Voluspa Jarpa at the Venice Biennale
Voluspa Jarpa (b. 1971), a contemporary Chilean painter and visual artist famous for targeting issues with gender, race, identity politics, and colonialism; will have the honor of representing the Chilean pavilion at the fifty-eight Venice Biennale from May 11, 2019 until November 24, 2019. Growing up between Brazil, Paraguay, and Chile, being part of Chile’s creative scene during the artistic revival 1990s, and being one of the first generation of Chileans who were able to study under a democracy following Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973–1990), Jarpa’s art has always had a connection with history, time, and issues of identity.
In fact, earlier this year, on January 6, in an interview with El Líbero, Chilea’s only digital news platform to be part of la Asociación Nacional de la Prensa (Chile’s National Press Association), Jarpa expanded on her connection with issues of identity by how she would see life in Chile as something that did not belong to her, but was still part of her[1]. Jurpa’s struggle with her Chilean identity began at an early age after leaving Chile during the military regime of Augusto Pinochet and continue until this day. The early impact that experience has encouraged the artist to include issues of identity politics, from historic as well as modern and contemporary eras, into her pieces.
When asked about Jarpa’s participation in the Venice Biennale, Consuelo Valdés, Chile’s Minister of Culture, Art and Heritage, stated that:
“choosing Voluspa Jarpa gives value to the involvement of female artists in renowned events such as the Venice Biennale. Furthermore, she represents the post 90’s artists generation who have created a strong collection of images in the visual development of our country. We believe Voluspa is an artist who has wide international projection and, furthermore, has the backup of Agustín Pérez Rubio’s experience as an internationally renowned curator. We are certain that this will be a milestone in national participations”.[2]
The Venice Biennale will not be the artist’s first biennale. Through her career, Jarpa has also had the opportunity of exhibiting her art at the Havana Biennale (1997), Istanbul Biennale (2011), Mercosur Biennale in Porto Alegre (2011), Sao Paulo Biennale (2014) and the Shanghai Biennale (2018). However, in her interview with El Líbero, Jarpa disclosed a particular level of anticipation regarding the Venice Biennale and the way the event is structured by dividing pavilions according to countries. Jarpa believes that this division by countries helps the Venice Biennale remain a geopolitical event and that the removal of such structure would not only strengthen colonialist concepts of race and origin, resulting in the biennale watering down artists’ identities.
For the biennale, Jarpa’s series, Altered Views (2019), critiques what the artist refers to as “hegemonía cultural” (or cultural hegemony in English).[3] According to the curator, Agustín Pérez Rubio, the series is a research project made up of three inverted cultural spaces: The Museum of Hegemony, The Subaltern Portrait Gallery, and The Emancipatory Opera. By looking as an imaginary museum, Altered Views starts by presenting six cases/micro-stories that illustrate some of the concepts with which the colonies were defined: race and miscegenation, subaltern male subjects, cannibalism, conceptions of gender, civilization and barbarism; monarchy and republic, etc… These six cases are displayed in the first room, The Hegemonic Museum, and include events throughout seventeenth and twentieth century European history, such as the Rampjaar cannibalism on 1672, Vienna’s ridiculing of women’s political party at Vienna’s first association of democratic women in 1848, European human zoos from 1815 to 1958, etc… In here, viewers are educated about six different historical cases that will “expose the counterpoints to the notions of civilization with which the European discourse, subsequently exported to the United States and other countries — including the colonies through some of their hegemonic elites — upheld the centralization of its expansionist power, based on concepts of race, barbarism and colonialism”. [4] The Hegemonic Museum invites one to see how a Eurocentric perspective has led to misinterpretation and manipulation of historic events in order for the viewer to understand the importance of decolonizing these perspectives so that this does not prevail in contemporary times.
The first artwork in this section is Hegemonic Massacre Model, a translucent amplified letter that works as a background for three blocks with the word “redeloos” in red, a Dutch word for unreasonable that was used to describe the Dutch during the Rampjaar 1672. Below the words there are sculptures of body parts, like a human eye, non-erect phallus, human tongue, human ear, human nose, etc… Some sculptures are captioned in Dutch, but those who are in English are captioned with words like “maybe selling a tongue”. The first image seen in the entire installation are these sculptures that relate to “the 1672 disaster, or Rampjaar, and meant panic, massacres and desolation for the citizens of the Republic”.[5] Next to it, there is another piece, The Hegemonic Map, that highlight the regions that will be explored through the three pieces of the installation. After that, The Hegemonic Museum continues with other installations, prints, paintings, audios, videos, newspapers covers, and 3D printed model sculptures, among other mediums, that relate to five other cases. Surrounded by all the different representations of Vienna’s first association of democratic women, the human zoos, Jean Martin Charcot’s hysteria diagnosis, Guatemalan President Juan Jacobo Árbenz’s involvement with the “banana republic”, and CIA’s and NATO’s involvement in secret military operations in post-war Europe, there is room of glass that looks towards the exhibition.[6]This room is a very small circular room with glass walls with text on them. Each text excerpt has evidence that contradict the popular hegemonic perspective of the cases mentioned before and each is glass panel is placed directly in front of the section of the installation that deal with each of the cases .
