AMOJONANDO

During those complicated years of adolescence, of enormous confusion, I lived between Valparaíso and Santiago. My father was there and not there at the same time. The paradox of presence and absence. One of his hobbies was to read the press regularly in print (paper). I remember seeing him always sitting at weekends, behind large sheets of paper full of headlines. The 1990s was the decade that preceded the digital revolution. This was the traditional way of accessing journalistic information.

It was not at all an obligation or a necessity, but rather a pleasure. I think I will never know how much of this habit was for fun and how much for escape. In any case, I used to wonder how much information I could store? And then I could see and imagine the metaphor of “digestion”. That was a way of relating to the world. A process in which we can imagine an entry point and an exit point. Instead of being fed with food, it was fed with data. In the same way that data passed through a system that digested it, processed it, assimilated it or rejected it as waste.

If we accept that there is an ‘information stomach’ there will also be an information filter or scatology. Not everything that goes in stays in, some of it is discarded or dismissed. For this reason, the newspaper reader, instead of sitting in a chair, is comfortably squatting in an optimal position to defecate all the journalistic rubbish he consumes along with the substances that are truly nutritious for his organism.

The drawing explores precisely how opinion is formed (DOXA) The reader is also a subject who makes judgements. And this evaluation is extremely difficult in our time. How can we make accurate value judgements? On the quantitative level, information is now overwhelming. And in the face of such a diversity of approaches, doubts increase and certainties diminish. Something “relative” was imposed, is everything valid?, or nothing valid?. One day what seemed true is now false. The next day the opposite position is defended. That was the atmosphere I experienced, at least from the 1990s onwards.