CAROLINA OPAZO
BIO Carolina Opazo (Born: 1987 -Valdivia, Chile) Visual Artist graduated from School of Visual Arts of the Austral University of Chile Has been involved in differents art gatherings and festivals, like MusLab (Mexico), Sonec (Chile), Rotativa (COncepciĂłn), FAAC (PerĂş), TSONAMI (Chile), among others. Currently, she works as an independent artist and manager of curatorial projects.
My artistic practice began in the landscapes of Valdivia, walking under the rain the labyrinth of curved and angular streets that adapt to hills, rivers and wetlands. From there i began to research the relations of the natural/urban landscape through video. After that I move myself to the exploration of the sound and the drawing as narrative way, through which I link with the diverse subjectivities that conditions the landscape, developing projects of collaborative art with communities, adding value and reactivating their forms of resistance against the processes of globalizaciรณn by creative encounters, shared explorations of the territory and reflections about the sensorial, geographic, historical, identity landscape.
AMPLYFYING FLOWS Colaborative Art Residences / Culture Network Quilleco, BiobĂo. Chile October 13, 2018 - January 13, 2019
Book: https://issuu.com/caroopazo/docs/amplificando_caudales
Residency project of Collaborative Art conducted in collaboration with local communities of Quilleco, around the symbolic, cultural and historical abundances of its rivers and estuaries. During three months I was living in Quilleco, located in the Andes Precordillera, south of Biobío area. Before making the residence, in a diagnosis stage, I noticed the cultural invisibilization of the river affluents that furrow by all the town, as a result of this I began to form relations with the communities in a process of research and valuation of forgotten stories, articulating new stories, experiences and interventions in the urban/rural landscape along the fluvial thing.
Collaboration: Quilleco Communities: Weavers organization, “Hebras of Quilleco”, Environmental Group Ponte Bío, Neighbors of the Street Eusebio Lillo “Dogs Street”, Singers of Folk Music of the town and Quilleco City Hall. Bibliographical research and in land, management for the meeting with the communities: Germán Sepúlveda, Anthropologist and Director of Communitarian Organizations of the Quilleco City Hall Publishing production (technical and conceptual attendance throughout the process, photographic registry, poster and book about the process design and impression): Almacén Editorial Invited artist to participate in “Acción Catutera” Natascha de Cortillas, Visual Artist Text production on the project: David Romero, Researcher on Contemporary Art around the relations between Art and Public Sphere
ERASE THE SIGNS Authoral Curatorship Collective exhibit in Art City Gallery of ValparaĂso, Chile October 15 - November 15, 2018
The exhibition ERASE THE SIGNS brings together ten artists (walkers) from Valdivia, Concepción, Santiago and Valparaíso, who developed in different ways installation works that have in common the search to subvert the tradition, expose the unpredictable, the deviation, the useless, the degeneration, the obsolescence and the randomness between the found and transformed. Here, certain established borders are reversed, it erased and / or stressed the global and local, the industrial and the handicraft, the organic and inorganic, the inside and outside, the form and the content. Thus places, found objects and experiences become material to rework; in the make room for a moment, to then clear. According to the particular backgrounds of the artists, each place is a commitment to a dialogue that allows different intensities. This is how Enrique Flores finds among junk, the doors of the old and mythical Subaru vehicle, that traveled all over Chile for the scientific television program “The land we live on”. Meanwhile, Carlos Silva focuses on the exhibition space itself, unveiling and stressing certain borders and litanies proper to it. Or, Natascha de Cortillas, who with her work connects north to south, artists and collaborators, questioning borders and ways of living where bread, symbolically put together, typical conjunctures of the social and cultural context. Artists: Carlos Silva (Valparaíso). Catalina González, Ignacio Traverso, Ash Aravena, Isabel Núñez and Enrique Flores (Santiago). Natascha de Cortillas y Sebastián Rivas (Concepción). Isabel Santibáñez y Carolina Opazo (Valdivia).