The second room, The Subaltern Portrait Gallery, inverts the idea of oil paintings. Instead of glorying the characters and events present in hegemonic and imperial history, this gallery depicts the events from the previously mentioned cases and illustrates them the way history never did. The Subaltern Portrait Gallery exhibits twenty-two “large-scale oil paintings of archival images, assuming the standardization of bodies and representations, in the same proud way in which insults and racist, sexist terms have been used to catalogue, ridicule and subjugate individuals”.[7] The oil paintings are mostly colored in either red or black and white, except for De Witt, Lips from the Women Club, Insult Vienna 1, and Insult Vienna 2. The objective of this gallery is for viewers to start questioning what history would have really looked like without hegemonic institutions in control of information, to start thinking of new and more accurate depictions of history, and to challenge the Eurocentric and Christian notions of civilization and contemporary systems that were in place through these historic moments and are still present today.
The last room in the installation is The Emancipating Opera works as a stage of decolonized ideas and perspectives. This room contains a videographic opera with a video directed by Felipe Ríos that is played as a song, El Arriero y su Sombra (The Arriero and His Shadow), is played over it. The composition is called cantana and is a “musical form that was born in the seventeenth century at the same time as opera and the baroque style and is, in turn, the first case study of our Hegemonic Museum”. [8] The videographic opera finishes the viewer’s experience with a de-colonial narrative that follows the arriero, a mestizo character that exists in Chile’s region of the Andes, as he explores Chile’s nature and culture and Daniela Vega, the famous Chilean trans singer and actress. These two characters represent some of the several ways that hegemonic power can still be perceived in contemporary Chile through the psyche of the dominated and the dominator.
According to Jarpa’s, Altered Views (2019) critiques these Eurocentric and colonial perspective that formed postcolonial regions, such as her native Latin America, by illustrating how colonial concepts of race, gender, monarchy, and others, created a state of disesteem and disrespect that still exists. As the viewer engages with each of the pieces of each section, one can notice the wide array of different mediums used by Jarpa: Video, painting, photography, scanned images, sculptures, mirrors, etc.. However, even though the materials might differ, all of Jarpa’s artworks in Altered Views remain consistent through the idea that they are all connected to historic documents. Each piece of art in display is a representation of one of the many ways that Jarpa uses historic documents as artistic material as well as history itself as the story to which she reacts to.[9]
Altered Views (2019) invites the viewers to think critically in regard to which of these labels of subordination are exhibited without any doubt and realize how visible are many of the signs of colonialization. By calling for the viewer to consider the many labels of subordination in terms of race, gender, class, etc… Jarpa wants to denormalized these inherited divisions in order for viewers to realize that as long as we continue normalizing these categories, regions like Latin America will always find it impossible to advance to the same level as other non-colonial regions. For instance, In her interview with El Líbero, she gives the example of contemporary monarchies and how they promote colonialism’s idea of separation of classes and therefore, should not exist any longer.[10]
Pérez Rubio asserts that Altered Views (2019) exposes the Eurocentric perspective we have normalized and looks to shed light on this violence with which the world is reduced to an expansionist, developmentalist and hegemonic model.[11] This aligns with the critical narrative Jarpa looks to achieve through her usage of materials that make you experience her intent with your senses instead of just reading it. For her art synthesizes all of these ideas collectively[12].
Jarpa’s inspiration for Altered Views emerged from her own analysis of declassified intelligent files belonging to The United States’s Central Intelligence Academy (CIA) and other intelligence and security agencies. Between 1999–2000, declassified files about The United State’s involvement with Chile and other Latin American countries were released. However, in the more than 8,800 documents released, most of them had entire pages and substantially long paragraphs censored. Coincidently, none of the pieces of information that were in fact readable mentioned anything about The United States’s funding dictatorships or secret political interventions that had already been confirmed by other sources. This inspired Jarpa to think of all the other historical archives that had provided us with censored knowledge over the years just so hegemonic cultures could perpetuate the status quo established upon the colonies.
This lead Jarpa to start thinking of someone’s need for the truth of what has happened where they live and how understanding this could enlighten the person about all the factors that have shaped them and their surroundings into making them who they are now. By doing it herself, Jarpa wants her contemporary and future audiences to feel like they too be allowed to revise and critique history — especially the history that relates to them and their identities.
