Voluspa Jarpa

Sindemia

August 2021 - Feb 2022
MAMBO - Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá, Colombia

Voluspa Jarpa’s Sindemia [Syndemic] is the winner of the inaugural edition of the Julius Baer Art Prize for Latin American Female Artists,’ a new biennial award initiated by Julius Baer and The Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá – MAMBO. It is the first of its kind to be held in Latin America, whose mission is to honor the research of outstanding Latin American female artists.

Sindemia is Voluspa Jarpa’s metaphor to analyze the violent social riots that occurred from October 2019 to March 2020 in Chile. She invited collaborators—an astrophysicist, a mathematician, a Mapuche poet, a female witness, and a woman fighting in the frontline—to collect and share experiences about this phenomenon of protest, resistance, and rebellion against systematic human rights violations: torture, sexual violence, and other injustices.

Sindemia delves into sensitive issues related to one of the most intense social outbreaks of Chilean history, culminating with a new national Constitution that replaced the one written in the 1980s under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). The process was marked by violence and severe police abuses, as has occurred during the recent demonstrations of the Colombian national strike.

For this reason, the artist decided to extend her research to the Colombian context, comparing how governments manage social unrest and human rights violations, which often remain in impunity involving photos, archival documents, videos, maps, sculptures, objects, installation, wallpapers, and lasers that project beyond the Museum’s physical space into the surrounding environment.