The artistic practices of Gabriel Chaile, Bernardo Oyarzún and Cristina Piffer call into question the national identities of the Southern Cone countries so proudly erected on white immigrant status. Whiteness is defined by the anthropologist Gastón Gordillo as an issue of emotional conditioning rather than an ideology, a perception rather than an idea. It works as way of orienting bodies towards the desire, albeit not one they are always fully aware of, to create, define and feel through a kind of corporeal navigation, that national geography is principally European.
Urgent Memories seeks to reconfigure this space, developing an archeological investigation from the body. Bernardo and the Machi Jorge Quilaqueo perform a dance, inviting stones to seek the sound that preceded words, tensing the latter’s written form as something that arrived with the conquest, a bureaucratic instrument. Gabriel builds a bread oven and a totemic figure from clay, a throwback to the first peoples of the Argentine north, stoking the flames of the relationship between class and race: a testament to survival as much as to continued subjugation. Cristina chips away at the layers of the walls to lay bare the historical construction of the other as a palimpsest, using legal texts to denounce the genocidal violence of states in a racist and cyclical endeavor that is still current today.
Together, they excavate, exposing unstable architectures which mutate and are transformed within the diverse encounters between dust-mud-stone and sound-word-text. Their installations function as cells or units of poetry that rename our built-up surroundings and propose alternative approaches and models of history-in-community.
Photo:
Werken (Messenger)
Bernardo Oyarzún
Núcleo: patronímica mapuche
Instalation
Pabellón de Chile de la Bienal de Venecia 2017
