Catalogue > At random

Los rastreadores is a two channel video installation set in Bolivia and very loosely inspired by John Ford's American Western classic film The Searchers. It does not attempt to recreate the film but adapts its major themes where the similarities lie in the use of landscape and depictions of themes like race and alienation. The main character in Los Rastreadores, Ernesto Suarez, is a drug lord who, recently released from a Miami prison, returns to his home in Santa Cruz only to immediately depart in a search towards the oposite side of the county for his family's only surviving members after a home invasion and massacre. Ernesto's character is modeled after Roberto Suarez Gomez, a Bolivian drug trafficker nicknamed "king of cocaine" and the most powerful drug lord in Bolivian history. Los Rastreadores merges and distills issues of race, belonging, class systems, and alienation into a minimal narrative that con - denses the massacre of Ernesto's family, the kidnapping of his daughter, and his departure to search for her. Using silences and voice-overs rather than traditional dialogue it centers on the power of myth where literal events operate as a displacement for the political discourse in the country.

Claudia Joskowicz (MFA New York University, 2000) has had solo exhibitions at LMAK Projects, Forever & Today, Inc., Thierry Goldberg Projects, and Momenta Art in New York, Dot Fiftyone in Miami, California Museum of Photography in California, Galeria ACBEU in Salvador, Espacio Simón Patiño and Museo Nacional de Arte, Centro Cultural Santa Cruz and Galería Kiosko in Bolivia, and Lawndale Art Center in Houston. Recent group exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, NY; Fondation Cartier pour l`art contemporain, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark; Tenth Sharjah Biennial; the 29th São Paulo Biennial; the Tenth Habana Biennial; Slought Foundation, Philadelphia and the 17th and 18th Videobrasil Festivals in São Paulo. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship, a mid-career artist commission from the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, a Fulbright Scholar award, and a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. Recidencies include Sacatar Institute in Brazil, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts AIM program. Joskowicz is currently the artist in residence at the LMCC’s Residency at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.