Voluspa Jarpa

Born 1971 in Chile, he lives and works in Santiago de Chile.  

Voluspa Jarpa is fascinated by the traces left by trauma in our private lives and in society, in nations and through history. She consequently focuses part of her work on hysteria, the language of the body which expresses buried desires and their frustrations, forgotten trauma. Following in the footsteps of Doctor Charcot, the great French pioneer in the study of this psychic disorder, she takes an interest in the “demoniac swarm,” which she represents visually in the form of highly equivocal installations. Swarms of insects? No, thousands of little women’s bodies twisting weightlessly in the exhibition space: twenty-eight thousand, six hundred and forty-nine of them, to be precise, that being the number of “hysterical women” logged in Charcot’s photographic archives.

For le Printemps de septembre, Voluspa Jarpa is going back to her BibBibliothèque de la non histoire, but in a new form. In it we find some hundred books bringing together “declassified” official archive documents from the United States concerning the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. A number of censored pages, signalled by the erasure of information, imply that not everything is known about what happened, that our perception may already have been frozen in the memorialist body of the archive. The work is frightening in its simplicity. Jarpa is challenging us. History? Sometimes it needs to be rewritten, equitably revisited, reabsorbed by the attentive subject: “History is mine!”.