The Man of Calafate / El Hombre de Calafate

This work merges the central metaphor of the Calafate—understood as a symbol of a bitter memory that must be confronted in order to move forward—with the iconography of pain and resistance during the Chilean military dictatorship (1973–1990). Rather than portraying torture in an explicit or sensationalist manner, the image evokes its shadow, its psychological aftermath, and the ongoing struggle to preserve memory.

The Calafate Man is not merely a representation of pain; it becomes a monument to resilience. Just as woodcut requires the act of carving—an incision that permanently marks the surface—to reveal an image, the collective memory of a nation must confront the engraved traces of its history in order to recover its true identity. The wound becomes the form. The scar becomes the image.

Through this material and symbolic process, the artwork reflects the relationship between trauma, memoria, and survival. The engraved texture, the force of the cut, and the permanence of ink all serve as metaphors for the human capacity to endure, to remember, and to resist forgetting.