aerial view of La Capilla Azul | |
HOLIDAY GREETINGS FROM
LA CAPILLA AZUL
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Hello Dan,
Thank you for taking a look at December’s newsletter for La Capilla Azul, an
independent community-based exhibition space in the Chilote archipelago of southern Chile. We’re a modestly scaled venue, located in a rural area that’s remote from the art world’s centers, so we understand that it’s on us to let you know what we’re doing, since it’s likely, alas, that only a small percentage of you reading these words will have the chance to visit us in person. However, since we frequently talk about La Capilla Azul as a thought experiment that’s been transformed into concrete action, it’s also true that we develop our programs with our faraway public in mind nearly as much as our neighbors
in Queilen. For that reason, we want to make it easy for you to not feel the need to join us in person in order to appreciate what we’re doing at Capilla Azul, and why it matters.
In this issue, we take you from the launch party for a Capilla-produced vinyl recording in Brooklyn to a visit by co-curator Ramón Castillo to the studio of Silvia Rivera in Castro. We’re also sharing our first Letter from Contuy, written by our co-founder Pablo Carvacho, in which he articulates the meeting-point between the exhibitions we present at Capilla Azul, and the ongoing educational programs that Comarca Contuy organizes in Queilen, in collaboration with the Universidad Finis Terrae.
Thank you for reading and Happy Holidays,
Dan Cameron
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VID VIDA VIDAJENA IN WILLIAMSBURG | | |
Iván Navarro speaking about Vid Vida Vidajena at Miriam, November 14. Photo by Thelma Garcia | |
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The year 2024 kicked off for us with a performance-based sound installation that transformed Capilla Azul for three months into a space for listening, rather than looking. On January 13 and 14, an intimate group of friends and neighbors crowded inside the chapel to experience the two-part premiere of Vid Vida Vidajena, a work of sound poetry composed by Courtney Smith and Iván Navarro (as Konantü), and performed by musician Enrique Millán with eight volunteer readers and an audio team on hand to record both events live, and remix them for the installation. Ten months later to the day, those performances got a second life before a full house at the artist-run gallery Miriam in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as part of an opening that doubled as the release party for the vinyl recording of Vid Vida Vidajena on Navarro’s label Hueso Records. The event also featured a short presentation by me about La Capilla Azul, which was warmly received.
For us, the opening at Miriam helps demonstrate that the worlds of rural Chiloé and New York City are not so far apart, in terms of creative individuals making the best possible use of art’s capacity to bring people together, and reinforce a sense of community. Nowadays, it seems everyone has a renewed interest in the topic of how art can help us imagine a better way of being in the world.
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Vid Vida Vidajena LP front and back
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NATURE’S WAY: TWO EXHIBITIONS | | |
Sebastián Preece, Flipping Time | |
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The big unanticipated surprise of 2024 had to be the string of violent storms in April that uprooted countless trees throughout Chiloé a month before the exhibition Saving Time opened, while scattering the components of Sebastián Preece’s carefully planned site-specific installation, parts of which were permanently lost. Without hesitating, Preece returned to Contuy, salvaged everything he could and decided to completely reconceive of his project for the newly ravaged environment. Unsurprisingly, the final version made maximum use of the roots and craters left by nature’s upheaval, and rather than Saving Time, Preece’s updated title was Flipping Time.
The same swath of destruction turned out to be a critical jumping-off point for Voluspa Jarpa’s initial research for her current collaborative project with Raquel Aquilar. On a visit shortly after the storms, the artist was taken aback at the immense scale of the change in the landscape, with the result that her counterpart to Raquel Aguilar’s three- meter forest woman was created from the uprooted trunk and roots of a canelo tree, which is sacred to Mapuche tradition. Suspended from the chapel’s roof in sections, the largest chunk is held aloft through the assistance of hundreds of gold filaments that are strung between the tree, the ceiling, and the pillars.
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Voluspa Jarpa, Somos Raices/We Are Roots — now on view | |
ABSENCES/AUSENCIAS OPENS
JANUARY 18
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Osvaldo Güineo Obando, works in progress | |
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Capilla Azul is very excited to be opening 2025 with the exhibition Absences/Ausencias, featuring new work produced for the occasion by Osvaldo Güineo and Alfredo Jaar. While at first glance the two artists’ respective approaches to making art could not seem more different — a Chilote textile artist and a NYC-based conceptual artist — by working in dialogue with each other, their respective practices started to overlap within the scope of their mutual exploration of the building’s separation from its own past, both as architecture (Jaar) and as iconography (Güineo). Both men were invited by the curators to visit Contuy earlier this year for their first meeting, initiating a conversation that led to the decision to make a joint project about what becomes lost when a local house of worship metamorphosis into a gallery for aesthetic contemplation. Working both inside and outside the building to share their works with the public, Jaar and Güineo probe the Capilla’s history in a way that invites historical and philosophical
reflection on the role culture plays in the transformation of spaces for one form of ritual into spaces for another form of ritual.
