Collections of Fundación MAPFRE
Instituto Moreira Salles
São Paulo
The work of Paz Errázuriz (b. Santiago, Chile, 1944) began in the 1970s, deep in the context of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, and to this day remains marked by a curiosity about the human condition and its social framework.
Errázuriz has no formal training in photography. She learned the technique over time and through her travels. We could say this artist is a wandering photographer within her own country, where she has journeyed to many corners, including Patagonia, central Chile, Talca, Valparaíso, and Santiago. Yet what draws her attention most are not landscapes, or natural surroundings, but the people who inhabit these places and the personal or collective stories enveloping them. The respectful investigation of these lives has been a hallmark of her work. This is why the bonds Errázuriz forges with the people she meets are essential to understanding her working process. In some instances, she has gone back to the same place repeated times over the years, winning the trust of those who live there, like members of the Kawésqar indigenous group, on Wellington Island.
Her projects have often implied breaking rules set by the former military regime, as she dared to enter environments deemed unsavory—brothels, asylums, psychiatric treatment centers, boxing clubs—places where women are not welcome and where isolation and confinement predominate. There, she seems to search out singular types of behavior and forms of resistance to dictated norms.
Her production traverses the tumultuous history of Chile, a country she has resolutely explored through contact with people plying a range of trades—boxers, circus performers, sex workers, butchers in the Straits of Magellan—and people of differing ages and social conditions, like the visually impaired, alcoholics, the homeless, and patients committed to psychiatric hospitals. While devoid of any explicitly critical intent, her images breached many taboos in a society divested of freedoms, as was Chile’s case until democracy was re-established there in the 1990s.
Errázuriz was a founding member of Chile’s Asociación de Fotógrafos Independientes [Association of Independent Photographers] (AFI), created in 1981. She has received numerous awards over the course of her career, among the most recent of which was Chile’s National Fine Arts Prize in 2017. She also represented her country at the Venice Biennale in 2015.
This exhibition, Brazil’s first retrospective of Errázuriz, comes to us through Fundación mapfre, which in 2018 acquired the material as part of its Photography Collections, thus expanding its representative holdings of Latin American photography. The selections have been structured along two lines: a chronological reading of Paz Errázuriz’s photographic oeuvre and a thematic one, encompassing groups of photographs that the Chilean artist has been organizing since the 1970s.
- Struggle and Resistance
- Agents and Spaces of Social Change
- Sex, a Tool for Survival
- Excision
- Strength and Weakness
- The Circus
- The Ages of Life (and Death)
- The Extinction of an Ethnic Group
- Impediments to the Gaze
- Confinement
Struggle and Resistance
Given that she began her career during the extremely eventful period of Chilean history encompassing the years under Unidad Popular (1970-1973) and the fascist dictatorship (1973-1990), and given her firm commitment to the human rights struggle, it is easy to appreciate why Paz Errázuriz decided to record the country’s social upheavals.
Active in the Asociación de Fotógrafos Independientes (afi) from 1981 onwards, on occasions Errázuriz took to the streets as part of a group in order to document these protests against an unacceptable reality. It was during this decade that she produced most of the images that constitute a record of the bravery and resistance of many sectors of the Chilean population, who took part in strikes, demonstrations and protests against the regime. Errázuriz closely followed the activities of Mujeres por la Vida [Women for Life], which played a leading role in raising awareness of women’s subordination. In 1985 she photographed the Women’s Day, locating herself at the top of a building in the centre of Santiago in order to capture the way a group of women stopped the traffic, and the dissuasive responses (including water canon) or openly repressive ones on the part of the forces of law and order.
Another series to be seen in this section is Mujeres de Chile [Women of Chile] of 1992. As if embarking on an investigation of herself, here Errázuriz portrays a series of women working in different fields: women whose lives are not reflected in the media or in history books, such as a rural school teacher, a coal collector and a female diver.
