Field work
Exhibition held between December 11
2024 and the 17 of April of 2025, with a tour
that ranges from the chamber 13 to the room 08
second floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art
of the University of Chile, MAC, headquarters Forest Park.
“Coexistence is one of the best dances,” says a text on the work The making of the Golden Warriors (2006) the architect and visual artist Francisca Benitez. The piece, an installation video, multichannel, presents a series of settlers of pigeons, who face their birds in battles/dance overhead, where neither the birds nor the trainers actually have physical contact. An outlet of the air space -imported to New York by Italian immigrants and currently developed by members of the central american community of the city-that speaks to us of coexistence, of occupation of the public space, migration, transfer of information, of multiculturalism, of the city, to move in the city and make art with what is at hand. In this case: pigeons. It is a rhizome of ideas that, according to Benitez, it interacts directly with the work of another artist/architect located in New York: “Gordon Matta-Clark, and Violeta Parra are my biggest influences, and Matta-Clark met him first."
All my work is talking with him. On all of my early years. Long time ago, Camila Marambio (curator of the pavilion of Chile at the Venice Biennale, 2021) invited me to do a talk about a work that I would have liked to do to me, and I chose to Fake States (Reality Properties: Fake Estates, 1973-1974) Matta-Clark. The two come from architecture, work in the city, the love of the ephemeral,” he explains.
But Francisca Benitez does not work with the pigeons of New York by Matta-Clark, working with them because he lives there. Field work is a play on words that refers, on the one hand, to a series of methods of observation and collection of data about people, cultures, and natural environments. In that sense, his actions and decisions conversing with the Violet Grape that -along with her great friend Margot Loyola - was inserted into the rural communities, through the study of their modes of life, to understand, for example, a way to tune the guitar. On the other hand, field Work is more literal. Francisca Benitez comes from a working-class family based in the rural village of Pichingal, River basin Lontué, Maule Region. Of the field.
“My proposal is part of the basis of making art with what is there, and that comes from the awareness that we live on a planet with limited resources. Is being frugal. I grew up with six brothers, my mom was a teacher, my dad worked in an agricultural business, we lived in Pichingal with scarce resources. It has to do with my personal reality, but also with a point of view of the ecosystem, for what I will buy more things if I have this? To make the rubbing of soil-largest in the exhibition, Assembly (2012), I took a roll of background photographic studio discarded. The property Lines (2008) made the papers when I was working as an art teacher in community centers in public housing in New York. Got to do art with the kids and not ensuciarlas tables. They had reams and reams. I then asked can I take? and I said, “yes, llévatelos, there are too many”, explains the artist.
It is as well as field Work is structured on the basis of the deep scan that Benitez made to their immediate environment: New York city, and Pichingal. And it is from that commitment with their territories, which, in its exposure, it makes sense to the dialogue between pigeons and treiles (queltehues), between the constructs precarious of any orthodox jew and constructions precarious of a huaso of the central area, between the stress the property of the housing in the global North and stress the ownership of water in the global South, between the music and the language of signs (the father of Benitez was deaf, what led her to develop works as a Song Visual for the 2012 and Soliloquy in Sign, 2014), between exit to skateboarding and going out to collect quinces, between the friendship of Gordon Matta-Clark and Trisha Brown, and Violeta Parra, and Margot Loyola. However, this multiplicity of formats and topics, they seem to converge in a single point, and that point could be to stimulate the interaction and the generation of community as the main weapon against the capital.
That point could be: socialism. “I am part of groups who claim the necessity of public space for leisure, to dialogue, to dissent. Not only to buy. I am interested in the city, but I'm also interested in the diseases of the city, how do we fight the commodification of everything? New York, despite being the birthplace of capitalism, it is also the place of the opposition within the empire. There is a social security system is impressive. Where you go there is a public library. Anyone who makes less than “x” silver has free medical insurance. Me included. There is a public space super vital, with much enjoyment, and expression of identities and ideas. Then it makes me sad to come to Chile as neo-liberal symptoms a path appears to an entrepreneur who charges you $500 pesos to go and see her mountain”, explains the artist and adds, “I look forward to the day that, as said Gladys Marín, we all have to eat and sing.”