PERFORMANCE AND INSTALLATION

MERCANCIA, merchandise, was my second solo show in Chile, after my residence in Hamburg, Germany.
In the underground rooms of this historical museum, Benjamin Vicuña Mackenna National Museum, I use the space for to exhibit my biography, but not trought the narrative form, but trought the Objects As a pieces of lost memories. Only the objects can bring us our memories, and to find in
this personal objects, memories that we share as society. Merchandise is all that can be sold or to buy.
Karl Marx called as fetishism of the merchandise to the psychological and social phenomenon where the merchandise pretend to have an independent will of their producers. Marx affirms that the fetishism of the merchandise is somewhat intrinsic to the production of merchandise, since in the trading company the process of production itself autonomize of the will of the human being. Such autonomy only will disappear when the human being control in a conscious way the process of production,
which only is possible to cause revoking the private property of the media of production and transforming into common property, and in this manner revoking the commercial character of the goods preserving only its value of use. That is to say, a revolution in the relations of production and of distribution of the media of life.
In our societies, the spaces where memories lives (museums) are common spaces where the commercial character is stopped. I understand that the objects and actions of my work produce an experience that recovers a function of art as a human communication , intimate, a media of social construction.

See VIDEOS, Merchandise

GHOST, 2004
ANIMAL Gallery
Performance
A phantom in the gallery
The ANIMAL Gallery is one of the most important galleries in Santiago of Chile. Each year the gallerist, Tomás Andreu, produces a contest of contemporary art with a newspaper El Mercurio, a conservative newspaper but the only one who produces ARTES Y LETRAS, a newspaper about art and culture.
That year the jury was: Víctor Zamudio-Taylor, a curator in USA and Latinoamerica, Francisco Brugnoli, director of the Contemporary Art Museum of Santiago, Tomás Andreu, the gallerist, and two journalists of Artes y Letras, Waldemar Sommers and Claudia Campaña. When I think in Ghost, my interest was to work with the mass media. I needed a work which could transform the traditional forms of art. The Ghost was a work where the artist was the work.
During one month, the artist would live in the gallery, and the Gallery being constituted as home. The artist is disguised as a ghost. Again, the subjectivity is mediated by the gallery and transforms into objectivity, as image and as object.
The Ghost is the most important work in my career, since all my interests about art are involve in it. The performance as an event, where the work of art and spectator find each other, the extreme experience in art, the transformation of the limits in the sense of art and life, the timing in the work of art, the joke as a terminator, the joke as a form of art, as a form of social protest, as a surface of disrupting the logic of the late capitalism in our life.
The Animal Gallery had a ghost, really. In the nights when nobody was there, the Ghost was playing. When the Gallery was closed, the Ghost was making art, and with a little camera and data show he was showing in the terrace of the gallery what he was doing, night by night. The Ghost was a very amazing project. The opening day, I paid another person to roller-skate disguised as a ghost, while I was in another room disguised as a ghost too.
People were happy and they left happy that day.

POSTMARX (Group exhibition) 2004
ANIMAL Gallery
God Bless You, installation and performance

Financial Times, 2004
Cecilia Palma Art Gallery
Installation

MITI MOTA (2003, Cecilia Palma Art Gallery) is an art work that was thought for an art contest. First, is very important to say something about “contemporary architecture” in Chile. Malls, shopping centers have become a new public space such as a square, where people live to save their social and idle activities such as eating, walking, buying, watching
movies or listening to concerts.
With the revolutionary changes in chilean economy in the 80´s, society
transformed its identity into the neoliberalism way. The contrast between high society and the lower classes is enormous, though now is possible to see Malls in all the periphery of Santiago City. This phenomenon has created new ghettos since people don't circulate through the city.
Malls are like little cities with their own climate, social life, as a mini
biospheres where all what you need exist in there, you don't need
to move any more.
Now, in the malls of Santiago is very common the existence of art
spaces, theatres, halls of concerts, etc. In this case, Cecilia Palma Gallery is the first space for contemporary art, and that situation, its location is a challenge for artists.
So, the gallerist created a contest with the requirement that all the works
should be contained in 1 cubic meter. When I was invited, I didn't know what to present. I wanted to win the contest, so, three days before the presentation of works at the jury, I was talking with my friends, other artists, about the contest. We were drinking and joking. Then, my friend Antonia, put herself with her legs among her arms, crouch down. In this moment I said: Hey, I will show you as a work of art!!!
I thought about the possibility of showing a body within the limits of 1 cubic meter. I had found the answer: To install a body with these measurements in the space of the gallery which would live in 1 cubic meter for a month. What body could have those measurements? The body of a dwarf has it. But, where do I find a dwarf that wants to be part of
an art work? Two days before the presentation, another friend called me and said that in the book "Bizarre Santiago", a guide written by a young journalist in Chile about all the bizarre things in the city, appeared the note:
RENTING DWARFS, call Roberto Avendano Production. And the phone
number.
I called immediately and talked with Roberto. I didn't know that he was
the dwarf. I told him about the project. I needed a dwarf to be installed in the gallery, if we won the first prize I could pay for the permanence in the place for a month. He accepted the deal. And then we went to the gallery the next day for the presentation at the jury.