Installation & publication with
Soledad García Saavedra / Brandon LaBelle
Friday, November 25 / 18:00 – 21:00
The withdrawn, the disappeared, the secret and the invisible: these are carriers of ghostly histories and collective memories – territories that require another type of orientation and navigation. Developed from an interest in aesthetic operations and strategies that negotiate the presence of what has gone missing, the installation “The Magic Block” is a proposal for a haunted poetics: a black art by which to follow in the steps of phantom figures and narratives – the citizens that form a shadow nation.
In conjunction with the installation, we are pleased to present the publication Magic Block: Contemporary Art from Chile. Stemming from two exhibitions and seminars held in Bergen, Norway, and Santiago de Chile, curated and organized by Soledad García Saavedra and Brandon LaBelle, the publication underscores the processes of appearance and disappearance, memory and forgetting, writing and erasure as social and psychological intensities. It focuses on the creative and critical strategies at play in works of recent Chilean art that emerge from a reflection on the politics of invisibility: how the operations of the seen and the unseen are understood to perform equally within the material realities of Chilean society. Through the works of Chilean artists and writers, Magic Block highlights art as a powerful platform for working through the political structures that hold the body in a phantasmic grip, and which can be traced and appropriated through unsteady acts of magic. Expressions of secrecy, camouflage, forgetfulness, dematerialization and covert occupation thus enable a giving narrative to those memories that are often subordinated by history.
Magic Block
Edited by Soledad García Saavedra / Brandon LaBelle
220 pages; spanish / english
ISBN: 978-0-9889375-3-6
Including works by the participating artists:
Catalina Bauer
Juan Downey
Claudia Missana
Eugenio Téllez
Sandra Vasquez de la Horra
Michelle-Marie Letelier
Rainer Krause
Gonzalo Díaz/Justo Pastor Mellado
Voluspa Jarpa
Enrique Ramírez
With written contributions by:
Soledad García Saavedra
Cristián Gómez Moya
Fernando Pérez Villalón
Camila Marambio
Justo Pastor Mellado
Carla Macchiavello
Sebastián Vidal Valenzuela
Sergio Rojas
Florian Wüst
Michele Galletti
Valentina Montero
Mara Polgovsky
Ezcurra Paz Guevara
Luna Montenegro & Adrian Fischer
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Errant Sound
Kollwitzstrasse 97
10435 Berlin
