About

I studied at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam and Academy of Art & Design ‘s-Hertogenbosch. My experimental films have been screened in museums and film festivals in Spain, Sweden, Italy, Japan, Denmark, Croatia, Greece, the Netherlands, etc. I have photographed for magazines, newspapers, art publications, etc. Commissions include portraits of former Queen Beatrix and the Royal Family , Prix de Rome, and Fundacion Imagen de Chile, and the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile. I have worked with international artists in realizing projects: Carlos Amorales (Mexico), Alicia Framis (Spain) Otto Berchem (USA) Runa Islam (UK), Mark Manders (NL), etc. Longing for silence and hungry for the calm emptiness of nature, I traveled through the desert 20 years ago in search of absolute, sublime nothingness.

Instead, this turned into a photographic inventory of traces of violent human activity in the desert landscape of the Southwest. A dusty trip through a scorched land of super malls, nuclear fall out, ground zeros and hostile skies. The halo of modern times arose at the horizon as a frightening fata morgana at every turn. I encountered intercontinental ballistic missiles launched from New Mexico, descended into nuclear bomb craters, and found “downwinder” communities (due to radioactive fallout from the test site) in Nevada. Then my wife got pregnant. Our daughter was born in a makeshift hut I made, not too safe because of the scorpions and snakes that often crawled under her crib. This cabin was in a semi-ghost town in the Great Basin Desert inhabited by a handful of heavily armed misfits; recluses, drunks, veterans, rednecks and hippies. We’ve left for the frozen wilderness of Canada, in a place with no TV, electricity or internet, with bears and cougars as neighbors. My son was born there. The cold and hardships brought us to Chile where we wanted to start over in the Atacama desert, the driest desert in the world. Ten years ago in that earthquake country I started to build a house for my family with my own hands without the help of machines. It has become a project that has changed me as a person and an artist.