Santiago Reyes Villaveces, Matteo Olivero Prize

With his project Harp, Colombian artist Santiago Reyes Villaveces has won the 41st edition of the Matteo Olivero Prize, organized by the city of Saluzzo, Italy, and the Fondazione Amleto Bertoni with the aim of promoting the territory through art. The international jury that decided unanimously in favor of Reyes' project was composed of Chrissie Iles, Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Nicola Ricciardi, Artistic Director at OGR, Turin; Arturo Demaria, Counselor at Fondazione Amleto Bertoni; Roberto Giordana, deputy manager at Cassa di Risparmio di Cuneo; and Stefano Raimondi, curator of the Prize. The winner was selected from among 41 international participants. For this edition, artists were invited to participate by a group of international advisors, including curators and directors of institutions. Santiago Reyes Villaveces was invited by Eugenio Viola (Curator at MAMBO, Bogotá). The theme for the 41st edition of the Prize was Origin, intended as an initial element or event, the fundamental cause, the matrix. Santiago Reyes Villaveces used this theme to reinterpret the Sacristy of the old Jesuit church of Sant'Ignazio (1725), in Saluzzo, transforming its space into a large echo chamber. Harp consists in the deconstruction, by means of an elliptical structure with two focal points, of a traditional harp from Tópaga, Boyacá, installed between the sacristy's open drawers, windows, and physical structure. The work is completed by the performance of this new instrument, not by direct contact but through the vibrations produced by the voices of a local choir. To create it, the artist worked in collaboration with composer Nicolás Jaramillo and musicologist Daniel Vélez. Harp will be on exhibit in the sacristy—which now serves as an archive space for the city government palace—through September, 2019, as part of "START/storia e arte a Saluzzo", a festival devoted to art in all its forms in Saluzzo. This exhibition does not stop at the deconstruction of the instrument; it creates a polyarchic harp, a flow of historical and architectural frequencies intended to destabilize the history of the "Origin." Reyes refers back to the evangelizing role of music, specifically the use of the harp by the Jesuits during the expansion of the Nuevo Reino de Granada, around 1725. With this work, Reyes brings the harp back home (and with it, the entire charge of Europe's cultural conquest of the Americas). But he brings it back dismantled, desecrated.