Voluspa Jarpa has developed an artistic practice in recent years that revolves around treatments and uses of the archive as aesthetic source and as generator of new reality. Based on declassified intelligence documents and of documents yielded by trials, Jarpa relates vestiges of periods of dictatorship in countries like Chile, Paraguay and Brazil -all of which have played a part in the artist’s own past- in an attempt to understand the events that took place there. Jarpa works with the notions taken from other disciplines like psychoanalysis and history to construct a mixed discourse. The artist’s first solo show in a Latin American Museum, En nuestra pequeña región de por acá (In Our Little Region Around Here) was conceived specifically for MALBA’s premises and is now presented in Chile, her native country, at the space Matucana 100.

In the framework of her research into recent history, Jarpa analyzes the Cold War period in relation to Latin America- a territory key to that conflict’s conception and events. She opposes the asepsis of North American minimalism -glaringly evident in the work of Donald Judd, for instance- to U.S. intelligence service documents for the period from 1948 to 1994. The narrative he formulates revolves around forty-seven Latin American leaders who played a key role in the organization of States and who were either assassinated or died in circumstances still enveloped in doubt.

In its exploration, the exhibition moves between politics, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis. Its open and new reading formulates questions on those unresolved deaths and signals the hidden powers and economic interests at play in the region, from Mexico to Argentina. Jarpa’s narrative goes from the micro to the macro; a range of documents, archival images, audio recordings, and texts hold fragments of a permeable discourse. Through them, it is possible to put together an account of our history that heeds the specific context of each country.

Jarpa’s work combines the investigative and the artistic acts. Language is a fundamental part of a process to which ideas of knowledge and translation are essential as creative acts in themselves, as the videographic work that closes the show evidences.

Agustín Pérez Rubio Curator