Jauría
2016|2023
The work consists of a video recording, two photographic pieces, and a textile installation produced between 2016 and 2023 through a series of montages in Chile and abroad. This audiovisual composition was created in 2016 and the photographic pieces were printed on 260 g of pearl lustre photo paper in the size of 80 x 60 cm in single copies in 2023, together with the textile installation made of stretch velvet with total variable dimensions of 8 x 7 x 4 m. The video operates as an audiovisual poem in which dialectical statements between struggle, success, chance, concealment and self-deception, are simultaneously told and contradicted. The writings by Chinesse General Sun-Tzu (The Art of War, 5th c. BC) account how to fight against the enemy without confrontation, creating deep fear to win without going to battle.
In the midst of today’s crisis and constant threat of collapse, we are protected by the defense of a set of intimate/social strategies of concealment and deceit. Unconscious and clumsy survival is no more than a fight, often settled in a cunning self-boycott. From this point of uncertainty and suspicion, Jauría offers a series of pieces that focus on control, desire, and failure; a metaphor of the savage composition that obscures reality with different systems of consumption and self-automation. It’s also the scene of a quest and a hard struggle for the training of one’s undomesticated ego: the inner animal that’s eager for victory.
Jauría serves as a kind of poetry book in different media, granting dialectical meanings in which success, chance, betrayal, fear, and courage are said and contradicted at the same time. The work invites to an experience that hides affections which overflow it. Art itself becomes an instrument capable of tracing a tangent towards the common. The external and internal struggle will continue endlessly until the least considered tactic is displayed, as Sun Tzu stated: “All warfare is based on deception, and the supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”
The project has been exhibited in 2016 at Galería AK 35 [Santiago, Chile], its extension at the Judas Galería and Worm Gallery [Valparaíso, Chile], in 2017 at the Neon Heather Gallery [Findlay Oh, USA] and in a last version in 2023, at the Plomo Gallery [Mexico City, Mexico].