WE ARE ROOTS
Raquel Aguilar & Voluspa Jarpa
September - December 2024
Raquel Aguilar and Voluspa Jarpa, working together, created a choreography of poetry and material both inside and outside Capilla Azul. During the exhibition, a giant forest woman, dressed in leaves and birds, floated suspended from the zenith of the architecture. A physical extension of the Contuy forest, she brought with her its native trees, its undergrowth of fungi, and its ancient peat bogs. Hanging in front of her were the roots and fragmented trunk of a canelo tree, extending from the bell tower almost to the floor of the chapel. Accompanying the tree were fragmented satellite images of the full extension of the Andean massif, from Venezuela to Antarctica, that has for millennia provided the backdrop to the journeys of the culture and people of South America.
Raquel Aguilar
The quilineja is a thin root that grows around trees in humid forests, like many which are found in Chiloé. It slowly ascends, climbing, encircling, and gently wrapping itself around the trees, reaching heights of thirteen meters or more. After a long pause, it slowly reverses its movement, gradually returning from where it appeared, and eventually disappears back into the earth.
Raquel Aguilar makes regular excursions to the Incopuy forest near Quellón to collect quilinejas. After bringing them home, the roots are washed, boiled, and left to dry, after which they become pliable to human hands. From there, the quilineja can be braided into a durable rope, one of which Aguilar has been working on continually for the past few months. It must be especially long because it appears in the current exhibition as an animated tendril, extending from the adjacent forest toward the chapel, approaching from above, and silently inching its way to the interior.
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Voluspa Jarpa
The braids of the quinileja find a close visual counterpart in the roots of the canelo, which lived underground for thirty-plus years until a recent storm in Chiloé tore them out of the soil. Both partially mirror the satellite images presented by Voluspa Jarpa of the Andes mountain range, and the circular shapes within the range bear a visual relationship to the inner rings of the hovering canelo trunk, which in turn trace the successive years of the tree’s life. Jarpa further expanded the comparison between what looms and what submerges in her digital images of the mountains, repeatedly folded over themselves in what appears to be a self-embrace, until they sink and disappear in the Chiloé archipelago, only to emerge once more in Antarctica. From top to bottom, the Andes are converted into a movement of concentric rings, their compressed geological strata a crust to be read across space and time.
Jarpa’s prior attention to the Andes’ myriad range of cultures generated, among other works, her well-known Emancipation Opera (2017), which was performed by people who live and work in close relationship with nature in the central mountain range. Along with Emancipation Opera, a recent video made by Violeta Molineux, which records a recent collective action by women in Quellón, was also included in the exhibition. Jarpa’s works at Capilla Azul expanded on her previous investigations by incorporating graphic visualizations of the topology of mountains and volcanoes alongside the stratification of patterns of social unrest in the Andean region — as if together, nature and society find a point of confluence in images of containment and eruption.
The canelo, sacred to Mapuche spirituality, was salvaged and brought inside the chapel, carrying with it a sense of life constantly striving to expand: the inner bark covered by spots, bumps and cracks, and the roots that were recently sunk in the subsoil, growing in direct proportion to the strength and stability that the tree requires in its quest to move ever upward. The roots remind us of everything that we can’t see beneath our feet, hidden from sight, nourishing and irrigating life in the earth, emerging and sinking at the same time.