This piece interacts with the permanent collection of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, Chile. Specifically, it relates to one emblematic painting titled La perla del mercader de esclavas (The Slave Merchant’s Pearl) painted at the end of the 19th century in Paris by Alfredo Valenzuela Puelma. This painting was completed in 1882, the year the first photographs of hysterical women were taken in La Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris.

Taking this historical coincidence as a starting point, I am constructing an account of the different conflicting feminine archetypes of the end of the 19th century, from the representation of the virgin slave-girl sold by the slave trader to the hysterical women transformed into subjects for the “feminine illness.”

I examine the critical reception of the painting throughout its history and consider the omissions it makes in the violence that it depicts. I also consider archive material about the life of the painter, as himself being a subject troubled by social and psychological conflicts of gender, visible in his work and throughout his artistic life.