Photos by Laurence Poirier
With this exhibition, I navigate the rigidity of citizenship through the flexibility of textiles. I explore the identity crisis and sense of belonging brought on by the loss of my Chilean status. This work takes shape as I process that loss, and examines the relationship between legal status and identity across several stages: an attachment to my last legal documents, a questioning of their legitimacy in defining who I am, and an exploration of alternative forms of self-identification grounded in personal criteria, infused with humor and absurdity.
What initially began as a desire to produce what the Chilean state took from me — a status and official documents — has transformed into a critique of those objects themselves, the system they embody, and my conflicted relationship to it. This process has led me to the metaphor of the glitch and to Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell, in which she writes: “the glitch creates a rupture within which new possibilities of being and becoming can emerge. This failure to function within the limits of a society that fails us constitutes an intentional and necessary refusal.”
I explore the imaginary of the glitch as a way to reveal the flaws in the system and open it up to new possibilities. What happens if we make citizenship glitch? How can we create new systems on the margins of those that constrain us?
The pieces Welcome Mat, Permanencia, and Texto stem from a need to process this loss by materializing it. Weaving my expired identity card into a doormat so I can feel it beneath my feet; digitally embroidering my last legal documents onto soluble paper in order to have the power to dissolve them; embroidering the message from my brother informing me of the news, as a way of coming to terms with it.
Glitch proposes a “glitched” deconstruction of my status through digital knitting. The glitch is both visual and structural: the stitch itself reveals the faults. Fragile and open to the viewer’s intervention, the work can be pulled apart.
ID is an immersive installation composed of around forty weavings, in which I explore notions of citizenship and identity through irony. In line with my approach to creation as a space for reflection, I use slow, meditative techniques—from producing my own threads out of recycled textiles to the act of weaving itself. Within this work, I develop a modular identity card, pierced with large safety pins and informed by glitch and street art aesthetics, designed to continuously transform and expose the absurdity of the object. The installation unfolds in space like an assertive collage of my self-identification process, while also offering a critical distancing from a central symbol of national identity.
The project as a whole is accompanied by a publication in the form of a passport, bringing together visual research (scans, glitches) and conceptual reflections on systems of citizenship.
Welcome Mat
Texto
Permanencia and GLITCH
ID
Passport
Passport
IMPERDIBLE at LatinArte, Montreal
Pieces featured in the exhibition "Les espaces de frontière" at the Maison de la culture Parc-Extension, along side the work of Maria-Claudia Quijano and Sabina Gámez. The show was curated by Claudia Arana, and held in the context of the 18th edition of the festival LatinArte
photos by Martin Postel-Vinay