Artwork Information

This drawing comes from the series Always There, which is also the title of the installation it was part of, in Turbulence: the 3rd Auckland Triennial, 2007. The title refers to the horizon, which is always in one’s sight, but never obtainable. As Nikos Papastergiadis explains in the Triennial catalogue, it is “always there and never here, always beyond but never within one’s grasp; a boundary that surrounds but is never reached". Staring out from Sydney, he once remarked to me: ‘This is the Chilean horizon seen from the other side.’ This alluring presence, which is also an absence, has underpinned Capelán’s practice”. Indeed much of Capelán’s work centres around the concepts of dematerialisation and rematerialisation. Ideas that relate to the state of being in exile; a state he has been in since leaving Uruguay in the 1970s; a state in which one dematerialises and must find ways to rematerialise in a new home.