Voluspa Jarpa

Rancagua, Chile, 1971

            Born in Rancagua, a city located south of Santiago in Chile, Voluspa Jarpa has worked to consistently pay particular attention to the immediate conditions of her production, as if guided by the words of, the Russian writer, Tolstoy: "Paint your village, and you will paint the whole world." In fact, her first work, in collaboration with Natalia Babarovic, was the mural El sitio de Rancagua, located in the hall of the train station of her hometown, in which a historical scene was recovered with forceful realism. From that initial work to her latest projects, which have led her to represent the Chilean pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2019), the artist has developed an investigation aimed at discovering the way in which the wounds of local histories persist in the present, in the form of a diffuse unease that needs to be unraveled.

            Indeed, Altered Views, the project presented at the Biennial, deployed an intense search in an installation from which she restated European conceptions of race, gender, and organization of power, which distort the gaze on the non-European. Both her work with the archive and public and personal memory, as well as her urban interventions, are understood as an inquiry into the blind spots of modernity, visible in the inequalities and injustices that are revealed more clearly in the peripheral regions, in the trajectories of subalternized subjects, in women's bodies domesticated by the male viewpoint.

            In this sense, her consistent work towards decolonizing the perspective needs to be consummated by a work of fragmentation and assembly that the artist has been performing since her training as a painter. Her pieces always highlight the conceptual nature of the means through a meditated elaboration of the variants of color and composition, until reaching a more direct, formal experimentation on the implemented media. With the use of flags or blankets, she led painting to dialogue with objects and space, deploying her works in different planes and materialities. In this transition, the political and philosophical concerns that run through her work became more eloquent: the landscape, the body, history as scenarios of a trauma that does not yield to the steady pace of events and of which art can, if not heal, remind us to be on guard against.