About
Sebastian Bustamante-Brauning is an artist, writer and curator specialising in photography and art from Latin America. He has lectured and taught on art from Latin American and was Assistant Director of the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America (University of Essex). Interested in the relationship between memory, human rights and art, Sebastian has researched the use of photography in memory spaces and the intersection between archiving theories and photobooks.
Sebastian is the son of Chilean exiles. This has had a profound effect on him as an artist, opting often to look for images with a social message. His other styles have come out of his interest in music and people. In 2006, after completing an HND in photography, he travelled to his Chile in order to explore his identity and the legacies of the dictatorship which had forced his parents to flee persecution. It was there that he worked on the series Dónde Están. This work was later exhibited at the University of Essex Albert Sloman Library and at the Marxism 2010 festival in London amongst other venues.
Bustamante has travelled to Colombia, Argentina and Chile where he documented different aspects of life in Latin America. His collaborative project NaNO3 aims to show the effects of nitrate mining in the north of Chile and the lasting scars this has left on the landscape. Sebastian is currently working on a longitudinal study exploring place, identity and memory working with vernacular images from the family archive and his own photographic archive. He is looking to produce a lasting output in a photobook titled El otoño inspired by Gabriel García Márquez's book the Autumn of the Patriarch.
Sebastian is the son of Chilean exiles. This has had a profound effect on him as an artist, opting often to look for images with a social message. His other styles have come out of his interest in music and people. In 2006, after completing an HND in photography, he travelled to his Chile in order to explore his identity and the legacies of the dictatorship which had forced his parents to flee persecution. It was there that he worked on the series Dónde Están. This work was later exhibited at the University of Essex Albert Sloman Library and at the Marxism 2010 festival in London amongst other venues.
Bustamante has travelled to Colombia, Argentina and Chile where he documented different aspects of life in Latin America. His collaborative project NaNO3 aims to show the effects of nitrate mining in the north of Chile and the lasting scars this has left on the landscape. Sebastian is currently working on a longitudinal study exploring place, identity and memory working with vernacular images from the family archive and his own photographic archive. He is looking to produce a lasting output in a photobook titled El otoño inspired by Gabriel García Márquez's book the Autumn of the Patriarch.
