curated by Or-Am | Catalina Ossa/Enrique Rivera

Thursday, 16th March 2006, the exhibition Suspensiòn voluntaria de la lògica curated by Or-Am | Catalina Ossa/Enrique Rivera will open at Velan, 52 via Modena. With this exchange exhibition by artists from Chile and from Turin, Velan Centro d’Arte Contemporanea confirms its activity to promote contemporary art in Italy and abroad. Suspensiòn voluntaria de la lògica presents an overview of the latest generation Video art from Chile, mixing artists with different languages and sensibility: Felipe AGUILA, Marcelo ALISTE, Juan CESPEDES, Francisca GARCIA, Isabel GARCIA, Michelle LETELIER, Benjamìn MARAMBIO, Marcela MORAGA, Mario NAVARRO e Verena URRUTIA. The exhibited works follow different routes, without many things in common. A genres crossover – experimental video art, documentaries, fiction, digital creation attesting the diversity of an artistic scene which in the last years registered a rapid development. Or-Am is an operative platform with the purpose of creating digital and analogical works, production and management of cultural events. www.or-am. The Centro de Documentaciòn de las Artes del Centro Cultural Palacio de la Moneda in Santiago collects paper and audio visual material reguarding the artistic production in Chile in the last thirty years. Beside the audio-visual archive, composed by national and international documentaries, interviews to critics and artists, a lively promotional activity of international videoart is taken on with a regular planning. www.ccplm.cl 

Felipe Aguila, Spit (2004): in a sort of temporal rarefaction, Felipe Aguila turns the attention of the watcher to details that normally would pass unnoticed, and gives them an unusual expressive force.  In ‘Spit’ a man walks slowly, smoking and coughing. It is night and the road is almost desert. The artist follows closely the movements until the moment when the men gets free from his despair: an enormous spit falls in the middle of his legs. Marcelo Aliste, Xy loop xx (2003: the delirious world in the works by Marcelo Aliste is softened by a very controlled system of digital creation. Unlikely portraits of everyday situations involve the characters of xy loop xx, busy in a funny love situation taking his inspiration freely from contemporary Japanese cartoons. Juan Cèspedes, Inside (2001): The methodical research of the artist in the communication media takes on an important value in Inside. Through this work, Cèspedes puts up a process of identification between the observer and the thing observed, putting symbolically his own figure inside a television set. A reflection about mass communication media. Francisca Garcìa, Burning house (2002): Francisca Garcìa’s work explores the connections existing between the language of the visual and of the audio visual art, cinema in particular. Each element in her works is determined by the slackening of the borders between fiction (not only on a narrative level) and reality. Binding the mechanism of production and their meaning, Burning house reflects on the theme of landscape. Isabel Garcìa, Empty frames (2003): Isabel Garcìa is the author of video installation, monumental advertisements and photographs in the country landscapes in the outskirts of Santiago, characterized in the last years by a more and more obtrusive presence of new real estate projects and new shopping malls. In this video, the artist videotaped from her car dark and lonely fragments of the highway landscape, where the image of the huge advertisements is registered by superimposing their illumination. In this way the advertisements become white pictures, vibrant and empty, ready to offer themselves to the eyes of the spectator. Michelle Letelier, Elephant (2004): with this video Letelier registers the routine of the emptying ride of the trucks of chuquicamata (open-air copper mines in the Northern part of Chile, a process which produces what is defined a ‘cake’ of sterile material. The repetition of the action leads to the humanization of the instruments in this process depicting the trucks as if they were the images of elephants in line. Benjamìn Marambio, Senza titolo, s.d.: it is difficult to describe the work by Benjiamin Marambio as a unity, since it doesn’t present a narrative line and is without codes and conceptual bindings. The language of the artist, strictly connected with painting, puts the observer in front of a picture in movement, forcing him to an aesthetic sensation, vertiginous and dense, as if the movement was going to come to life learning how to unbind itself from the le state of immobility. Marcela Moraga, Proxyland, (2005): the work by Marcela Moraga takes its life from symbols coming from impossible situations and from characters taken from the cinema world. Proxyland is the representation of a prophetic vision on how an instrument can take on an intelligent and emotional life, discovering the world through natural-synthetic landscapes. Mario Navarro, Fuegos fatuos (2005), Fuegos Fatuos induces in the spectator a sensation of strong confusion. The 3D head of the artist himself, bored and sleepy, explodes with the purpose of waking up, creating thus an identification process where the explosion coincides symbolically with the sensation experienced by the observe of waking up from the hypnosis caused by the images. Verena Urrutia, Flujo normal (2004): the video explores the public manifestation of the vital processes of human body, usually connected to a feeling of shame. Its exhibition inserts in a public space what happens in the private, going specifically towards the analysis of a decency feeling which regulates the public exposure of the body.

We thank Region Piedmont for the contribution. With the patronage of the Chile Government and the Chilean Embassy in Italy. The exhibition will remain open from 17^th March to 7^th April 2006 from Monday to Friday 04.00PM – 07.00PM. Monday and Saturday by appointment.