The Complex, Exhibition by Claudia del Fierro

The exhibition titled "The Complex," curated by Santiago Rueda, has just been inaugurated at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Bogota. The video-installation project by Chilean artist Claudia del Fierro was created in Neltume, in the south of Chile, a town where a political story unfolded in recent decades. Neltume is a small town in the Paguipulli commune where, during the end of the 1970s, dozens of left-wing activists arrived to work at the Complejo Maderero de Panguipulli, in a land expropriated by the government and given to the workers to build a collectively operated project that was to be the most important and productive in the south of Chile. After the military coup of 1973, the workers clashed with the police and the military, and continued resisting for months up in the mountains, hoping to recover their land at some point. But the Complejo Maderero closed, the land was returned to their former owners and many activists were jailed, exiled or murdered. Neltume became a territory under siege. There are still remnants in the place of tools, makeshift constructions—in which to live and fight—and excavations in the woods. Beginning in a museum founded by the community to reclaim their history, Claudia del Fierro's narrative reveals the mechanisms of memory and shares a story of resistance. The project was based on research that the artist used in the video as the central tool. With it she constructs a narrative that borders on a documentary exercise. The narrative offered through video projections and archival materials is weaved with objects, images and testimonies.