Our represented artist Juvenal Barría presents his project Memoria Alterada: Exploraciones Autoetnográficas [Altered Memory: Autethnographic Explorations], an audiovisual installation to be premiered next Wednesday 21 December at the Parque Cultural de Valparaíso, Chile.
Memoria Alterada: Exploraciones Autoetnográficas is a creation, production and exhibition project comprising a set of transdisciplinary works that sets up a dialogue between installation, object art and video performance, developed by Juvenal Barría, an artist native of the Chiloé Island and resident of Valparaíso, with the curatorship of Javiera Bagnara, researcher and cultural agent.
This audiovisual narrative consists of five chapters narrated through registers of actions in the territory, which, in turn, are in dialogue with object installations related to each one of them. Sound and visuals are fundamental elements in the audience's experience of this autoethnographic exploration.
Juvenal Barría explains: "This project was conceived at the beginning of the pandemic as an exercise of memory in difficult times worldwide, where the question of existence and origin, together with socio-affective relationships, became fundamental in order to be able to continue despite the context of isolation".
"At that time, far from Chiloé, from my mother and brother, I set out to investigate my family's maternal history, a motivation inherited from my grandmother Milagro Millacura, of Huilliche origin like almost all of us on the island. This opened a portal to think about the methodology of autoethnographic exploration as a way of ironising the 'ethnographic' treatment of the Huilliche communities, as well as revitalising the history of the island from a critical, personalised and affective point of view, questioning the processes of this territory as well as those of my own ancestry", the artist adds.
The installation combines elements in which the audience becomes part of the set-up as they immerse themselves in a journey that attracts attention with its combination of lights, the content of the artworks and sounds.
About the exhibition, Javiera Bagnara comments: "This project is the work of an interdisciplinary team, and the most important thing is that it was developed in the territory in its entirety, which implied that all of us spent a residency in Chiloé. This is why we believe that it is unthinkable to continue replicating centralised logic and to expand the artistic work to the different places that identify us. Juvenal's proposal explains how contemporary art allows us to move in multiple forms and directions that, in their reflexive character, bring us closer to the personal history of an artist, which expands to a reality situated on the island, and which, why not, can be replicated elsewhere. In this sense, the autoethnographic methodology has a historicity where the biographical becomes collective".
Memoria Alterada: Exploraciones Autoetnográficas by Juvenal Barría will be presented at the Parque Cultural de Valparaíso on 21 December at 19.00h, and on 22 December with five sessions at 15.00, 16.00, 17.00, 18.00 and 19.00 hr. Starting on 14 January, the exhibition will move to the Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM) in Chiloé and will end its itinerancy in Santiago in 2023.
Memoria Alterada: Exploraciones Autoetnográficas is a project funded by Fondart Nacional de Desarrollo Cultural y las Artes - national funding, 2022, and presented in collaboration with Isabel Croxatto Galería.
19 December 2022
