Opening October 15
Visits: Tuesday to Friday from 10 am to 6 pm. Registration at the entrance Were it possible to think of a founding political moment, a time when everything is yet to be defined, we would have to go back to the instant when we set out to establish the foundations that constitute power in a society. The opportunity in which we can dream and openly project the principles and boundaries of our social conditions unfolds in the word "Constitution", the most uttered term in Chile since October 2019. The exhibition Blank Page has been planned and installed as a joint effort between Centex and BIENALSUR at the initial moment of re-foundation, when things begin to take shape. Indeed, the constitutional effort currently underway in Chile seeks to draft the living expressions of the political organisation of the state and involves the contrast of different pre-existing knowledge and powers. Writing a constitution inevitably entails the wish to change reality on the basis of a set of existing conditions, of remaining elements that define the understanding of a given social context. In this light, the page is never blank.
The great social upheaval of October 2019 awakened an irrepressible urge to change the course of an era marked by discrimination and inequality. This critical, self-founding moment experienced by Chilean society involves a delicate balancing game, where knowledge and power must be combined in the drafting of a text whose wording addresses the concerns of everyone. At this contemporary moment, compelled to rise to the level of our own complexity, we propose an exhibition installation that glimpses, from different angles, the disarticulation of certain historical forms that have influenced the exercise of power. On the one hand, Luciana Lamothe challenges the sustained binarism that perpetuates inequalities and oppressions of different nature. Her installation features an organic structure without right angles or closed spaces. On the other hand, Adolfo Bimer translates the constitutional text into a pictorial appearance in the light of the windows of the State, in a combination of text, image and lighting. Both proposals coexist in the white silence of the main hall of the Centro de Extensión del Ministerio de las Culturas, las Artes y el Patrimonio in Valparaíso like reveries of the troubled times we unleashed as a society. Their experimental fiction is now written on the remains of a collapsed order. Pedro Donoso and Fernando Farina
