The Arts
April 2021
Altered Views. Voluspa Jarpa
by Voluspa Jarpa, Agustín Pérez Rubio, Sabine Breitwieser, Charles Esche, Andrea Giunta, Alberto Mayol, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Adriana Valdés
Altered Views. Voluspa Jarpa is the publication of the Chilean Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale of Art, presented by Voluspa Jarpa and curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio. The project originates in a question the artist seeks to answer: how is the modernist, Eurocentric and colonial gaze configured? The gaze that later expands from Europe to the U.S. and constructs a symbolic contempt that is imposed as political, cultural and economic subjugation in non-hegemonic regions?Altered Views is an unprecedented research project that works as a cross-reference between various instances of European history from the 17th to the 20th Century, full of social manifestations, ethnographic searches and dominant powers, attempting to restore the conquered awe of the coloniser. The work seeks to rescue concepts coined from a Eurocentric perspective that shed light on the violence with which the world is reduced to an expansionist, developmentalist and hegemonic model. Altered Views is an invitation to reflect on issues that prevail and are still visible in our contemporary society. The volume contains a general text from the Chilean pavilion´s curator and editor of this book, Agustín Pérez Rubio explaining each part of the project; along with six different texts by Charles Esche, Sabine Breitwieser, Andrea Giunta, Adriana Valdés, Alberto Mayol and Cuauhtémoc Medina. These texts talk about the historical and contemporary repercussions of the hegemonic model.