Agents and Spaces of Social Change
Paz Errázuriz’s photography emerged in her native country, Chile, in the first half of the 1970s in a political context dominated by the brutality of the Pinochet dictatorship. Her first steps were influenced by an extremely tense and uncertain social situation which affected the lives of opponents of the coup d’êtat. Going out on the street with a camera was risky for anyone aiming to capture events as they happened and was also perceived as a threat by the military regime. It was even less common to see a woman undertaking the type of investigations characteristic of photography
In 1980 Paz Errázuriz presented her first solo exhibition, entitled Personas [People], at the Instituto Chileno-Norteamericano [Chilean North-American Institute] in Santiago. The following year she and some fellow photographers co-founded the Asociación de Fotógrafos Independientes [Association of Independent Photographers] (afi).
During that dark period, Errázuriz’s self-taught photographic gaze focused on homeless people sleeping rough, scraping a living or destitute. This series, Los dormidos [The Sleepers], offers a notably unheroic vision of the country, immersed in poverty.
Also at that time and throughout the 1980s, Errázuriz turned her inquisitive eye on the lifestyles of the country’s wealthy classes, who displayed their fortunes in the areas of Las Condes and La Dehesa in Santiago.
Sex, a Tool for Survival
adam’s apple
At a very early date in her career Paz Errázuriz forged contacts with the world of female prostitution. Between 1982 and 1987, however, she spent much of her time among a group of transsexuals who prostituted themselves in different brothels in Santiago and Talca. These were people who were regularly subject to abuse and violence by the police in the form of insults, harassment, humiliation, beatings and torture.
In 1990 Errázuriz published the photo-book La manzana de Adán [Adam’s Apple] featuring the black and white images from this series as well as texts and interviews undertaken with members of this family, of a type quite remote from the standard middle-class one. A large and varied family that broke moulds but which was decimated by aids, economic uncertainty and police persecution.
In La manzana de Adán, Errázuriz offers a wideranging visual landscape animated by the everyday lives of its protagonists, including images of the street, preparations for the night ahead and the different rooms in which these individuals pose on the bed.
brothels
Very early in her career, even before La manzana de Adán, Errázuriz had already met a number of female sex workers. She pursued this interest with the images that she took in different brothels in Curanilahue and Valparaíso in the series Prostíbulos [Brothels] of 1999-2002. These images reveal the degree of complicity that exists between the women and their clients. There is nothing glamorous to be found in these poverty-stricken brothels and the female nude is notable for its absence.
A recent trip to the north of Chile took Errázuriz to a seedy brothel. The resulting colour series of 2014 is entitled Muñecas, frontera Chile-Perú [Dolls, the Chile-Peru Border]. The artist’s acute gaze conveys the trust that she established with the women, who allow themselves to be captured by the camera without the least reserve.
Excision
In its protean diversity, Chile is undoubtedly the terrain observed, analysed and photographed by Paz Errázuriz. Exéresis [Excision] of 2004, the only series displayed in this section of the exhibition, is thus unusual within the artist’s output as the photographs were not taken in Chile but in different European and American museums, including the Louvre (Paris), the Pergamon (Berlin), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) and the National Gallery of Art (Washington).
The photographs depict statues without their heads, as the images are deliberately cut off at breast height so that the viewer’s attention focuses on the genital area where we see a hole or the remains of a cut-off penis. The historical, cultural and moral reasons for the disappearance of these sculpted penises probably lie in obscurantist mentalities and/or revenge of a religious type, but here Errázuriz uses the results to reflect on mutilated masculinity of a totally unheroic nature, giving rise to an ambiguous body of no specific gender.
Strength and Weakness
Having frequently depicted groups and sectors of society remote from standard behavioural patterns, in 1987 Paz Errázuriz decided to explore the seemingly exceptionally virile world of boxing. She first went to the Club México in Santiago to make some initial inquiries but was not admitted, with the sexist argument that women were not allowed to enter a male venue of this type.
She was finally able to undertake her project by visiting the Chilean Boxing Federation. The result of her repeated visits is the wide range of images that constitutes El combate contra el ángel [The Fight against the Angel] of 1987, depicting men whose vulnerable appearance makes the viewer doubt the victory to which they aspire. Errázuriz shows them out of the ring or about to start training. Rather, than perfect anatomical forms in all their glory, however, what the viewer primarily notices is weariness and exhaustion as well as the precariousness and vulnerability of their lives.
