Infiltradax | Juvenal Barría: Curatorial Text | Andrea Aguad

In INFILTRADAX, Juvenal Barría offers us a fiction that is articulated from the construction of a possible reality subjugated by technological treatment, the media and advertising. Through various formats, the artist introduces us to La Nana, an alter ego character who plays a home consultant and who is part of a game about the arbitrariness of the gender role and the class struggle. Through irony, the author invites us to think about the phenomenon of expanding the limits of classification, using cross-dressing as a tool for criticism, subversion and deconstruction of the categories sex / gender, man / woman, and even employee / employer, with which he parodies and questions hierarchies as stable and binary categories. The author inserts "La Nana" into a series of old slides that record the journey of a lonely woman through different cities of the world between the 60s and 70s. With this appropriation and post-production procedure, Barría reveals the possibilities that photography offers. , abandoning the notion of mere registration of reality and opening the way to the simulacrum, as non-reality, and hyperreality, as something "more real than real" (Jean Baudrillard). From this double articulation, the intervened photography finds a channel of expression that reinforces its semantic meaning. In the photographic installation and the video, the transvestite artist is the support of the story that is constructed from a performative act behind the camera, developed within the private sphere, where there is no public or witnesses. As a result, his body is transformed into a symbolic one, revealing key themes concerning identity and political representation. Juvenal Barría uses his own body to make us reflect, through transfigurative resources and in a satirical tone, on the possibilities of art to resist and question the prevailing social order.

Andrea Aguad, curator.

Winner of the Best Exhibition Award | Gallery Weekend Santiago 2018