SACO9 Now or never

THE FRAILTIES OF THE BODY | Dagmara Wyskiel The research project Fissures, by Uruguayan artist Ana Agorio, emerged slowly during her stay as an artist in residence in Antofagasta at the beginning of 2019; the following year she received an invitation to show her work. This production might just relate to fissures in all of their possible layers of meaning.

A few months after Ana returned to Montevideo, Chile had an awakening and the fissures were filled with blood. International news channels showed images of Dignity Plaza on a daily basis. That summer, Santiago radiated a burning breath of hope to the world. Later came the autumn, and with it the plague. We quickly fell into the depths of the pandemic; both the festival and Ana’s exhibition were rescheduled.

Landscape as Insight is and is not a project based on current tensions. The work would not have existed without the pandemic; it is fed by the graphic visualization of statistical information from the northernmost regions of Chile during the peak of the public health crisis. At the same time, it gives an account of the artist’s findings during her trips exploring the desert and nitrate fields. In both pieces that comprise this work –video and graphic– we find ruptures of overlapping artificial layers contrasting with the sky.

Elements gathered during her residency fuse with audiovisual takes and images from the work of software engineer Juan Olivares. From Seattle, along with the help of researcher Jorge Pérez from the University of Chile, Olivares produced graphics about the correlation between quarantine measures taken by the authorities in different towns and the numbers of new cases of COVID-19 during those same periods. The results were published on Twitter, generating a great deal of interest among Chilean media outlets.

Aliro Bolados is a retired gynecologist from the public health service and an academic from the University of Antofagasta with more than five decades working as a professional, and is also the former director of the Regional Hospital and expresident of the Antofagasta School of Medicine. His wife, the artist Flor Venegas, has hosted the only commercial art gallery in the entire north of Chile for more than 30 years. The space, which smells of old oil paints, is covered by the image of a surgeon´s apron.

Flor and Aliro´s Image Gallery became part of the exhibition circuit museum without museum in 2019 with the show Personal (Nothing Lives Forever) by Francis Naranjo and Carmen Caballero, an exhibition based on medical themes.

It is strange that in 2020 this space should yet again house a project that focuses on human health from an existential perspective. The body’s vulnerability on an 98