Description
OD Photo Prize 2025 | Shortlisted Artist
Pie Aerts [1985] is a photographer based in Haarlem. His work examines and questions the intricate and melancholic relationship between people and place in an attempt to explore why we seem increasingly disconnected from each other, ourselves, and our natural environment. With a research-led exploration of stereotypes, he attempts to define nuanced and personal perspectives on culture, tradition and human relationships. In doing so, he deliberately prioritises hope over despair, and coexistence over conflict.
Artist Statement | ‘The day the last black bird sings’ is a poetic long-form multiplatform documentary project that explores the intimate world of some of the last Southern Chilean country men, as they continue to live their isolated lives in distant outposts amidst the encroaching changes of the modern world. Their interweaving stories reveal a complex and intimate portrait of a forgotten people, a forgotten land and a forgotten culture. Pulling back the stoic curtain on their culture, reveals the reality of men suffering from severe mental health issues due to decade-long isolation. Fear of retirement, lack of financial security, and worries about a changing climate, are causing stories of alcoholism and suicide to run rampant in the community. But at the same time, these men carry the degradation of their culture and fading of their identity with dignity, resilience and pride. The younger generation in this southern region of Chilean Patagonia no longer find the necessity or desire to pursue a life on the land, instead opting to follow ambitions of big city living or moving into ‘gaucho tourism’ and thereby breaking a generational cycle of farm life. As a result of these rapid social, cultural and economic changes, most gauchos constantly shift between embracing and resisting the inevitability of change, which creates a complex internal dialogue. The men featuring in this project live their entire life in a place they never owned, and once the time comes that they can no longer do the physical work, they’re forced to go into towns and ‘regular society’ to live a life they’ve never known. Therefore, they not only deal with loneliness, but with existential questions of purpose, belonging and ownership as well. Therefore, the story of these last standing country men reveals an intimate and complex portrait of a culture on the brink of disappearing, breaking stigmas and barriers while allowing for vulnerability over fortitude, all the while inviting the audience to consider not just a culture being forgotten, but to question their own relationship to country, nature and traditions, as well as reflect on themes as isolation, mental health, masculinity, ageing and social class, and essentially meditate on a world moving too quickly to keep up with.
All print enquiries:
tom@opendoors.gallery
+44 (0)7769922824
