artnexus #89

For some contemporary artists, working with archives is a key source of raw materials. Their exploration of archives follows different criteria from those of art historians who also use documentary legacies, but they do share the same interest in rendering their analysis problematic. Voluspa Jarpa (Rancagua, Chile, 1971) began working with declassified archives in the 1990s, making documentary studies that allow her to rethink Chilean history, explore its traumas, and propose alternative gazes to the hidden stories. That process resulted in works like Biblioteca de la No-historia, which expanded her explorations to the Southern Cone region and its geopolitical particulars. Two situations, which the artist sets in parallel, operate in her reading of memory: on the one hand, a particular historical discourse; on the other, the way in which subjectivity is expressed. To quote Jarpa, the two narrative systems in operation are “the historical narrative as a convention of public discourse about collective traumatic events, and the discourse that funds the subjective through the ‘disease’ that is at the point of origin of psychoanalysis: hysteria. On that basis, my investigation focuses on generating an interweaving of hysteria and history, their languages, mechanisms, and images that make it possible for me to render them visible”. * In her installations, large paintings, and sculptural objects, those archives appear as scratched, intervened images, with particular visual characteristics. The fragmented texts and the erasures leave abstract black lines that, rather than fostering knowledge, question the notion of the archive as a source of knowledge. Jarpa incorporates into her works a variety of techniques, for example silk-screening or photograph, revealing that along with the rigorous theoretical investigation she puts forward there is a thoughtful analysis of the concept of representation. The work on our cover, Minimal Secret, uses 42 tar coated cardboard sheets to reproduce several documents declassified by the CIA between 1998 and 2000, about events in Chile. The intention is to have us think about the need for a new historical reading of these events. 
IVONNE PINI

*arte-sur, 2013.