cathartic-aesthetic process (a project began in 2011), where she took with her the material vestiges created while waiting for the medical diagnoses of “others” —bodies interned in operating rooms, subjected to intensive therapy and radioactive studies, etc.— which as time passed inevitably prompted the evocation of a mirror on their figure as “patients,” those who waited outside. Bodies deafened by the unstoppable aftereffects of the plucking of memories, forgetting, errors, regrets, doubts, fears, yet, even so, persisting in the middle of such haze, the tying of that knot is sustained by hope.

Three large hanging murals comprised of numerous layers of drawings in various dimensions, formats, techniques, and figurative content, suggest the tension of the waiting bodies that, despite the sum of days extracted from the timeline of the real world and veiled, inevitably, by a cruel and silent inertia, accepted to create tracings as a release valve for their memories. Outbreaks of color in fainting, terrified, enraged broadsides, rarefied in the very act of that entire “staging.” There are “legible” codes in some pieces of paper—the architectural plans of lived and perhaps also lost spaces—as well as brief instances of writing, perhaps clinging, half-aware, to the duration-in-continuity that is seemingly promised by what “remains” written.

On the opposite walls, on suspended shelves, Aninat rewrote, in embroidery, fragments quoted between other people’s memories: “We weren’t able to enter all connected and separated by meters, I don’t remember the size, ten rooms, and the wind.” Offered thusly to the gaze of all, just as they were given to her. Wild flowers.

On a different shelf, two bundles in the shape of cloth books, survivors of some kind of catastrophe of their own, are tied for their exhibition (one with string, the other one with a couple of leather bands)—their contents inaccessible—if not by the words with which they confront us. One of them, painted in light gray, displays as a title-in-warning, hand-painted in white letters in the “cover,” a sentence as common and banal as it is essentially brutal: “I don’t remember.” The most complete retraction of “truth,” the certainty of which is not always such, even when it is.

Memory creates and destroys at will by individual design, or, already uncontrollable, by neuronal disarray. Remembering or not remembering what one has lived, the events that (un)make the past of our present; individuals, conversations, actions, demarcate the soul from the body, the possibility of (co)existence. The play of memory covers the expanse between truth and lies, negotiating the (un)certain memories we so jealously preserve until we don’t. Until we find ourselves in a hospital’s waiting area and understand that between memory and presence, life flies by.

In another installation in the open space of the gallery, Aninat gives shape to what could be her inner world. Between cords, vertical supports rise perhaps a meter above the floor, thin and black —but one, with mirror-like edges— like markings, concentration points, between which some cords barely stand and continue with their swaying routes every so often pierced by white corals, like dry ocean neurons captured in a fruitless fisherman’s haul. Almost the entire grid of white and very light blue cords seems adrift, but between them, there is a circular figure created in a sequence of knots. Nine “lines” of the same material separated from each other by a few centimeters from the edge of the circumference—threaded, freestanding or attached to themselves between unequal knots—come together to materialize the center of the circumference.

By connecting this work with the three “rooms” covered by registers created by hundreds of hands “hospitalized” in un-space, where the wait congeals the time of creation to such a degree that is seems to lose not only its meaning, but the fullness of its existence, that metaphorical “thread” of memory—I imagine, in terms of the possibility of its salvaging, recovery, retention, and rescue—Aninat attempts to return or deliver “something” to/from the memoryless states of the wait-sick-with-waiting, seeking between the bodiless bodies a way to recover the pulse of the drive.

Published in ArtNexus magazine N° 116, November 9, 2021.