INSISTENT MACHINE Authoral curatorship “ERASED THE SIGNS” Collective exhibit in Art City Gallery of Valparaíso, Chile October 15 - November 15, 2018
Artistic Installation / Equipment: Manual lawnmower, windshield motor, arduino single board computer, electronic circuit, power source, electricity. Background Wallpaper / Variable dimensions. The work is built with a manual lawnmower craft by my father with a motor recovered from another machine, wood and iron. Obsolete, was left outdoors for about 20 years exposed to the southern climate, rusting, rotting and colonized by moss and grass. Its image recalls a past, a possible function that today appears surreal. The knives no longer cut, the engine does not work. Too heavy, rotten and rusty, devoured by the landscape, overcoming its initial function of modeling the garden, now modeled by its counterpart. I took as a reference its insistence, turning it into an automaton that hits the walls, looking for a landscape that can never be modeled again. Collaboration: Engineering: Robinson Montecinos
WANDERING TRAVEL Curatorship by Isabel Nuñez, Rattha Gallery COllective Exhibit in Casa 916, Concepción, Chile May 2018
Sound-visual installation / Materials: sound composition, headphones and branch scheme / Variable dimensions A branches scheme, indicates the sound space where headphones are hanging from the ceiling. The visitor as located and put the headphones at this point, can hear the sound of a wandering walk through natural, ruinous and psychic landscapes. The artist, on her various trips and walks, records the sounds of a forest, a salt flat, the desert and the city. Then, based on the European story “Ship of Fools�, she decontextualizes the sources, seeking to interpret the drift and madness. https://soundcloud.com/carolinaopazo/viaje-errante-mezcla
PITAC
Temporal Contemporary Art Institute Project
Rotative Practices of Contemporary Art in Communities Barrio Plaza Cruz, Concepciรณn, Chile Collective exhibition in City Gallery of Conception November 2017
In ten days, this exercise was solved having generated a series of surveys to the community and artists who work with communities, assuming and parodying the imposition of a project of contemporary art when the confidences do not exist to be able to unfold it. PITAC raises to rethink the position that assumes the artist in relation to the community, when this is immersed in a sociocultural context that it distances of the artistic manifestations and the creative world in general, which is translated as a restriction to activate relations and a project in so short term. The surveys were exposed in a mural module, inviting to the visitors to respond the same survey.
HORIZON Individual exhibition House 916 Concepciรณn/Chile November, 2017
Installation of drawings and sounds that comes from personal and collective explorations of the sound and visual horizon of the contemporary landscape. This project puts the horizon as an axis of constant transformation, like a mental image of the visual and sonorous limits of the landscape. There are horizons that relax us while other put us on alert; a new building in the city proposes a new horizon and a new way to experience the daily basis. The natural landscape has been modified beyond
the city, its fields, object of the single-crop-farming, exhibit monochrome hills with uniform rows of eucaliptus and pines that modeling the form in which we perceived the horizon. This sample was an invitation to listen and to see the landscape that defines the way to locate us; an instance to reflect around the intervened map that constitutes us in a historically, physical and mental way.
CONCERT OF A WEATHER Individual exhibition in Barrios Bajos Gallery Valdivia, Chile August, 2017 National Contest Prize Fragua 2017
Sound/visual Installation / Materials: water, branches found in the ground, refrigeration gallons cuted by half, hoses, PVC tubes, motors and water pumps of washing machine, pulleys and wheels of bicycle, bottles, among other materials found around some humedales of the city of Valdivia. Variable Dimensions. Sound Concert of a Storm is an installation based on the geographic, critical and poetic observation of the relation of the rubbish dumps around the wetlands near Valdivia with the immersive character of the meteorological phenomenon of the storm that occurs regularly in this city. From this, I gathered rubbish and obsolete drift machines in urban/natural landscape and composed a structure that worked refurbishing the found objects electrical and mechanical way, reanimating the water and branches of trees. With this, I wanted to invite the viewer to think over a devastating landscape, where the elements of the nature must pass through the wastes. Collaboration: Refraction of machines: Felipe Laguna, Text production on the project: Isabel Núùez Assembly of work: Ash Aravena
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky-ctGgY150
SONIDOS DE LA OBSOLESCENCIA PROGRAMADA Texto Curatorial por Isabel Nuñez Santiago / Julio / 2017
El paisaje ha sido un tema continuo en la historia del arte, y los románticos lo declararon símbolo de esa belleza salvaje que suspendía los sentidos. Para Kant en la contemplación o más bien en el enfrentamiento con el paisaje era posible experimentar lo sublime terrorífico, esto sería por ejemplo; ese fugaz momento en que una ola gigante se eleva en el aire a punto de embestir una frágil embarcación, ese eterno y transitorio instante en el que tal espectáculo abruma los sentidos, y aturde la razón, en donde no hay escape sino en la contemplación. En esos últimos momentos decimonónicos en los que aún cabía hablar de paisaje natural, en donde la intervención humana estaba en sus inicios, los románticos, los poetas, los filósofos recorrieron cada una de sus grietas, las grietas y situaciones del paisaje, mapeando cada una de sus topografías. En este paisaje univoco la tormenta era una de sus manifestaciones más conmovedoras. Muchas capas se han agregado ahora a ese tal paisaje, muchas que se articulan, cruzan y reconfiguran el devenir de un sujeto que actualmente ha perdido la medida de lo sublime, e inclusive de lo terrorífico invocándolo todos los días a través de los distintos medios. Cabe preguntarse ahora, sumidos en esta contemporaneidad; ¿qué es lo que se escucha cuando se oye una tormenta? ¿Una grieta en las nubes?, los efectos del cambio climático?, La postura utópica de una llamada de la naturaleza en el vacio? Es posible pensar o vivenciar un paisaje no intervenido? Construir y reflexionar sobre el espacio, el tiempo y la existencia han sido parte de las temáticas del arte por antonomasia, la suspensión de las coordenadas de lo productivo en donde la inutilidad del arte ejerce su influjo, en este descampado el trabajo que relaciona arte y sonido no es nuevo, lo podemos rastrear en Kandinsky, en el constructivismo ruso y también en Marcel Duchamp.