Jarpa’s series for the Biennale can be regarded as similar to her installation at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA) in 2016. The exhibition shown at the Latin American Art Museum of Buenos Aires appeals, En nuestra pequeña region de por acá (2016), is according to Natalia Taccetta, a doctor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, an example of the kind of archival representation and connection to memory and history expected from Jarpa’s Altered Views (2019). Taccetta expresses the difficulty of working with contemporary pieces with archival characteristics by quoting Frank Stella’s 1964’s “What you see is what it is” phrase[13]. She points out how, with Jarpa’s art, it is not only what is seen because it is not only what it is, but it is precisely what is not seen, what cannot be read, what is characteristic of this archival aesthetic, that is, the gap, that articulates the ontology of this Latin-American archive.
Altered Views is similar to Jarpa’s previous works in the sene that they all deal with the trauma in Latin America as consequence of the colonization efforts of both the European West and The United States of America. However, Altered Views does so by reversing society’s colonial mindset through the construction of a historical narrative where the organization in charge of archiving and sharing the information does not have the authority to modify or erase any piece of history that might compromise. A narrative where the right to know one’s story does not translate to the right of erasing another’s. Altered Views invites the viewer to think critically of their past and defy the Euramerican hegemonic male culture that exists today in order to reconstruct a different future for society.
[1] “Voluspa Jarpa, La Artista Que Representará a Chile En La Bienal De Venecia: «Que La Sociedad Entienda Que El Fenómeno Del Arte Lo Hace Una Sociedad Completa».” Interview by Magdalena Olea. El Líbero. January 6, 2019.
[2] “Chilean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.” E. Accessed May 25, 2019. https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/248949/voluspa-jarpaaltered-views/.
[3] “Voluspa Jarpa, La Artista Que Representará a Chile En La Bienal De Venecia: «Que La Sociedad Entienda Que El Fenómeno Del Arte Lo Hace Una Sociedad Completa».” Interview by Magdalena Olea. El Líbero. January 6, 2019.
[4] Pérez Rubio, Agustín. “Altered Views: Curator’s Statement.” Ministerio De Las Culturas, Las Artes Y El Patrimonio.” Consejo Nacional De La Cultura Y Las Artes: 3. https://www.cultura.gob.cl/bienalvenecia2019/wp-content/uploads/sites/38/2019/04/2.-altered-views_voluspa-jarpa-curated-by-agustin-perez-rubio.pdf.
[5] “Ministerio De Las Culturas, Las Artes Y El Patrimonio.” Consejo Nacional De La Cultura Y Las Artes — Gobierno De Chile
[6] “Ministerio De Las Culturas, Las Artes Y El Patrimonio.” Consejo Nacional De La Cultura Y Las Artes — Gobierno De Chile
[7] Pérez Rubio, Agustín. “Altered Views: Curator’s Statement.” Ministerio De Las Culturas, Las Artes Y El Patrimonio.” Consejo Nacional De La Cultura Y Las Artes: 3. https://www.cultura.gob.cl/bienalvenecia2019/wp-content/uploads/sites/38/2019/04/2.-altered-views_voluspa-jarpa-curated-by-agustin-perez-rubio.pdf.
[8] Pérez Rubio, Agustín. “Altered Views: Curator’s Statement.” Ministerio De Las Culturas, Las Artes Y El Patrimonio.” Consejo Nacional De La Cultura Y Las Artes: 3. https://www.cultura.gob.cl/bienalvenecia2019/wp-content/uploads/sites/38/2019/04/2.-altered-views_voluspa-jarpa-curated-by-agustin-perez-rubio.pdf.
[9] Jarpa, Voluspa. “Historia, Archivo E Imagen: Sobre La Necesidad De Simbolizar La Historia.” Contra Corriente: A Journal on Social History and Literature in Latin America 12, no. 1 (Fall 2014): 14–29.
[10] “Voluspa Jarpa, La Artista Que Representará a Chile En La Bienal De Venecia: «Que La Sociedad Entienda Que El Fenómeno Del Arte Lo Hace Una Sociedad Completa».” Interview by Magdalena Olea. El Líbero. January 6, 2019.
[11] “Ministerio De Las Culturas, Las Artes Y El Patrimonio.” Consejo Nacional De La Cultura Y Las Artes — Gobierno De Chile. Accessed May 25, 2019. https://www.cultura.gob.cl/bienalvenecia2019/.
[12] “Voluspa Jarpa, La Artista Que Representará a Chile En La Bienal De Venecia: «Que La Sociedad Entienda Que El Fenómeno Del Arte Lo Hace Una Sociedad Completa».” Interview by Magdalena Olea. El Líbero. January 6, 2019.
[13] Taccetta, Natalia. “En Nuestra Pequeña Region De Por Acá: De La Desclasicificación Del Documento Al Contrarchivo En La Obra De Voluspa Jarpa.” MERIDIONAL Revista Chilena De Estudios Latinoamericanos9 (May 2017). Accessed May 19, 2019.
