Altered Views

The publication is the catalogue of the Chilean Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale of Art, presented by artist Voluspa Jarpa Saldías (Rancagua, Chile 1971) and curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio. The project originates in a question the artist seeks to answer: how is the modernist, Eurocentric and colonial gaze configured? The gaze that later expands from Europe to the U.S. and constructs a symbolic contempt that is imposed as political, cultural and economic subjugation in non-hegemonic regions? Altered Views is an unprecedented research project that works as a cross-reference between various instances of European history from the 17th to the 20th Century, full of social manifestations, ethnographic searches and dominant powers, attempting to restore the conquered awe of the coloniser. The work seeks to rescue concepts coined from a Eurocentric perspective that shed light on the violence with which the world is reduced to an expansionist, developmentalist and hegemonic model.