Years later, after travelling around the north of Chile by bus with a group of wrestlers, Errázuriz was able to reveal certain aspects that are not generally associated with the world of wrestling: the existence of the wrestlers’ families, their children and their personal lives. Once again, in this series entitled Luchadores del ring [Wrestlers] of 2002, it is not the struggle between the physical bodies that motived the artist to devote time and attention to the wrestlers, but their vulnerability and the uniqueness of lives that do not conform to the prevailing norm due to their nomadic character and chosen profession.
The Circus
Errázuriz’s lengthy, self-taught career is characterised by her recurring interest in delving into peripheral worlds that involve gender exclusion (boxing), entering areas of life prohibited by prevailing morality (prostitution), or surveying the periphery in search of nomadic or ambulant ways of life, as in the series El circo [The Circus] of 1984-1988. The latter depicts moments of daily life, some banal, others not so, in shabby circuses of the type that scrape along in city neighbourhoods without the help of large hoardings or spectacular attractions.
Paz Errázuriz’s interest is always aroused by the uniqueness of human nature, which also encourages her respect towards ways of life that are alien to the stay-at-home majority. In this case Errázuriz avoids stereotypical, colourful images of the circus such as laughing clowns or acts with dangerous wild animals. Rather, she focuses on the everydayness of people who make their profession a discreet and natural way of life, to the extent that the acrobat and the magician could be any one of our neighbours.
The Ages of Life (and Death)
This section brings together works spanning a lengthy period of Paz Errázuriz’s career, the earliest dating from the early 1980s and the most recent created in the first decade of this century. Time and its treatment in images is their guiding thread. This is a subject that has interested artists in different disciplines, including photography, which undoubtedly has the capacity to capture time, recording and preserving it.
In the mid-1980s, Errázuriz decided to photograph her son Tomás once a month for four years (July 1986 to December 1990). His serious face is presented to the viewer, while the marks of change and the small circumstances of life are also visible in these images. Years later, in 2004, Errázuriz made the video Un cierto tiempo [A Certain Time] using this precious photographic material, which allowed her to emphasise the idea of continuity and visual rhythm.
The extreme ages of life (childhood and old age) are the ones most depicted by an artist who also casts a critical gaze on the way society treats old people like children, in addition to other issues such as their relationship with work. Aware of the present-day cult of youth and of beauty, Errázuriz’s audacious approach has led her to look at taboo subjects such as the uninhibited nudity of some very elderly people in the series Cuerpos [Bodies], or their enjoyment of leisure time in Tango.
The Extinction of an Ethnic Group
Meeting Fresia Alessandri Baker (called Jérawr-Asáwer in the Kawésqar language) in 1992 led Paz Errázuriz to postpone the series Mujeres de Chile in order to follow her to her own habitat, the western area of Tierra del Fuego. It was Jérawr-Asáwer who initially said “no photo” and it required a great deal of time, years even, before a relationship of trust was established between the two women. Here we encounter one of the most highly appreciated aspects of Paz Errázuriz’s photographs and one that gives them their distinctive nature, namely the fact that they arise from a solid ethical commitment based on respect, as a number of writers on her work have noted.
These photographs resulted in the book Kawésqar, hijos de la mujer sol [Kawésqar, Sons of the Sun Woman] of 2005, in which Errázuriz enters an unknown world, one that expresses itself in a language of its own, which has been studied by the ethno-linguist Óscar Aguilera.
In this series, Los nómadas del mar [Nomads of the Sea], Errázuriz has also delved into the everyday reality of an ageing community who live from canal fishing for mussels and from weaving rattan baskets. This animist ethnic group from Tierra del Fuego now finds itself in the process of extinction. Having taken these photographs, Errázuriz organised an exhibition to which she invited the subjects, held at the Centro Cultural Casa Azul del Arte in Punta Arenas in 2003, the year of the death of Jérawr-Asáwer, the true moving force behind the artist’s decision to focus on the Kawésqar universe.
Impediments to the Gaze
The photographer’s endeavour is that of examining reality through the use of a device that captures details which the eye seems unable to see clearly. Given that the technique allows for examining the almost invisible and imperceptible, it should be noted that Errázuriz has turned her attention to the blind: individuals who lack visual access to the images that photography creates of them.
In 2003 Errázuriz embarked on the series Ceguera [Blindness], which is an ongoing work in which her models have always been aware that they are being photographed. In some images these subjects are shown alone and in others in pairs, thus refuting the idea of blind people’s isolation.
