Spectres is a project that I developed between 2017 and 2021. All the works that integrate poetry and words in the piece belong to it. Spectres was born during a residency at Casa de Velázquez thanks to the Casa de Velázquez Specific Aid Grant. During the residency, I revisit the poetry of Ernestina Champourcin, poet of the Generation of ‘27, to develop an artistic production that plays with the limits of poetry, image and matter.

I used the book Canto Inútil as a reference to work on her poems and extract from them concepts and verses that evoke a series of “spectres”, evocative words that touch affections; words that reverberate in the memory. The aim was to make bodily interventions based on the selected text, to be photographically registered and then worked on in book format.

The methodology was a process of translation. There is a constant reflection on how to transfer the poetic word to a body? A body to an image? And an image to a material?

The residency at Casa de Velázquez was mainly focused on the development of an artists' book: Dialogues of a Dark Night. The book has two parts and is a permanent dialogue between image and poetic text. Inside there are intervened poems, texts embroidered with human hair on gauze silk, photographs printed on photographic paper and photographs transferred to wild silk. In this way, the book is a combination of poetry, image and textures. Many of the worked images also appeal to texture as if it were visual texture. The result is “tactile poetry”. The textile material, the visual texture, the word, all write, all speak.

In addition to the book, other pieces emerged. Among them Dialogues, an installation of 8 very thin and translucent natural silk shawls. Each shawl shows a frontal framed portrait with a piece of paper in its mouth with a different concept written on it: stillness, pause, deceit, boredom, silence, loneliness, inertia and falsehood. The portraits talk to each other, protest, argue, in an internal emotional dialogue. For me, this dialogue is deeply intimate. Consequently, the support had to have the same intimacy. This led me to silk. Silk is a material with a soft, delicate, fragile and docile visual texture. Silk turns the photograph into an intimate and close object. That same intimacy had to be present in the setup and was resolved with delicate points of light.

There is also an installation called Spectres which presents 5 elongated banners with an image at the bottom. The images are interventions on the body. The last banner carries only one text: “The wait is closed”. Spectres is also the title of a photographic series that shows a body deformation induced by a string. These photographs show the image of internal pain and suffering.

Finally, the residency was completed with a publication also entitled Spectres. This publication is an artist's book that mixes photography, scanography, poetry, dreams, texts by Alejandra Pizarnik and Ernestina Champourcin, among others.

Both the publication of Spectres and part of the artworks produced during the residency were financed by a FONDART grant from the Chilean Government.

After the residency, during the following years, I continued working with the theme of poetry and text integrated into the piece of art and investigating how to transmit these emotions through portraiture.

An example of this is Diaries, a piece created during the last pandemic year. From the first of January 2021 I started to photograph myself every day. The exercise of self-portrait allows for a confrontation with oneself. It is a time of observation. It is a moment of stillness in which to understand what is happening. In this detention I seek to unravel that which is different. The transformation is not only physical, but begins in the gut and ends in the internal and external perception. I wanted to record those ups and downs of everyday life that ultimately change me and make myself, not something immovable, but a fluctuation in time and space.

From another point of view, Circumstances addresses the issue of internal change by drawing on ancient Latin American cultures of the Andes that held that a person's wisdom and skills were preserved after death in the hair. These same cultures, during times of war, preserved the head of the enemy so that the woman could weave clothing with his hair to transfer that knowledge and skills to the family. All the stories are preserved in the hair. The installation shows a series of 4 photographs of my cut hair. The video performance shows the action of burning the hair, as an act of breaking with the past: not all stories are beautiful. Burning the memory is a reasonable way to get rid of its weight.

The reference to hair and its power is very present in the Spectre project. In different pieces I use hair as a material for embroidery and sewing. A clear example of this is Textus, where strips of silk with transferred texts are sewn together with human hair. Textus is a play on words. In Latin, the word textus was used to mean fabric and text. A fabric is the result of the action of joining and interweaving threads, in the same way, a text is the result of the action of joining and interweaving sounds or words. Text as discourse is a metaphor for weaving. Textus elaborates from autobiography textile stories composed of silk, poetry and hair. These stories construct objects that in turn form part of an installation. The piece is conceived from the sense of ‘transference’ given to textiles in the pre-Columbian Andean cosmovision. This ritual of transferring the body to the textile is understood as a poetic act through the inclusion of the hair in the warp. As an analogy, I use this same concept of transference in my production. Through the use of my hair as thread, I transfer a part of my body to the textile. This transference enhances the words used in the piece. The words used belong to my personal experience, the use of hair to join the words together constructs a text that is me and a me that becomes text. The action of sewing silk with hair is the fundamental process of production. The process is a ritual, it is a repetitive act of threading, threading the needle up and down, knotting and unknotting. This process is conceived more as a joining of two elements than as healing. Visually, the hair intertwines with the fabric and spreads across it, as if to restore the wound of separation.