ABSENCES
Alfredo Jaar & Osvaldo Güineo Obando
January - April, 2025
The exhibition, Absences/Ausencias, featured new work produced for the occasion by Osvaldo Güineo and Alfredo Jaar. While at first glance the two artists’ respective approaches to making art could not seem more different — a Chilote textile artist and a NYC-based conceptual artist — by working in dialogue with each other, their respective practices started to overlap within the scope of their mutual exploration of the building’s separation from its own past, both as architecture (Jaar) and as iconography (Güineo). Both men were invited by the curators to visit Contuy in preparation for the exhibition, during which time a conversation led to the decision to make a joint project about what becomes lost when a local house of worship metamorphoses into a gallery for aesthetic contemplation. Working both inside and outside the building to share their works with the public, Jaar and Güineo probed the Capilla’s history in a way that invited historical and philosophical reflection on the role culture plays in the transformation of spaces, for one form of ritual into spaces for another form of ritual.
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Alfredo Jaar
Alfredo Jaar took this physical transformation that occurred after the deconsecration of the Chapel as his starting point and proposed recovering the original architecture, which was less square and more rectangular, with the altar located further from the entrance door. In Jaar’s exercise in memory, a profile reconstructed the vertices of the old structure, like a schematic and essential drawing of a meeting place. This empty space, which was once part of the historic chapel, was redrawn linearly with wood, and within its boundaries, Jaar planted a small garden, densely populated with blue flowers that evoke the fullness and beauty of the lives of the previous inhabitants. The absence and presence in this work speaks to our own role as participants, of a place where the tangible and the intangible, contemplation and meditation, are possible because there is a physical space that houses them.
Looking back in time, overlapping multiple absences takes us back to the campaign waged by the Spanish crown, which for centuries attempted to convert the indigenous inhabitants of this remote corner of the distant empire to Catholicism. This historical religious memory was captured in architecture, culture, and iconography in many aspects and places throughout the Archipelago. However, for the Chapel, this legacy ended the day the parishioners of Contuy decided to renovate its structure and sell its wood for firewood. Jaar’s delicate spatial architecture recovered a place without limits, walls, or sky, open to the new life beginning to emerge from the ground.
Osvaldo Güineo
Just as Jaar directed our attention to the exterior of the building, Osvaldo Güineo presented two sheep wool textiles inside the chapel that, paradoxically, drew our attention to the absence of religious iconography in the place. In one piece, Güineo delimited the now-defunct altar and offered a traditional representation of Saint Michael the Archangel, who holds a scale in one hand as a symbol of justice and a warrior word in the other. Like the warrior who drives Satan to hell, Michael is simultaneously the one who ensures that divine justice is indifferent to a person's social status. The second piece hung behind the saint. It was a black rectangle dyed with plant fibers, with a bouquet of intense red flowers in the center. Both pieces were made using the kelwo technique, a Huilliche textile tradition revived by Osvaldo, which consists of horizontal weaving on a structure of four beams resting on the ground.
By bringing ancestral methods into the present, Güineo not only reflected the building’s former ceremonial function, but also served as a reminder of the cultural persistence of indigenous peoples; knowledge and practices related to spirituality, nature, and ecosystems—cultural dimensions that are increasingly revisited and in demand. This cultural blend of the ancestral and the religious, so characteristic of the Chiloé Archipelago, has made it possible for saints and sacred figures to become part of everyday life and celebration, and to be seen today as bearers of wisdom that is both ancient and contemporary, which explains their constant presence in diverse contexts of artistic, artisanal, and religious manifestations.