Essays on erasure
Capsule 2
On Capsule 2: essays on erasure, MEMORIA includes works stemming from artistic practices that shed light on what has been blurred or obliterated.
Through social and historical processes marked by the suppression of rights, by political persecution, by power disputes or by the invisibility of the agents in these fields of tension, various artists have made efforts to denounce or reconstruct stories that have been erased by forces in authoritarian contexts.
As poetic and discursive tools, these artists find in critical parody or in gestures of erasing, hiding, fading or masking precisely the capacity to generate in the public the attention on the disruptive elements in either the pictorial space or the conceptual bases of the artworks.
In the work of Guillermo Núñez (Santiago, Chile, 1930-2024) there is a denunciation of the events that culminated in his exile in France during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Núñez recovers and intervenes in personal documents and memories as a demonstration of the violence hidden by the authoritarian regime.
On the other hand, Juan Castillo (Antofagasta, Chile, 1952) reflects on the material and symbolic powers that trigger the erasure of individual and collective identities. The artist reflects on the ideological apparatus of oppression that classifies and subordinates presumed categories in a hierarchical logic. In this sense, his work is an appeal for a plural understanding of differences and hybridity.
Similarly, the works of Antonio Romero (San Salvador, El Salvador, 1978) examine the anonymity resulting from the concealment of identities under the dominant power structures. In this mechanism of erasure, the governing logics are reproduced with the same cycles of impunity and trauma.
Capsules is a critical project by MEMORIA, presented in digital media, which seeks to broaden the perspectives and generate intersections between the works of the different artists represented by the gallery.
SELECTION OF WORKS
