BACKYARD

Contemporary artworks created for a solo exhibition on the south wall of the #museoruinasdehuanchaca museum in Antofagasta, Chile.
The exhibition was the result of winning a 2024 call for entries, and the exhibition opened in January 2025 under the name "Backyard."
Backyard is an exercise in contemplation and understanding of reality, combined with the aesthetic exercise of looking from the outside, an exercise inherent to the landscape tradition of the visual arts. But it is also a questioning of the hegemonic concept that a landscape should be beautiful and green, and of the marginal treatment of our region compared to the center and south of the country. The south is always more beautiful. This "backyard" highlights the reconciliation of the industrial apparatus with the natural world that takes place in the urban complex that constitutes the Ruins of Huanchaca. The supremacy of materials has an overwhelming power and presence in this place. They are geological materials in pastel tones in constant transformation thanks to the dynamism of shadows and the light of the tireless sun.
In the Backyard pieces, I used a visual language that enhances the characteristics of this landscape. I dyed plant fabrics with natural pigments, which were joined together to generate different views that were then intervened with images embroidered on a domestic sewing machine. I use machine embroidery as a reference to the industrial past of the ruins. The embroidered images are elements that contribute to the visual identity of the city of Antofagasta. I used "tulmas" to refer to the colors characteristic of the region's highland textile tradition and also to metaphorically connect the coast with the Andes mountain range. A mountain range we share with Bolivia, the country from which the "silver" processed in Huanchaca came. The place where the cholitas used to pirouette the mineral.
In the backyard is what's useful, but we don't want them to see it. In the ruins, the rupture or fragmentation of matter reflects the symbolic and physical precariousness of the city and the people who live in the driest desert in the world.