Magic Block

Recent Chilean artists explore the power of art as a platform for working through confining political structures

This book engages the creative and critical strategies at play in works of recent Chilean art that emerge from a reflection on the politics of invisibility: how the operations of the seen and the unseen are understood to perform equally within the material realities of Chilean society. Stemming from two exhibitions and seminars held in Bergen, Norway and Santiago de Chile, curated and organized by Soledad García Saavedra and Brandon LaBelle, Magic Block underscores the processes of appearance and disappearance, memory and forgetting, writing and erasure as social and psychological intensities. Through the works of Chilean artists and writers, the publication highlights art as a powerful platform for working through the political structures that hold the body in a phantasmic grip, and which can be traced and appropriated through unsteady acts of magic. Expressions of secrecy, camouflage, forgetfulness, dematerialization and covert occupation thus enable a giving narrative to those memories that are often subordinated by history. The book includes works by Catalina Bauer, Juan Downey, Claudia Missana, Eugenio Téllez, Sandra Vasquez de la Horra, Michelle-Marie Letelier, Rainer Krause, Gonzalo Díaz/Justo Pastor Mellado Voluspa Jarpa and Enrique Ramírez.