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STUDIO VISIT: SILVIA RIVERA | | | |
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Since 2015, Silvia Rivera has been the Chilote artist we visited most frequently in her Castro home, where we pour through the works in her improvised personal art gallery, where the mastery with which she creates forms and communicates through color can be seen with heightened clarity. Silvia paints from her own personal memories, or those of neighbors and friends who describe to her what Castro was like before: the port and fishing boats, fish and mussels being sold in the port, the sawmill, the train and station, families sitting around the fogón, and daily life unfolding alongside the mythological
entities that populate Chilote culture.
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Her imagination brings Silvia’s stories together and dislocates them, infusing them with moods and dreams of the future, as when she paints the shellfish gatherers at the moment when they stop collecting mussels and start singing over the water, accompanied by strings, accordion and hand-claps. Each of her pictures becomes a window looking towards real and imaginary worlds that in her treatment coexist naturally. We don’t need to label them as either memory or premonition, because Silvia’s paintings create their separate reality based fully on her subjectivity.
Following her September 2023 exhibition at Capilla Azul, Silvia Rivera’s work has begun to be more broadly recognized, and in May 2025 she will have her first solo exhibition outside of Chiloé, at the Monte Carmelo Cultural Center in Santiago. We wish her great luck in this next phase of her career, knowing that her originality has no limits, which is why we cannot resist the temptation to visit her whenever we can, and invite her back to Capilla Azul.
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Our Education through Art program is a deeply human initiative that seeks to transform the educational experiences of students enrolled in the rural schools of Estero Paildad, in the comuna of Queilen. This project arises from a joint effort between the Universidad Finis Terrae, through its Faculty of Arts, and the Corporación Sociocultural Comarca Contuy, with the aim of bringing innovative artistic practices to school contexts in connection with their cultural and natural environment. University teachers and students join this experience, traveling from Santiago to share their knowledge and learn from local knowledge, in an exchange of learning where each voice is heard and valued. | |
Escuela de Contuy students at Education Through Art workshop | |
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At the heart of this initiative is the desire to offer children from the schools of Apeche, Contuy and Paildad new ways of learning and relating to the world around them. Through creative and collaborative workshops, students not only experience art as a tool for personal expression, but also as a bridge to understanding their identity and the territory they inhabit. Collaborative work with school teams and the community is one of the strengths of the program. The workshops, which include interdisciplinary activities in visual and sound art and creative practices, are developed in close dialogue with the teachers, who also receive tools to permanently integrate art into the school curriculum. The community is deeply involved, especially parents, who participate in workshops to strengthen ties with the school and foster a sense of cultural belonging.
A vital component of this program is the close and direct connection with La Capilla Azul, where students also exhibit their works. These visits, accompanied by a mediator, are moments of pride and reflection, where girls and boys see their creativity come to life in a space that values their work and their stories. This program not only impacts students and teachers, but also strengthens the social fabric of the communities involved. More than teaching art, Education through Art invites us all to dream, while exploring and building together a path where learning becomes a deeply meaningful, transformative experience.
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Contuy students at Capilla Azul | | |
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In September, Capilla Azul was honored to receive Alejandra Villasmil, editor and publisher of the Chilean art publication Artishock, and as a result of that visit a lengthy feature article about our programs since the Capilla’s inception was just published. Although scattered news reports announced our arrival when we opened last year, this is the first time a critical lens has been applied to our activities, and from the positive outcome it’s safe to say our intentions were not misunderstood. | |
CAPILLA AZUL IS A US-BASED 501c3 PUBLIC CHARITY — WHY THAT MATTERS | |
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From its inception, La Capilla Azul has been conceived as a community-oriented exhibition space dedicated to increasing the visibility of artists and artisans in Queilen and elsewhere in Chiloé, and to supporting visual art education in the primary school system. In other words, we have the DNA of a public charity, and because much of our administrative work is handled out of New York, last month it all became official: donations to Capilla Azul are tax-deductible within the limits of the US tax code.
What this means for our future is that we can now begin to apply for foundation and corporate support, as well as a higher level of contributions from individuals. This status also heightens our viability as a de facto cultural exchange between Chile and the U.S, since our by-laws are interchangeable with those of our host organization, Comarca Contuy, which in turn conform perfectly with the requirements of the U.S. Treasury for educational and cultural charitable organizations. Of course, we’ll continue to depend heavily on crowdfunding for the lion’s share of our expenses, but it’s vital that we now have different fundraising options we can explore.
Thank you in advance for any support you can provide to Capilla Azul before the end of 2024, as well as in early 2025, at a time when we’ll be striving to make our communities places of of hope, sharing and artistic creativity for all.
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LA CAPILLA AZUL:
Serving a rural community in southern Chile
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Capilla Azul is part of Comarca Contuy, Queilen, Chiloé, Region Los Lagos, Chile | | | | |
