Awakened Volcanoes: Sandra Vásquez de la Horra and Her Symbolic Universe

While some perceive something dark and profound, others see lightness, or rather, a levity in addressing complex themes. Los volcanes despertares (The Awakened Volcanoes) features mainly drawings and objects on paper, reflecting the interests of Chilean artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra . She was born in Valparaíso and has lived in Berlin since the 1990s. In 2023 , she won the prestigious Käthe Kollwitz Prize, becoming the first Latin American to receive it.

With a traveling exhibition from the United States and Chile , he arrives at the Malba Museum with a body of work that oscillates between autobiographical, symbolic and mythological aspects to talk about identity, memory and dreams.

In them, sensuality is combined with motherhood, birth, and nature, where a folded body becomes a mountain, fragile and delicate, but a mountain nonetheless.

Vásquez de la Horra draws fetuses, babies, bodies that merge with animals (women with moose heads, for example) or that overlap and crowd together until they become an unbreakable unity in the face of the phrase "the people united will never be defeated."

In a video Vásquez de la Horra recorded with the Denver Art Museum, where the exhibition was first presented, he defines his work as a compendium of research involving philosophical, religious, anthropological, ethnographic, and pagan ritual theories that he uses in different disciplines to explain other ways of seeing.

"My work is sometimes reflective, sometimes satirical, and sometimes simply alchemy," he explains during the meeting in his home studio.

There , she describes herself as a hyperactive person who, since the age of 12, has poured her interests into art and discovered her potential thanks to other people who supported her. She has an obsession with northern Chile and the desert where her great-grandmother comes from, as well as with nomadism, something that runs through her work, since everything presented in this exhibition could easily be folded, stored away, and disappeared.

That's the great power of paper , one of the most malleable media when it comes to revealing oneself to the world, as can be seen in urban expressions like pasteup. Making, folding, sending, and working with the precarious.

Putting an entire career in a small bag and leaving as she did so many times in her life, also letting in the topic of immigration , something not at all foreign to the life of the artist, who despite the movement did not abandon her customs and roots (when something is good it is not lost).

Another thing that Vásquez de la Horra highlights is how dreams are a tool through which she generates a bridge of ideas and experiences that marked her, through which she reflects in search of "a dimension of her own", improvising like musicians but with materials instead of instruments, from which emanate images of deified and powerful female figures, enlarged faces that intertwine with plants or, on the contrary, flowers that contain heads inside and become one with the central figure and torsos that are transformed into landscapes.

They also appear on a large wall composed of many drawings , creators of spells, a devouring viper, women fused in the actor of love and pleasure, representations of death that refer to the imaginary of distant times that confuse, delight and disturb in equal measure.

Something similar to the ex-voto that drags from Catholic religious education , "like going to thank the saint" she recounts in another interview for DW, highlighting the mixture of beliefs that occurred on these shores and that caught her attention after moving away from Catholicism at a very young age, which in her context was frowned upon and which led her to perceive a strong interest in people who believed in something when she had lost that will.

"They are two worlds that live in me" says Vásquez de la Horra while trying to understand the divinities and Pachamama as landscapes , the women who speak of the world and what is happening and the mother earth that she represents in various ways, maintaining that more than an artist she understands herself as an inventor, a work that goes from the outside in.

Whether Sandra Vásquez de la Horra's work arouses concern, attraction or intrigue is up to the viewer.

What is certain is that the world has set its sights on this artist who folds and unfolds , always in search of new challenges and without losing her connection with her roots, the attachment to her grandfather's land, her childhood marked by the Chilean landscape and those who influenced her before anyone else, like Cecilia Vicuña, opening the way to new interpretations of spirituality, folklore, mythology and the way in which female figures, their bodies and the themes that accompany them enter the canon of contemporary art.

The Awakened Volcanoes , by Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, until July 28 in room 3 of Malba (Av. Figueroa Alcorta 3415).