Graphic Identity

Ventana's logo is an adaptation of the work Made in Germany of the artist Amalia Valdés, which has kindly authorised its use for the conference's image and whose work addresses many of our questions and concerns.

Amalia Valdés is a Chilean artist based in Berlin. Her work connects with sacred geometry and ancestral symbols, through the use of the grid and repetitive movements, her work acquires rhythms, patterns, motions and pauses. For her materiality plays an important role as an active participant, bending, contracting, shining or expanding her work in multiple dimensions. The processes in Valdés’ works, are mainly manual, might be folding up metal, papers or re-organising ceramics, her works are always involving the body as a performance for the artist and as an experience for the audience. Through a meditative and intuitive process, she allows the materiality to interact and transform, to move between two or three-dimensional worlds and more than human interactions. In her pieces we see ancient symbols reinterpreted with contemporary elements and techniques, she works with networks and relationships between materials, forms and colours in order to find new senses and harmonies.

For this piece a site-specific work, Made in Germany¸ she used stainless steel, copper and bronze brought from Chile. Under the grid she reinterpreted the Chakana, The Chakana is a dam, a crossed path, a mountain, the mid-point that connects the cardinal points, the bridge and the staircase that connects the world, the point where ideas cross weaving knowledges and unveiling patterns.

 In this work the artist uses very thin and lightweight sheets of metal, deforming and reflexing the audience, the Chakana is re-interpreted through the use of the material while the figure is located in the conflict of its pre-Columbian origin, form and meaning, and the physical origin of the material (Chilean source) contextualised and made for an exhibition in Berlin, Germany. While mining is one of the main natural and economical resources in Chile, it found its form and place in Germany in this traditional Andean shape, conflicting with the identity in the composition of their fragments, unveiling the critical process and updating the sense of the Chakana in Berlin. In this respect, the way the artwork deals with historical issues of colonisation and neo colonisation resist the erasure of the deep memory, she recalls the recognition of an alternative order and accepts her own internal disorder. The Chakana being remembered, communicated and critically engaged. The body of the Chakana still, despite the historical conflicts, and the fragmentation of the figure appears as a way of assuming its identity within a critical process re-signifying the networks where is inscribed.

Stainless steel, copper, and bronze

150 x 150 cm.

2017

Galerie Eigenheim, Berlin, Germany.

http://www.amaliavaldes.cl/

Photo by Maite Zubizarreta