Exterior view of current exhibition, Somos Raices (We Are Roots)

Hello Dan,

Welcome to the second newsletter for La Capilla Azul, a community-based independent exhibition space located in Contuy, which is in the rural township of Queílen, at the southeastern end of Gran Isla de Chiloé, in the Los Lagos region of Patagonian Chile. Open to the public since May 2023, Capilla Azul’s primary focus is on developing collaborative projects that bring together Chiloé’s artists and craftspeople with their counterparts from other places. La Capilla’s programs are developed with our Contuy neighbors in mind as our primary audience.

This month's newsletter covers our current exhibition, Somos Raices (We Are Roots), present new work by Raquel Aquilar and Voluspa Jarpa, along with more of the story behind how and why I decided to co-found an exhibition space in rural Chiloé. There’s also an account written by my partner and fellow curator, Ramón Castillo, of a recent studio visit with Osvaldo Guineo Obando, on the island of Cailin.

Thank you for reading and Happy Holidays,

Dan Cameron

Chiloé has been on my mind ever since my very first trip to Chile, a three-week, Lonely Planet-tested sojourn back in 1991. I didn’t visit Chiloé then — I already had the Atacama Desert, Torres del Paine and Easter Island on my over-crammed agenda —, but back in Santiago the esteemed artist Eugenio Dittborn specifically recommended that I go to Chiloé someday to organize an exhibition, a suggestion that stuck with me long after I’d returned home. I went back to Chile several more times in the intervening years, but never to Chiloé, until some 24 years later, when I made my first visit, chaperoned by artist and friend Gianfranco Foschino. Our week-long excursion was relatively short, but enabled me to grasp some of the implications of Chiloé as a location with a deep and rich cultural profile of its own. I kept thinking about the half-dozen studios we visited. I’d expected to see artists whose work could be shown alongside a hypothetical list of non-Chilote artists in a future exhibition, and I did, but what stayed with me as vividly as the work itself was the precarious nature of making art and other things of beauty in remote, rural locations.

Palafito-style cabins at Comarca Contuy

La Capilla Azul, distant and aerial views.

It only took a few days to fall completely under the spell of Chiloé, and future trips soon followed. On the second or third visit, we made a short lunchtime stop at Comarca Contuy, a rural lodge that doubled as a space that is especially receptive to artists. The Comarca’s proprietors, Marcela Iturrieta and Pablo Carvacho, had escaped life in the capital several years before, throwing themselves heart and soul into developing a type of small-scale rural tourism that emphasized residencies by artists, writers, and occasional university groups or regional meetings on the topic of culture. They invited artists to take part in the classroom visual arts programs they developed for the three local rural schools, the largest of which had fewer than forty students. They’d even organized an international photography festival, housing their guests in the four palafito cabañas they had built in a grove of tress overlooking the tidal river below. 

“You’ll know you’ve arrived when you see the blue chapel.” I didn’t suspect it at the time, but because the rustic sign for Comarca Contuy wasn’t always easy to see from the road, our hosts generally used the small 19th century wooden church near the main road as a visual marker for first-time visitors. They’d purchased it years before to save it from being dismantled and used for firewood, and on my fifth or sixth trip to Chiloé in 2022, by now collaborating with friend and curator Ramón Castillo, we’d all become good enough friends that Pablo shared his plan to transform the chapel into an exhibition space. It only took an instant to realize that what we’d been looking for had been right in front of us all along, and an agreement to open La Capilla Azul as soon as possible were made the same day.

WE ARE ROOTS/SOMOS RAICES:

On view through January 4

At the beginning of this year, Capilla Azul reached out separately to the Quellón-based artisan Raquel Aguilar and the Santiago-based contemporary artist Voluspa Jarpa, to see if they were interested in collaborating on an exhibition, even though they hadn’t met, and weren't familiar with each other’s work. Fortunately, their first meeting soon became an extended conversation, the result of which is the exhibition currently on view: We Are Roots/Somos Raices.

Both artists produced new works for the occasion, and their creations face each other across the span of the former chapel like contrasting halves in a dialectical exchange. For Jarpa, the investigation began with her discovery of the roots of a canelo tree, ripped out of the ground in a recent storm. Cut into partial lengths, the exposed network of the tree’s base and earthy tangle of roots become transformed into a celestial myth of itself, easing itself earthward like a slow-motion comet from the chapel’s tower, while hanging suspended from the ceiling by a thicket of gold filaments.

Raquel Aguilar and Voluspa Jarpa

The starting point for Raquel Aguilar’s sculptural intervention was the forest adjacent to Capilla Azul, out of which a single leafy vine, made from the local quilinejas root, emerged, making its way in the direction of the chapel, which it appears to have stealthily entered through a tiny aperture beside one of the shingles. Once inside, the vine spread across the wall, reconstituting itself as a towering forest woman, who floats  weightlessly in the center of the space, beckoning toward us with outstretched arms. Her plaited hair is wreathed in leaves and small birds nestle on her shoulders, while her regal posture suggests a form of emissary sent to us from the forest’s interior. 

The slender quilinejas roots that constitute the substance of Aguilar’s creations are part of a Chiloé-specific ecosystem whose long-term resilience to climate change is far from certain, and their presence in her works serve as a reminder that ancestral practices that employ local materials form a part of an interconnected web of knowledge and practice that is rooted in the ethical stewardship of one’s natural surroundings. Similarly, Jarpa’s inclusion of additional works in the exhibition brings parallel perspectives to the subject of arboreal knowledge. These include her 2015 musical video Emancipatory Opera, along with a recent video by the artist Violeta Molineaux that incorporates a collective performance by women on the beach in Quellón, and translucent aerial maps placed over the Capilla’s windows, tracking the visual spine of the Andrean cordillera, from Venezuela all the way to Antarctica.

 The textile tradition comes to Osvaldo through his grandparents, in particular his grandmothers, who are descendants of Huilliche habitants. Beginning at the age of seven, Osvaldo learned to spin and later to weave. His kelwo, spread out on the floor, makes it easier for a visitor to appreciate the designs and to watch him work from every side. We saw roses that he was creating for an exhibition, and watched him experiment with new wools and colors that were made by himself. Sometimes he buys spun wool from women on other nearby islands, but usually he spins it himself. Osvaldo designs sweaters (chombas), rugs and bedspreads up to two meters in width. In recent years he has developed more experimental designs that circulate both in the craft world, where he has received numerous awards and recognition, as well as the art world, where his work has been presented in galleries and museums. Osvaldo’s patterns are both personal and representative of the Huilliche tradition, full of symbols, colors and designs within a geometric framework. He often creates figures, including animals, birds, flowers, and humans, alongside his more abstract patterns.

We fell under the spell of wool being spun by the fire, while Osvaldo told stories, the kettle boiled on the stove and the smell of the food being prepared confirmed that it had been a very full day, as we experienced creativity in the details of daily life by one of Chiloé’s most accomplished inhabitants.

Support La Capilla Azul: Donate Here

As of October 2024, La Capilla Azul is officially designated a public charity in the US, which means we are exempt from federal income tax under IRS Code 501(c)(3). For an organization like ours, this also means we can begin receiving support from foundations, corporations, individuals and public sources that require beneficiaries to be non-profit, tax-exempt charities. This doesn’t mean we are going to slow down our efforts using crowdfunding, which have been quite successful — only that we are also going to also be applying for tax deductible grants and other forms of support in the months ahead.

 LA CAPILLA AZUL:

Serving a rural community in southern Chile  

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