HAPPY TO BE PROVEN WRONG

As part of the research for my exhibition at O – Overgaden in November, I traveled to Chile for six weeks in March 2022. I’ve been exploring the topic of South American folklore and traditional Chilean culture for some years now, amazed by its perseverance and communal tradition. The research trip was a chance to visit the Fondo Margot Loyola Palacios archive, which has been my most significant source of information, thanks to its generous digitalization. Not only did the trip help me deepen my understanding of Chilean traditional culture, but it also gave me a chance to grasp the current state of the country: its challenges, its potential, and most importantly its resistances.

The conclusion I’ve drawn from my research trip to Chile is that it is all very complicated and complex, including everything from my own family relations to current politics, struggles, resistances, and cultural traditions. When I sat on the plane from Amsterdam to Santiago, I knew I had a lot to learn; so much that it felt overwhelming. Since the transatlantic crossing, I’ve been on guided tours, in conversations with artists, drivers, fellow bus travelers, and a very curious and sweet car-renter. I’ve spent hours and days in a tiny archive and have, in general, experienced generosity beyond anything I could imagine. But most precious of all was the luxury of doing my work while spending time with relatives and living in my late grandmother’s house.

It has been eight years since my last trip to the land of my ancestors. By the table where my grandmother used to serve me homemade dessert, here I was, a decade later, eating gas station donuts while compiling fund applications and figuring out exhibition plans. It wasn’t sad exactly, just a mindfuck of time and its unpredictable development. With a sea of alone time, I was hit with memories from previous visits and my transformation between each of those trips. My first visit as a child, then as a teenager, as a young adult; as a daughter and granddaughter, and now as an artist doing research. I entered the country with a mind screaming with expectations, logistical panic, and an overall fear of doing this kind of trip for the first time.

And just like that, it was all replaced. Replaced with memories flashing with the sight of every familiar item, place, or smell. I realized I was packed full with memories. The memories of others. Memories my parents have given me from their youth and early lives. While riding the metro in Santiago I would recognize the names of the stations. That’s where my father saw a ghost in the empty building. That’s where she used to go to school. That’s where rich people live. That’s the square where that video was recorded.

Memories and references I’ve grown up with and been told about thousands of miles and borders away. Memories mixed with the constant stream of images and information I’ve come across online. Everything in a funky collaborative mixtape. Surrounded by mountains, I carried the memory of a past and present beyond my timeline and reality. Turns out it wasn’t only within me but all over the place.

Following the political development in Chile from afar has been frustrating. Every time a major political decision crept to the right, my parents have disappointedly uttered: “Have they learned nothing?” I’ve agreed – as you do as a child. And as an adult, I kept nodding, equally disappointed. It was an opinion made with the privilege of an outsider position, from the safe distance of Scandinavian continuity. It exposes the unchallenged narrative you can create from afar. They proved me wrong. I encountered a capital city where memory is tagged all over the place; it screams at you. Not even the dead escape the injustices and crimes they committed. Everywhere you look words are telling us that they will never forget. People are mad, not only about the past but also about the present. Rightfully.

Cementerio general. Photo: Isabella Solar Villaseca.

South America is no exception to the worldwide phenomenon of speculation and distortion. Whether recollection is made on an institutional level, on the street, or around the dinner table, it is never absent. But in some way, we; the people are constantly disturbed in our trains of thought and action. With governmental strategies of speculation, alienation, fake news, and distortion; strategies we can recognize from current politics all over the world. We are constantly distracted to look elsewhere with different outrages of sensation and spectacle. A form of ruling with the purpose of exhausting and deceiving our sense of direction and collective belonging.

With a freshly inaugurated president with roots in the student movement that shook things up back in 2011, I thought I would meet a nation full of optimism, but what I actually met was more of a shrugging “he’s all right” kind of vibe. People are torn, suspicious, and tired. And it probably won’t be a quick fix with fresh, cool, progressive leadership. Suspicion is constantly on high alert and it is not just paranoia. The country have a long history of strong systemic and instrumental strategies for memory distortion and mass manipulation. The Uber driver says: “If they [the government] give me something I wonder what they will take next.” It’s not so much the level of suspicion that takes me aback, it’s the exhausted indifference.

Pedro Montt, Ex-President (1906-1910). Gave the green light to the Santa María School massacre committed in 1907 by the Chilean Army. A massacer of striking mine workers and their families, with between 2200-3600 victims. Photo: Isabella Solar Villaseca.

During my stay, I learned about past uprisings long before October 2019 in the paintings of Violeta Parra, and on the tagged graves at the Cementerio General. I learn about the exhaustion of having to deal with the protests every Friday in the capital. I’m told about the frustration of being beaten down and then helped to the hospital by the police themselves. I’m cautioned about going to the areas of protest. The porter of the building says with an ensuring expression: “People are really angry.”

I learn about statues being taken down by authorities (by military request). Not as woke postcolonial action, unfortunately, more of a *save and conserve* kind of rescue operation. I see empty pedestals tagged with words of remembrance, frustration, and anger; pedestals repainted and re-tagged – an inexhaustible, never-ending cycle. I learn the names of the protagonists of resistance from street murals, by the words of remembrance on their graves, while stuck in traffic with the cab driver.

As I’m not used to the cityscape, I encounter a city that erupts with memory, unable to avoid the words with cautionary alerts, claims of narratives, remembrance, cheering, and swearwords sending everyone to hell. I feel uplifted and sad: a mixed shitparty.

Happy to be proven wrong, they have not forgotten; they have not not learned anything from history. Resistance and movement are very much present. But it is beyond a simple dialectical answer.

The realities are too many and the ways people deal with them even more. Some talk about the past and the present with a sad undertone, others with cynical frankness. Some talk about the dictatorship’s hardships while others prefer to focus on the future. I ask my middle-class aunt if the dictatorship affected her and her husband’s business in any way. She says: “No, not at all.” On the other hand, she still carries the sorrow of having her once tightly knitted family spread across continents. I met a country with a cacophonic way of remembrance and left it baffled by the complexity of its multiplicity.

Santiago, Baquedano friday protest. Photo: Isabella Solar Villaseca.

Interested in resistances and their current and past movements, artist Isabella Solar Villaseca combines archive material, found footage, and music with sculptural and performative elements.

Solar Villaseca is currently working on her first institutional solo exhibition as part of the INTRO program for young artists. Isabella Solar Villaseca is one of this year’s two INTRO artists in O – Overgaden’s customized development program for young artists in Denmark (the other one being Tora Schultz), which also includes the option to do research trips.

The culmination of the INTRO program is a solo exhibition accompanied by a publication. INTRO is a three-year pilot project, generously supported by Aage og Johanne Louis-Hansens Fond. The two INTRO exhibitions will open at O – Overgaden on November 18, 2022.

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