Capilla Azul, side view (photo by Helena Fitzek)

Hello Dan,

Thanks for having a look at our latest newsletter, which coincides with our second anniversary exhibition, opening at La Capilla Azul on May 17. It's hard to believe that only two years ago we invited friends, family and neighbors to help us open a small, independent, community-based exhibition space in the middle of the country, off a dirt road (it’s since been paved) about halfway between Chonchi and Queilen. We had no way of knowing how many people would make the trip, but it turned out to be a beautiful Saturday afternoon, and a dynamic cross-section of people were apparently intrigued enough by our mission to promote visual creativity within the Chiloé archipelago that they came in from Castro, Ancud and Quellon, but also from Puerto Montt and Puerto Varas, with even a handful coming all way from Santiago.

We think that more than 120 persons appeared that day, jubilantly celebrating both the handsome restoration of what had once been the local Catholic church, as well as the exquisite works by Guillermo Grez and Clara Yañez on view. At one point in the proceedings, it dawned on us that we hadn’t come up with a method to get an accurate head count at the opening, when most people would see the exhibition, and it was far too late to do anything about it that day. From that unforeseen logistical gap was born the raffle that kicks off every public opening at Capilla Azul.

Gianfranco Foschino, still from Home, 2010, video installation

Our May exhibition, Second Nature, features a brand-new two-minute animation with accompanying drawings by Estéban Pérez (Puerto Varas), presented alongside two early videos by Gianfranco Foschino (Santiago). Although neither is Chilote in the strict sense of the word, each artist possesses a lifelong attachment to Chiloé through family and personal history, and both credit the archipelago for playing a key role in their individual choices to work with the natural environment as their overall subject.

Gianfranco Foschino, still from La Fenêtre, 2011, video installation, and Le Fenêtre installed at Zona MACO, CDMX

In Foschino’s case, the impulse to share with us a fixed-camera slice of daily life in the country is framed by the unflinching gaze of an outsider passing through, someone who by definition is unable to discern the finer points of the scene before him, and for that reason focuses on peripheral details. Figures seen through semi-opaque fabric appear and disappear from a patched window (Le Fenêtre, 2011), chickens peck through dirt in search of food (Home, 2010). Introducing a languid visual rhythm that remains consistent in each silent piece. Foschino offers a peek into a life that, however objectively humdrum or workaday, is totally unknowable to anyone who isn’t physically there to share it. This suggests that our curiosity regarding the who and where of what we’re watching is what marks us as perpetual outsiders, while making an implicit case for the irresistible human urge towards voyeurism.

Above left: Esteban Perez, fondo salicornia. Above right: Esteban Perez, fundaciones primer plano. Below: Esteban Perez, styleframe liquen color 2.

For the past two years, Esteban Perez has been working on a new hand-drawn animation, Pause of Eternity, which incorporates hundreds of individually drawn frames to explore the perceptual and environmental richness of Chiloé. This work will have its first public showing at Capilla Azul next month, making Second Nature the first of our curatorial projects centered on the moving image. Because of its analogical nature, Pérez’s working process requires the artist to individually paint more than 1,200 drawings to make a film that lasts only two and a half minutes, but Perez doesn’t embrace the distorted reality of hand animation as a simple test of his endurance. For him it is a methodology for perceiving and representing nature as a force of constant, if often imperceptible, change.

In this newsletter you’ll also find a text by Pablo Carvacho, President of the Corporation Sciocultural de Comarca Conuy, that explains how the Comarca’s residencies currently function, and how we plan to expand them in the future. Ramón Castillo has also contributed a text in this issue about visiting the studio of Esteban Perez in Puerto Varas, which is adjacent to Chiloé. Please enjoy!

- Dan Cameron

The artist residencies in Comarca Contuy seek to offer an experience that transcends individual creation, allowing artists to immerse themselves in the daily life of the archipelago, its people, its crafts, its landscape, and its memory. Rather than emphasizing the production of work, it's about spending time in a place where history and nature are inseparable, where the morning mist blends with birdsong and the slow rhythm of the tide dictates the time of day. We want artists to come to Comarca Contuy as part of an extended dialogue with those who inhabit this territory.

Each residency is a bridge between the visitor and the community, a space for exchange, listening, and mutual learning. Through art, we also seek to strengthen the relationship with the Chilote seascape, its ways of living, its stories, and its knowledge.

Each residency is different. There is no fixed timeframe because we understand that creation requires its own rhythm. The minimum stay is two weeks, but it can be extended depending on the project and the conditions. Before an artist or collective arrives in Comarca Contuy, we take care to prepare their residency in terms of logistics, but more importantly the human encounters that will make their experience unique.

