Sebastián Calfuqueo and Carolina Illanes will be participating in “Right to Inhabit”, and will carry out artistic projects at Gasworks and Tate Modern, in March 2022. Working with curator Joselyne Contreras Cerda, these projects will be developed as part of Latin Elephant’s 2021-2022 public programme, “Inhabiting Spaces”, funded by Arts Council England, UK.
The work of Sebastián Calfuqueo and Carolina Illanes will be presented in the city of London as part of the project “Right to Inhabit”, which is part of the curatorial initiative and public programme of Latin Elephant 2021-2022, “Inhabiting Spaces”, by curator Joselyne Contreras Cerda. The activities that Calfuqueo and Illanes will carry out at Gasworks and Tate Modern, in March 2022, seek to generate instances of exchange and collective feeling/thinking to reflect, says Contreras, “about the meanings and senses that inhabiting has today, and how it is crossed with issues of infrastructure (visible to invisible)”. For her part, Patria Román, founder of Latin Elephant, highlights the focus of the curatorial programme as delving into “political relations, the design of cities and how these relations are observed in communities that are less considered when thinking about inhabiting, whether in London, San Juan de Puerto Rico, or Santiago de Chile”. With this, the public programme 2021-2022 of the London NGO seeks to explore and generate instances of collective thought and feeling, based on the encounter between art and society, to reflect on the possible changes that are occurring in different parts of the planet.
At Gasworks, Sebastián Calfuqueo will present the performance “Bodies in resistance” and the workshop “Cuerpos insumisos”. The performance, which is the artist’s first in the United Kingdom, uses different ways of naming “sodomy” in Mapudungun, the Mapuche language, to address “the relationship between colonisation and evangelisation as a means used by the Spanish to normalise and eliminate the non-heterosexual identities that existed before the European colonial process”, in Calfuqueo’s words. In the workshop “Cuerpos insumisos”, they will collectively explore tools for conceptualising and reflecting on the body from an intersectional perspective. With a work that reviews the history of Latin American performance art and its diverse forms of resistance to colonialism, it will open up questions about how gendered and racialised bodies are affirmed in the context of the Southern Cone and beyond. Sebastián adds they are “very happy to be able to carry out a performance and workshop at Gasworks on their first visit to London, with the help and support of Latin Elephant, and especially Joselyne Contreras Cerda. My work always acquires another perspective from other territories where it is being read, evidently that nourishes my work as well as what is outside it, the social relations that are so significant for this project that will be expressed in both the performance and the workshop”.
At Tate Modern, meanwhile, Carolina Illanes will perform and exhibit her work centred on the recent transformations that have taken place in the Elephant and Castle area of London. Through documents, correspondence, architectural drawings and photographs recovered from different public archives in the United Kingdom, the artist will reconstruct spatialities that no longer exist. Materialities that, Carolina points out, “will make visible the alterations that this urban area of the city has undergone”, a sector that has experienced a process of urban regeneration of great dimensions. For the workshop, along with her research, the artist also incorporates documents that the architect Felipe Lanuza gathered during his investigation of the Heygate Estate, a housing complex in the area that was demolished between 2011 and 2014. About the project, Illanes mentions that “at Tate Modern and supported by Latin Elephant, different evidences of houses and buildings that have recently been demolished in the Elephant and Castle neighbourhood will be staged, based on an investigation that I have converted into graphic and spatial displacements, to connect a citizen with the memory of inhabiting a neighbourhood that has been strongly transformed by the real estate industry”.
The participation of Sebastián Calfuqueo and Carolina Illanes in the project “Right to Inhabit” is supported by Galería Patricia Ready and, in the case of Illanes, by one of the 2020 Competitive Funds of the Faculty of Arts of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
Latin Elephant’s public programme 2021-2022, “Inhabiting Spaces”, funded by Arts Council England, UK, and realised in collaboration with South London Gallery, Gasworks and Tate, will continue with activities during the months of May, June, and July 2022.
Contact: Joselyne Contreras +4407933507912, joselyne@latinelephant.org