Mooring by Eric Conrad

All the elements are gathered in the center of the city. On one side, the library rests behind its classic facade of gray and solemn tones. The Plaza Colón, in front, describes a square polygon where monuments, water fountains, lawns, and tall palm trees are spread out. Passers-by move around its perimeter, sit down to rest from the sun, take refuge under some shade, and approach civilly. The scene confirms the civic form of a central point of the city arranged for the encounter in the public space. The one that adds up all the individualities until combining them in a collective phenomenon of diverse possibilities, precisely where we become citizens, where we share with those we do not know, where others are the measure of my freedom. Approaching the work of the American artist Eric Conrad implies going out from inside the Regional Library of Antofagasta. In fact, it is like a communicating vessel between what is inside the building –which is also for public use– and the reality of the city outside.

Of course, the connection between the public and the private goes through intimacy, that is, that fragile area where we cannot expose ourselves. Our intimacy must be protected because the way we understand it escapes the security of the defined structures: inside we are a shapeless reality, we are like that pile of cloths that hang while we try to order the life that surrounds us. A stereotypical expression of intimate life is, precisely, the so-called intimate garments. From the front of the library hang wide underpants like a flag of intimate identity exposed to the sight and patience of passers-by who, depending on the case, may laugh or frown. Because we do not know if the purpose is only playful. We do not know either if it is a declaration of a change of purpose of the building that, from all the solemn seriousness it shows in its facade, appears now ridiculed, invaded by an inappropriate garment to display. Would we be able to believe that, perhaps, within the relativization of the importance of the public through an exhibition like this, we can begin to think differently in its sense? Then, it is not necessary to define it as a space but as a way of relationship where what we expose becomes something shared. And if it is an amalgam of sticks and canvases, suddenly we must know that this intimate confusion is also public. Let’s add that the installation was created thanks to the call for a workshop in which students from the city participated. Necessarily, in this exercise of approximation, of contact through the canvases and the sticks that they had to arrange, a dialog with the artist began, an elaboration of their doubts until they reached this fragile, laughable, even confusing proposal.

The exhibition is called Mooring, which in English is equivalent to a berth where ships can moor. The allusion to a space that moors the public and the personal is, seen with due distance, the space where the biennial itself wants to settle, whose works are spread around the city in an effort to open other dialogs, other distances. What Conrad achieves, then, is to bring what is personal out into the street, breaking the rigid mold of the culturizing institution from a proposal of reading without complexes. As the artist himself pointed out in an interview, “for me that was the interesting contradiction between such a public space and something that is intimate and that really refers to vulnerability.”