En este trabajo Carolina Opazo hace eco de las intervenciones al paisaje citadas anteriormente, buscando intervenir y emular la tormenta a través de una manufactura que deja hablar a la precariedad de sus materiales, en contraste con lenguajes que provienen del código de programación, utilizado para configurar placas Arduino, combinando formatos análogos que conviven con la tecnología, un open source (código abierto) que capa tras capa busca construir un espacio y una atmósfera con materiales de bajo presupuesto. Cabe preguntarse por el resultado, el sonido resultante emulará realmente a una tormenta? Será este sonido resultante, ambiguo y envolvente para el espectador? La música suele ser una de las artes mas directas, es prácticamente imposible sustraerse a los sonidos, es un arte directo que penetra y en el que nos vemos estimulados de inmediato, no es posible realizar un distanciamiento racional como en ocasiones lo hacemos al estar frente a una obra puramente visual, o a una instalación, así que mientras recorres con la mirada, con el desplazamiento una instalación el sonido ya se ha encargado de estimular el cerebro, implicándote emocional y racionalmente, ciertamente el sonido comparte esto con la música. La operación racional de Carolina busca ilógicamente lograr un sonido especifico que es realizado por la naturaleza con materiales precarios, un juego talvés imposible, pero que es importante intentar, se trataría de utopías locales, situaciones inútiles, atmósferas artificiales, sueños racionales y emotivos, se trataría en suma de acciones que evocan un acontecimiento que pasamos de largo entre publicidad, mensajes, llamadas, tránsitos, reportes meteorológicos, supermercados, rutas viales e imágenes dadas.
MARKED SOUNDS Logbook of a tour of the city of Chachapoyas, northern Peru International Festival of Contemporary Art FAAC, organized by Seqes platform. Chachapoyas, PerĂş
Research on sound spaces from the time of observation and concentration provided by the drawing. Drawing requires a certain time, which extends into the observation space, unlike the digital record, which synthesizes this time fragment to the detriment of the process of capturing the registered motive. So that, the time that requires the drawing allows to expand the sound analysis. A graphical registry of a place constitutes an entrance to look for a possible sound in a specific space, which once perceived is translated in an artistic and visual exercise, being in a conscious and vivid drawing.
SOUND WANDERING Authoral project in collaboration with artists from Concepción, Chile: Sebastián Rivas, Javiera Rebeco and Pablo Arancibia FAAC / SEQES Cultural Collective Chachapoyas. Chachapoyas, Perú August, 2017 Authoral project Audiofiction Residence Sound Art International Festival TSONAMI Valparaíso, Chile November, 2015
Valparaíso, Chile
CHACHAPOYAS, PERÚ Market Model of Chachapoyas art intervention, with audio registries of southern Chile inviting to children, who spend all the day in the market selling with their families, to interpret the sounds with drawings about how they imagine the landscapes where the sounds comes from. Colaboration: “Suple Group”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RnCUBLgeVc
VALPARAÍSO, CHILE Public Space Intervention. With a music stand and graphical scores based on sound and visual elements that were repeated in the city of Valparaiso, passers-by and street musicians were invited to improvise a sonorous interpretation with the instruments which they had at the hand, some of them used their voice and one of them that walked whistling, interpreted whistling. Production and photographic registry: TSONAMI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QwNYHtV9kk
Valparaíso, Chile
Chachapoyas, PerĂş
LIQUID STATE City H, Curatorship by Ignacio Szmulewicz Cultural center Matucana 100 Santiago, Chile April to June, 2015
Sound Instalation / Materials: Sonorous composition, 5 channels of audio exit, loudspeakers 5.1 / Variable Dimensions: spiral form. Sonorous composition with selected audio registries of Valdivia, from four-year tours with recorder in hand. The idea was to interpret how the flow of water was stressed in its journey through the city, both on the surface and underground, around this, some of the records were obtained in real estate excavation sites. Collaboration: Landscape research: RubĂŠn Pino, Academic Biologist of the Austral University of Chile Landscape research: Ricardo Mendoza Historian and Visual Artist, Director of the Museum of Niebla Castle
https://soundcloud.com/carolinaopazo/estado-liquido
... TO THE WOMEN, TO THE FOREST AND TO THE MEMORIES (...) Student’s Hall, curatorship by Artiom Mamlai Museum of Contemporary Art Valdivia, Chile April of 2013
Videoinstalation / Materials: White pool with double bottom, on the surface water and under two subwoofer, video loop projection, sound composition in situ Pure Data software for opening, sound loop during the exhibition time / Variable dimensions In this work, I wanted to interpret a dream image where women look each other with the glances, traveling through natural surroundings. Meanwhile, the sounds of the nature are juxtaposed with the whispers of the women. Collaboration: Acoustic engineering: CĂŠsar Guerra
CAROLINA OPAZO 56 + 9 738 09 563 caro.o.river@gmail.com https://soundcloud.com/carolinaopazo