Juan Castillo (Antofagasta, 1952–Stockholm, 2025) developed an artistic practice spanning more than forty years, centred on a fundamental question: how are people connected to the territories they inhabit and the images that represent those places? His work spans installation, photography, video, drawing and writing, using each medium to explore how identity and social experience are inscribed in places. This exhibition pays tribute to his career following his recent passing, presenting recent works that encapsulate his main lines of inquiry.

Castillo’s childhood at the Pedro de Valdivia saltpetre works in northern Chile had a profound influence on his artistic vision. That mining enclave, characterised by exploitation and subsequent abandonment, was the first landscape in which nature and human experience appeared inextricably linked. Over the following decades, Castillo would revisit that relationship in various places, understanding the landscape as a space in which human stories are inscribed. In the late 1970s, he joined the Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (CADA), alongside Raúl Zurita, Diamela Eltit, Lotty Rosenfeld and Fernando Balcells; the collective was active between 1979 and 1985 during one of the most repressive periods of the Chilean dictatorship. His move to Sweden in 1986 opened up a new field of research: displacement and its effects on identity and a sense of belonging. From then on, the testimonies of migrants and the narratives associated with the experience of uprooting would come to occupy a recurring place in a practice that understands territory as something that is produced and contested through those who inhabit it.

Castillo’s current exhibition, Tu rostro es el paisaje, suggests from its title a relationship between the body and the territory; this relationship takes on a special resonance when placed in dialogue with the numerous phrases that run through his work, including: ‘No map can do justice to your face’. Whilst a map seeks to make a territory legible, the landscape introduces a different relationship with space. Between these two ideas, the face ceases to be merely a bodily surface and becomes, moreover, a place in which a relationship with the territory is inscribed.

In contrast to the anatomical tradition, which has sought to break down the body in order to make it comprehensible, Castillo turns his gaze back to the surface: to the skin and to the ways in which a surface can become territory. His compositions, suspended between organs and territorial masses, destabilise the distinction between body and landscape. This relationship takes on a political dimension when the landscape ceases to be merely something to be contemplated and instead appears as territory, and when territory, in turn, functions as a form of identity. 

In Tu rostro es el paisaje (2018), where a skeleton unfolds horizontally amongst silhouettes of barely sketched faces, Castillo does something quite intriguing with this idea: the skeleton—what remains when the flesh, that is, the surface, has disappeared—lies precisely where the face and the landscape ought to merge. And if ‘the face is a politics’, as Deleuze and Guattari say, undoing it is another—that of a clandestine becoming which Castillo transforms into an almost abstract black rectangle, hinting at Martín Gubbins’s flag that appears in his work Lo nacional se desarma (2020).

The distinction between a map and a landscape is fundamental here. A map seeks to produce a legible territory, and modern cartography developed in close association with military and administrative practices. The landscape operates differently, although the distinction between the two becomes less clear when we consider Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation—drawing on Maurice Ronai—of the landscape as ‘the face of the homeland or the nation’. Whilst the map renders the territory visible as a surface of control, the landscape imbues it with affective and symbolic significance, transforming it into an image of belonging. In both cases, these are political operations.

The echoes of Bobby Capó’s bolero Piel Canela and the emphasis on dark eyes, in turn, prompt a reflection on the gaze. Seeing another person should not mean reducing them to an object of perception; hence Castillo’s blurred faces resist being fixed in a recognisable identity. But this resistance does not simply consist of evading representation. His images seem to question the conditions that make the recognition of a face possible, whether that of a landscape or that of a nation.