De Ciudad Abierta a Ventanas is an installation composed of multiple video projection screens and audio channels. In addition to sound artist Nico Espinoza, who did the audio capture and an electroacoustic piece, the project invites video editors to be coauthors and freely edit the raw imagery material, each producing its own film version. All images were captured by Luiza Baldan between 2019 and 2022 in the region of Valparaíso, Chile, along 20km of a freight railroad that borders the Pacific Ocean. The highlighted section includes the Ciudad Abierta de Amereida; the defunct summer complex and later detention center of Ritoque; and the Ventanas port in Quintero bay, popularly known as the Chilean Chernobyl.
The project, which began as a survey of tangible and visible issues in a short heterogeneous landscape, has extended itself along paths where what predominates is precisely the invisible: the contrast between preserved, sacrificed, and extinct lands, forms of community political action, the absence of historical landmarks, the threat of pollutants diluted in nature and in direct contact with the lives of the population, etc. Thinking of different ways to reveal the relevant silence contained in the images, the project is open to the sensitivity of people unaware of the process and not involved with the highlighted landscape.
