Memoria Alterada: Exploraciones Autoetnográficas, an exhibition by Juvenal Barría, is presented at Espacio 218 in Santiago, in collaboration with Isabel Croxatto Galería, following a tour that took the project to Valparaíso's Parque Cultural in late 2022 and Chiloé's Museum of Modern Art in early 2023.
Memoria Alterada: Exploraciones Autoetnográficas is a project funded by the National Fund for Cultural Development and the Arts - Call 2022 of the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage of the Government of Chile, and presented in collaboration with Isabel Croxatto Galería.
Eyes of Fire
Memoria Alterada: Exploraciones Autoetnográficas [Altered Memory: Autoethnographic Explorations] is a creation, production and exhibition project that consists of a set of transdisciplinary works that establishes a dialogue between installation, object art and video performance. This audiovisual story consists of five chapters narrated in video-performance recordings, which converse with object installations corresponding to each of them. Sound and visuals are fundamental elements in the audience's experience of this autoethnographic exploration.
The concept of 'autoethnography' is proposed as a methodology to locate the artist's biographical, cultural and territorial experience, centred on the Chiloé archipelago, Juvenal's birthplace. The island is a land of mythological beliefs with a natural environment of endemic species, which in turn has a particular history of colonisation and extractivism of its resources, such as the timber industry and, today, the exploitation of its maritorium. This is also linked to the collective history of the people who inhabit the area and the formation of an identity that combines the life and beliefs of its original inhabitants with the strategies of resistance and decolonisation that have been put forward in recent decades.
Juvenal Barría's research and artistic proposal was born in early 2020 as an impulse to rediscover their personal history, which had been systematically denied to them through inertia, as his mother was subjected to the questions of identity that arose from the denial of her indigenous origins. In a survey of the knowledge of their maternal lineage, the artist carried out a genealogical research process on their mother and grandmother, key figures in the process of creating their works. The results of this research became a reflexive engine for questioning the cultural and affective boundaries between three generations that share a common origin: an indigenous history suppressed by colonisation processes in the territory of Chiloé.
The study of these experiences led to different and contradictory conclusions within the same family nucleus. On the one hand, their grandmother's ancestry incorporated the worldview of her own culture and traditions, giving new meaning to the artist's early childhood. On the other hand, the mother's life experience - subjected to the personal and social needs generated in the context of industrialisation and the forced installation of neoliberalism during the civic-military dictatorship, with political, social and cultural consequences - was analysed. It is through this contextual approach that we understand the denial of their indigenous origins as a mechanism of subsistence, taking Chilean identity as a means of acceptance in this context of modernisation and extractivism of the territory.
The chapters, which have neither a linear structure nor a unified narrative, seek to generate a collision by putting into tension experiences that are culturally counterbalanced: Christian baptism and the subsequent cleansing of the artist's body through rituals derived from Huilliche spirituality; burial and rebirth, as the stripping away of a forced identity and the connection with this new acceptance; the role of the mother and the symbol of pregnancy in the artist's body, which create a tension between life and death from the island's processes, whose history is always watched over by gods and goddesses incarnated in birds that guard the traces of human history. The Christological intervention, in the form of an x-ray of the Father, together with the Mass in Latin in Chonchi, also generates an aesthetic shock with the use of special effects that reveal the ironic gesture with which the artist seeks to achieve sufficient spirituality to immerse himself in every corner of the island, as well as in the caves, which occupy a central place where the artist revives the practice of witchcraft hiding.
Finally, the process of hybridisation on the part of Juvenal Barría (grandchild-child), who receives this mixed heritage and decides to adopt a critical perspective. Their attitude manifests transformative and revelatory processes that are currently breaking cultural boundaries and connecting with the collective histories of society based on the decolonial process.
Javiera Bagnara, curator.
Juvenal Barría, artist.
