ARTIST STATEMENT

My first encounter with artistic creation was through the word.

I began with theatre, working with what could not be preserved: the voice, the body, the presence of another human being, and the brief existence of something shared between performer and audience. I was interested in a theatre stripped of material necessities, without scenery or props, where the body and the imagination of those present were sufficient to construct an entire world.

Nothing remained once the performance ended. No object, no permanent image, no physical evidence of what had taken place. Yet something had happened. A word, a gesture, or a moment of silence could alter the perception of those who witnessed it. I began to understand that the ephemeral was not the absence of substance, but another form of existence.

Theatre taught me that meaning does not necessarily reside in matter. It can emerge through relationships, through collective attention, through the invisible agreement that allows an audience to accept an imagined reality.

Only later did the object enter my practice.

Through clowning, juggling, and years of performance in public spaces, I began investigating what happened when matter became part of that exchange. An ordinary object, placed in motion, could acquire an entirely different significance. A stone, a ball, or a stick could become an instrument of danger, an invitation to laughter, or the center of a collective expectation. Its physical composition remained unchanged, yet the relationship between the object and the human beings surrounding it had been transformed.

I became fascinated by this passage between the immaterial and the material: how an idea becomes a gesture, how a gesture transforms an object, and how an object may eventually acquire an existence independent of the performer.

This investigation continues today through sculpture, painting, performance, theatre, and poetry. I do not understand these as separate disciplines, but as different ways of approaching the same questions: how human beings construct reality, how we attribute meaning and authority to things, and whether what we have inherited as truth might be understood otherwise.

I was born in Chile, in South America, carrying an ancestral history that extends across continents. My lineage connects me to the Indigenous Mapuche and Aymara peoples of the Americas, alongside English, Irish, Italian, German, and Jewish ancestry from Europe. I regard this inheritance neither as a fixed identity nor as a collection of cultural claims. It is a history of encounters, contradictions, migrations, and survivals that continues to exist within me.

South America holds particular significance in my thinking. It is a continent where different civilizations have met under circumstances of extraordinary violence, resistance, exchange, and transformation. I believe that within this unresolved history lies the possibility of imagining another relationship between the peoples of the world. Not a universal identity that erases difference, but a form of coexistence capable of acknowledging it. I consider peace an intellectual and cultural undertaking as much as a political one.

I was educated in Catholic schools, where ritual, sacred imagery, and religious authority formed part of my earliest understanding of the world. I later studied Civil Industrial Engineering in Santiago, Chile. Engineering introduced me to systems, mathematics, and the principles through which structures operate. Theatre, however, confronted me with something that could not be resolved through calculation alone: the human being within those structures. I left my engineering studies to pursue theatre.

That decision began a period of travel and artistic formation that brought me through Europe and eventually to the United States. Along the way, I encountered traditions connected to my European ancestry and later deepened my engagement with Indigenous American histories and Toltec teachings. My education developed through movement, encounters, and deliberate exposure to unfamiliar ways of understanding existence.

I did not travel to escape the reality from which I came, nor in pursuit of an idealized elsewhere. I was interested in confronting myself through other realities. To leave the familiar was to question what I had mistaken for something permanent within my own identity.

I came to the United States and lived for years without legal immigration status. This experience acquired particular significance when considered alongside my family history. My great-grandfather, a German Jew, had also arrived in Chile without legal immigration status, generations earlier and under entirely different historical circumstances. I do not equate our experiences. What interests me is the recurrence, across generations, of the relationship between human movement and the authority of borders.

During my undocumented years, I performed in the streets of Los Angeles. My body was simultaneously the instrument of my work and the subject of a political condition. I was participating in a society that could encounter me, applaud me, and exchange with me, while its institutions did not fully recognize my place within it.

I understand this experience as part of what I call anthropological performance: an investigation conducted not from a position of distance, but through direct participation in the conditions being examined. My own life becomes part of the field of inquiry. Migration, work, vulnerability, public space, and human interaction are not merely subjects to represent; they are experiences through which I have developed my understanding of power.

