El Ojo Salvaje grows out of a question that arose during numerous expeditions to Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost reaches of Patagonia: Can images resist an institutionally mandated forgetting?
At the beginning of the 20th century, Austrian ethnologist Martin Gusinde photographed the indigenous Selk'nam people during the most fragile phase of their history — shortly before their culture was falsely declared "extinct" as a result of colonial violence.
A century later, this project returns to the territories of the Selk'nam — to re-read the photographic and ethnographic archive from the present, in direct exchange with their descendants.
At the centre stands a reconstruction of the plate camera used by Martin Gusinde. With it, new images are created that stand alongside the historical ones. El Ojo Salvaje understands images not as silent repositories of the past, but as living agents.
For decades, southern Patagonia was portrayed as a hostile environment that naturalised the disappearance of certain forms of life. Palaeoclimatic and ethnohistorical findings show, however, that these territories sustained stable ecosystems and complex human ways of life for thousands of years.
The rupture came only towards the end of the 19th century, when the colonisation of the Chilean and Argentine nation-states, the expansion of livestock farming, and missionary projects established an extractivist order. Hunting grounds were expropriated, meeting spaces fragmented by fences, ritual practices suppressed, and social relationships reregulated. The narrative of the supposed extinction of the Selk'nam served as a political instrument to legitimise dispossession: where there are no living heirs, there can be neither claims nor restitution.
The significance of El Ojo Salvaje lies in its capacity to interrogate this narrative. By interweaving image, territory, biodiversity, and colonial violence in Chilean and Argentine Patagonia, the project presents a living world-connection that defies state-mandated silence, continues to pulse, and presses for its reappearance.