Voluspa Jarpa to Represent Chile at 2019 Venice Biennale

Chilean artist Voluspa Jarpa will represent her country at the Chilean Pavilion of the 2019 Venice Biennale. Born in 1971 in Rancagua, Chile, Jarpa has long researched archives as aesthetic sources. Her work often uses declassified CIA documents about Latin America. In 2016, she presented 'En Nuestra Pequeña Región de por Acá' at MALBA in Buenos Aires, featuring works based on US intelligence files from 1948 to 1994 concerning 47 Latin American leaders who were assassinated or disappeared. Pérez Rubio, then artistic director of MALBA, stated that in Jarpa's work, investigation and artistic act are one. Jarpa writes that her reasons for working with archives come from encountering the erased and redacted, from the dimension of secrecy as a security matter. She has worked since age 15 with declassified CIA files on Latin America, starting with documents on Chile released in 1999-2001 when Pinochet was detained in London. The article also discusses broader trends in memory and geopolitics in art, citing institutions like Salt Galata in Istanbul (founded 2011) which researches Ottoman and Turkish history including the Armenian genocide, and the Atlas Group founded in 1999 by Walid Raad in Lebanon. It notes that since the 1960s, Latin American dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil resulted in thousands of political prisoners, disappearances, and murders.