Madrid,
Voluspa Jarpa was born in 1971 in the Chilean city of Rancagua, in the capital of her country she continues to reside and has been dedicating her work to the study of the underlying narratives in documents from declassified archives that were once secret, such as those linked to the Cold War until eighty; also from other types of sources that have not been the subject of secrecy, but that do refer to an uncomfortable past, such as publications related to hysteria where it was associated with multiple clichés, clearly misogynistic nineteenth-century pamphlets or texts related to the exposure of black people in zoos.
From these revealed archives, both visual and documentary, Jarpa is interested in understanding the ways in which hegemonic positions are constructed while others are subjugated, attending to issues of gender, class and race and their political and symbolic imaginary; In short, it delves into the nature of the archive, also in its material sense, its capacity to contain memory and even trauma.
Until next November 23, Jarpa presents the “Politics of Forms” project at the La Oficina gallery in Madrid: on this occasion it has been based on material declassified in the United States in relation to the coup d’état that ousted Allende in Chile in 1973 and emphasizes the importance of the support, and the articulation of the texts in it, when carrying out his readings: he is as interested or more interested in what is reliably written than what is left empty or cannot be read, and as much as clear or erased, a notion of archive that does not equate it as an extraction device, nor with a vehicular means, but rather grants it value for itself, for its own materiality. Whether or not it can be read and especially if it is not: if what is inscribed in it is something that, despite this, cannot be told.
It was precisely as a result of learning about this documentation, whose declassification took place during the Bill Clinton government, when Jarpa began to work on those very numerous and extensive deletions, which hid surely compromising content that may never come to light; in his words: Many of these documents were crossed out—paragraphs and entire pages erased with black lines and blocks. I was moved by that erased information and, in turn, by the History of Chile, which I felt small and insignificant since that erasure.
What is proscribed and not shown implies for the artist a form of violence, by leaving fragments of history cut off, and, paradoxically, for this reason, it acquires an affirmative meaning: it acquires the role of evidence of censorship and opacity, and of how these attempts of silence they also write the stories of the past and insert themselves into them. The gaps of yesterday would be inseparable and significant parts of it, not despite their forbidden nature but precisely because of it.
These black bands, which can be clearly seen on the texts that are revealed, intrinsic to any document and archive, do not constitute obstacles in his compositions, but signs to be broken down: they refer to contexts of surveillance, to the way in which states of exception are articulated and the plots of the story, to the existence of permissions to narrate. They are clues and she has chosen to take them through aesthetic and political terrain: in their refined linearity and blackness she has linked them with minimalism, in their origin they refer to the American intervention in that coup d’état, and both fields are associated in which called the politics of form. These declassified documents would thus come to be linked with an art that was close to them in time: that of Frank Stella or Donald Judd, formulating an unprecedented continuity between one sphere and another; in the approaches of this exhibition at the Office, an “epochal complicity.”
This is also a way of reading the illegible without falling into the attempt at decipherment or imagination, only in the eloquent links, potentially more expressive than the document per se. This Chilean author thus manages to turn censorship and destruction into productive sources, the beginning of a new movement.
Voluspa Jarpa. “Politics of forms”
