Voluspa Jarpa

Born in 1971 in Rancagua, Chile
Lives and works in Santiago, Chile

I work from the question of history and its representations in art. I was particularly interested in individual experience in tension with public speeches. Since 1991, I observe and look for the material traces between historical facts and the city. For this development a series of paintings, photographs and graphics techniques, which is concerning vacant land located in downtown Santiago.

Since 1994, I began to relate, conceptually, two systems created for the purpose antagonistic narrative, they are: the historical account of public discourse as a convention of collective traumatic events, and subjective speech case, through the “disease” that gives rise to psychoanalysis: hysteria. From this, my research focuses on creating an overlap between Hysteria and History, its leguajes, mechanisms and images that allows me to make them visible.

Today my interest is focused on the notion of trauma, which I understand as an event that makes possible the invention of a language – become the shock-producing difficult to assimilate the facts, both in the individual sense and collectively. My research around this, refer to the search for material and conceptual strategies to realize how traumatic as an anomaly in the language itself, whether text or image. Construction of these notions of collective history (speeches and historical documents, city and patriotic emblems) and its junction with the subjective somatization (image, cross, erasures) allows me to find and work in a boundary between text and image.

This has led me to select some images that have the ability to contain these features: the vacant lot and emergency housing with respect to the urban, the hysteria about the history, public records and the secret documents, go to as images and materials to construct the notions of public and private, the relatable and what has not ordering through language.

Currently working with the files declassified by the CIA and other intelligence agencies EUA Chile and Latin America, out into the open are censored and labeled. The documents were turned into books and these have made several public interventions, installations and object-based work.

I associate conceptually, black studs documents, figures of hysterical women understood as symptoms of the repressed in the text.

Group Shows
2012 – Minimal Secret – SoloProject, Focus Latinamerica, Arco Madrid
2011 – La No-Historia – 8th Biennial of MERCOSUR – Porto Alegre, Brazil.
2011 – The No-History´s Library – 12th Istanbul Biennial – Istanbul-Turkey.
2011 – Desclasificados, I already read – Wilfredo Lam Center, Havana, Cuba.
2011 – Voluspa Jarpa and Marina de Caro – ZonaMaco Mexico City, Mexico.
2010 – The No-History´s Library – 2011 Exhibition Dislocación – -Intervention Ulises’s Bookstore. With roaming in the Kunst Museum Bern(2011), Bern/ Swiss.

Solo Shows
2011 – Fallow Monument – Art Gallery of Concepción, Concepción, Chile.
2010 – L’Effet Charcot – Maison de l´ Amerique Latine, Paris, France.
2009 – Imaginary Construction – National Library, Lima, Peru.
2009 – Symptoms of the History – Intervention National Library Santiago, Chile.
2009 – Slave – Project Collection Exercises-National Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago, Chile.
2008 – Plague – Room Gasco-Santiago, Chile