Another subsequent series entitled La luz que me ciega [The Light that Blinds Me] of 2010 took Errázuriz to the small town of El Calvario near Paredones in Chile’s 6th region. Here she met a family affected by achromatopsia, which is a congenital disease that only allows for black and white vision and in which the sight is seriously impaired. Errázuriz’s images capture the modern drama, as the writer Diamela Eltit has described it, of a town with a cemetery filled with gravestones bearing the same surnames, revealing a long history of incest.
Confinement
A direct experience of the lack of freedom of movement in a country living under a dictatorship between 1973 and 1990 may well encourage a search for the reasons that lead to the confinement of certain individuals. This motivation encouraged Paz Errázuriz to repeatedly visit the Philippe Pinel psychiatric hospital in Putaendo, located 200 kilometres from Santiago, where she found people who were totally neglected by their families. Errázuriz made two series of photographs there: El infarto del alma [The Heart Attack of the Soul] of 1992-1994, which also resulted in a book in partnership with the writer Diamela Eltit, and Antesala de un desnudo [Antechamber of a Nude] of 1999.
Avoiding a pessimistic vision, Errázuriz focuses on human ties based around affection and tenderness and on the relationships between couples that spring up in the hospital. These photographs are filled with embraces, holding hands and bodies in close proximity. The most important aspect of El infarto del alma is the emphasis it gives to the individuality of the subjects portrayed and to the emotional ties forged at the hospital.
A few years after completing this series, Errázuriz returned to this world of confinement when she produced Antesala de un desnudo. For that series she selected an everyday location—showers—but one with sinister undertones. The bodies crammed together in a space with dirty walls and stained floors, and above all the sight of naked old women combined with the doors with metal grilles evokes the brutality of the psychiatric system.
Some time after the creation of the series, it emerged that the new director of the Philippe Pinel hospital had introduced improvements to its facilities, a change that also became evident in the staff’s perception of the patients confined there.
Paz Errázuriz
Collections of Fundación MAPFRE
Instituto Moreira Salles
São Paulo
IMS COORDINATION
Miguel Del Castillo
Samuel Titan Jr.
EXHIBITION DESIGN AND GRAPHIC DESIGN
Bloco Gráfico
Nathalia Navarro [assistance]
Stephanie Y. Shu [assistance]
IMS PRODUCTION
Camila Goulart
Márcia Vaz
Marina Marchesan
IMS LOGISTICS AND LOANS
Odette J. C. Vieira [coordenação coordination]
Ake Marc Albert Adje
Nadja dos Santos
TECHNICAL REPORTS
Edna Gaiardoni
SCENOGRAPHY
Elástica
LIGHTING
Fernanda Carvalho
Santa Luz
AUDIOVISUAL EQUIPMENT
Fusion Audio
EXHIBITION SET-UP
Gala
SIGNING
WaterVision
PROOFREADING
Flávio Cintra do Amaral
TRANSLATION
Diane Grosklaus Whitty
Livia Deorsola
IMS COMMUNICATION
Marília Scalzo [coordenação coordination]
Bárbara Giacomet de Aguiar
Mariana Tessitore
Marcela Antunes de Souza
Gustavo de Gouveia Basso
Debora Alexandre
Isabella B. Viana
IMS INTERNET
Alfredo Ribeiro [coordination]
Daniel Pellizzari
Fabio Montarroios
Fernanda Pereira
Laura Klemz
Laura Liuzzi
Nani Rubin
Maria Clara Villas
Daniela França
IMS EDUCATION
Janis Clémen
Anna Clara Hokama
Felipe Ferraro
Júnior Ahzura
Marcella Camillo
Yves Rolland
Beatriz Abade
Geovanna Santana
IMS PAULISTA TEAM
Joana Reiss Fernandes [coordination]
Daniela Marcondes
Roberta Val
Raquel Lehn
Ariadne Moraes Silva
Gabriela Lima
Jackson Ribeiro da Silva
Raimundo Hermínio
Sebastião Ribeiro da Silva
Wilson Lopes
Gabriela Caetano D’Amoreira
SHIPPING
Millenium
This exhibition was organized by Fundación MAPFRE in collaboration with Instituto Moreira Salles.