The Artistic Work
The three new multimedia installations by the Chilean artists Elisa Balmaceda (born 1985) and Claudia González (born 1983) and the Brazilian artist Barbara Marcel (born 1985) look at various threshold moments: the protests on the streets in Chile, the landscapes and people exhausted by exploitation and industrialisation, the ruins and remnants of a modernised and accelerated world. A sense of interconnectedness is at the centre of these works, a feeling that makes the entanglements of life tangible. Beginning with these symbiotic nodes, these works explore a myriad of opportunities to create connections by means of and yet also in particular by going beyond human languages. In all of this, different forms of knowledge and old and new technologies intermingle and open up a new understanding of ourselves within the contexts of our lives.
In a transcultural series of film screenings, film curator Florian Wüst questions and illustrates the present social upheavals in Chile, adding the audio-visual medium of film to the context of the exhibition. He includes in this the long-term temporal dimension of history and memory and how these help us to comprehend current developments – in constellations of the here and now, Chile's specific history, and an overarching narrative of revolution and its social traces and effects, as in Johannes Gierlinger's film 'Die vergangenen Zukünfte' ('The Past Futures') of 2021 that builds bridges between Chile and German-speaking Europe. The medium of film is included here as an aesthetic and substantive lens that illustrates socio-economic processes within the exhibition's project of reflection.