We take the time to identify the people and communities who can enrich the creative process: a tejuelero who knows the secrets of Chilote wood, a traditional cooking teacher who knows which wild herbs women gather in the fields, a fisherman who has spent his life reading the behavior of the sea. They are the ones who bring to the residency something that no book or museum can offer: the living experience of the territory.

During their residency, the artist lives in Comarca Contuy, which provides them with everything they need for their stay: accommodations in a peaceful and comfortable setting; food based on local products and the generosity of a shared kitchen; mobilization within the area so the artist can experience different spaces and communities; and production support so their work can be developed in the field. Part of the spirit of the residency is to include opportunities for exchange with the community. This can take many forms: a workshop in a rural school, conversations with neighbors, an open dialogue to share the creative process. Each artist defines how they wish to connect with the environment, and we support this exploration, respecting their own language and process.

There is no fixed expectation about how a residency should end. We do not expect artists to leave with a finished work or a concrete result, since for us, the most important thing is what remains in the memory and the relationships that are built. If the artist wishes to share their experience, we can facilitate an exhibition, an open dialogue with the community, or some other format. The important thing is that the residency leaves a significant mark on both those who experienced it and those who were part of it.

Residencies are open to artists and collectives from different disciplines who wish to experience a creative process in dialogue with the land and its people.

Residencies in Comarca Contuy offer an opportunity to look at the world from another perspective, to feel the depth of rural life and the warmth of a community that opens its doors to visitors. Here, art is intertwined with life, with the sound of water lapping the shore, with hands shaping wood, and with stories passed down from generation to generation. It is a space to create from the human roots that we share with the rest of nature.

-Pablo Carvacho

Dan Cameron, Esteban Perez, P. Varas, 2022 (Photo by Ramon Castillo)

Draftsman and artist Estéban Pérez spends most of his time by himself, working in his home studio in Puerto Varas, Chile. We’ve been visiting him since 2022, and witnessed the exponential increase in drawings that threaten to leave the studio and invade the entire house. Despite appearances, however, everything is under control when the creative process is ongoing, although stacks of hundreds of watercolors and drawings encroach from all sides of the small room as he labors to finalize a scene. 

It’s been impressive to watch as Estéban's tables and shelves fill with finished watercolors and drawings. Through them, we can study the visual processes of organic life and inorganic matter, of light and shadows that advance and retreat to the rhythm of his charcoal pencil or India ink. His studio's overflow depends on self-commissions, as well as exhibitions in Santiago or outside Chile that fill his schedule, including animation festivals in Argentina or Europe. Once the number of drawings he can produce per hour has been established, he’s able to slowly achieve this goal through methodical obsession, and his specific talent as an artist to develop visually complex structures in such a small physical space. His studio is away from the city center, in a nondescript neighborhood that could easily be found in any city in Chile. This allows him to be within the territory, while remaining outside the hustle and bustle of the tourists who fill the streets and beaches of Puerto Varas each summer.

From a very young age, drawing was Estéban’s passion as well as a primary means of communication, allowing him to make visible with his hands what he saw, imagined and dreamed. As a youth he attended art workshops and later studied Visual Arts in Valdivia and Santiago. What he drew during his university years became noticeably linked to memories from his childhood in the South, with his parents, grandparents, and friends. These memories frequently took the form of Chiloté myths that appeared and disappeared depending on the moment and the weather. In a sense, his entire life as a young artist, from Puerto Montt to Santiago, Valdivia, and back to Chiloé, has been a visual and experiential itinerary that emerges in the form of a continuous cycle of drawing.

Estéban Pérez's studio

Esteban Pérez’s process is to observe, draw, and then scan. After scanning each of hundreds of individual watercolors and drawing, the accumulated drawings dispersed around his studio are transferred to the computer's hard drive to later transform them into film sequences that capture the movement of trees and birds, of clouds in the midst of a storm, the reflection of a stump in the water, a solitary swan, a steady drip. Experiencing life as one frame after another, with a strict geometry of twelve drawings per second, he makes films in an artisanal way. Those hundreds of drawings, thoughtfully made over a long stretch of time, become visually consumed on a screen in very few minutes. In Capilla Azul, we will see the drawings as part of the process, but mostly the resulting animation: hundreds of drawings of Chilote life in movement, in a pause of eternity.

-Ramón Castillo

We are deeply proud to share the news that Castro native Silvia Rivera, whose renderings of a long-ago Chiloé in both social and mythological terms, graced our walls in the second exhibition at Capilla Azul (2023), will open an exhibition of her newest paintings at Centro Cultural Monte Carmelo on May 24. The exhibition, organized by our own Ramón Castillo, marks Silvia’s public debut in Santiago, and we look forward to seeing many new and longtime friends and admirers there.

Front door of Capilla Azul (photo by Helena Fitzek)

Photo by Helena Fitzek

Capilla Azul is part of Comarca Contuy, Queilen, Chiloé, Region Los Lagos, Chile