My theatrical education, particularly Commedia dell'Arte, clowning, and Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, gave form to concerns that had already emerged through my lived experience. I became increasingly interested in the relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor, and in the structures that make these positions possible.

My work stands with the oppressed. Yet I have come to recognize that the oppressor may also be confined by the very system through which they exercise power. This does not diminish their responsibility, nor does it suggest that domination and suffering are equivalent. It leads me toward a more demanding understanding of liberation. Reversing the positions of power is not necessarily the same as overcoming the structures that produce oppression.

My work in independent radio and news production at KPFK in Los Angeles extended this investigation into language and public discourse. The construction of a narrative is itself an exercise of power. What is remembered, what is omitted, and who is permitted to speak are inseparable from the way a society understands itself.

I have little interest in locating my thinking along the conventional political line of left, right, or center. These categories can describe positions, but they do not adequately express the movement of my thought. When asked where I stand philosophically, I prefer to suggest reading the Tao. I am interested in the relationship between apparent opposites, in the conditions through which one becomes the other, and in the possibility of understanding contradiction without being permanently confined to either side of it.

Anarchism, in my understanding, is a method of approaching the unknown.

I am interested in the demolition of inherited certainties, not because destruction is inherently valuable, but because what we already know frequently determines what we are capable of imagining. To question the foundation of an idea is to create the possibility that something entirely different might emerge. The unknown cannot be discovered if every inquiry must remain obedient to an existing explanation.

I understand my multidisciplinary development through the idea of a Neo-Renaissance. This is not an attempt to recover an idealized historical period, but a commitment to the pursuit of knowledge without accepting the divisions imposed between its disciplines. My background has made it difficult for me to regard the engineer, the sculptor, the poet, and the performer as fundamentally different kinds of human beings. Each develops a language for investigating the same world.

I am interested in their convergence.

This philosophy finds a material expression in Objects of Power, my developing body of sculptural work.

I find a particular significance in the fact that my earliest theatre required no objects at all. I began by constructing realities through language and presence alone. Years later, through the manipulation of objects, I discovered that matter could participate in that same process of transformation.

Sculpture now presents a further question: what happens when the performer is no longer present? Can an object retain something of the intention, attention, and symbolic force that once depended upon a living gesture?

I am drawn to the human history of objects invested with symbolic authority: stones, ceremonial forms, tools, ornaments, and artifacts whose significance exceeds their practical use. My interest in the shamanic is connected to this capacity to mediate between material experience and the invisible structures of belief. I approach such traditions as subjects of inquiry, not as spiritual authority I claim for myself.

Through obsidian, geometric forms, and material experimentation, I seek to create works whose physical presence invites contemplation of that relationship. I am not concerned with proving that an object possesses supernatural properties. I am concerned with understanding why human beings have repeatedly found it necessary to give matter powers that cannot be measured through its physical composition alone.

My paintings extend this inquiry through a language I call Andean Brutalism. I investigate the monumental, architectural, and symbolic possibilities of South America's ancient civilizations, not by attempting to reproduce their histories, but by permitting myself to imagine other developments, other continuities, and futures that were never realized.

I do not believe an artist's task is necessarily to provide answers. I am more interested in creating the conditions in which established meanings can become unstable, where an object may be encountered differently, where a familiar gesture becomes strange, or where a structure that once appeared inevitable begins to seem contingent.

The word, the body, and the object have become successive territories of the same investigation. One disappears as soon as it is spoken. Another exists through movement and presence. The last may remain long after its maker has departed. Yet all three depend upon the human capacity to create meaning.

The clown, the engineer, the migrant, the painter, and the sculptor are not successive identities I have adopted and abandoned. They coexist in the way I approach my work. Each has altered my understanding of the others.

I cannot separate my artistic practice from the decisions through which I have lived. Nor can I regard my ancestry as a completed history. Both remain active in my understanding of the world, without prescribing what I must become.

I am not interested in producing a definitive image of myself, or in repeating the world as I received it. My work is an attempt to make room for what has not yet been conceived.

I consider that possibility the beginning of creation.