Josefina Guilisasti
1963, Santiago, Chile
Josefina Guilisasti’s proposal has explored the crossroads between art, heritage and material culture, seeking from the objectual several critical approaches to time. From these she has constructed images and has staged objects through installations, videos, photographs and paintings. However, the pictorial medium and its displacements, and particularly the still life genre, have been a main foundation of her work.
The artistic output of Guilisasti is concerned with historical rescue, as well as traditional knowledge and skills, establishing interdisciplinary dialogues that involve History, anthropology, geography, and handcrafts. The strategy we see in her work resorts to seriality and reiteration.
In her recent search, and by means of collaborative works with scholars and specialists, her work has made explicit an effort to displace authorship. It is an expanded practice that has focused on testimony and the appreciation of knowledge and networks related to craft. By conceiving and providing art with a sensitive registration tool, this side of Josefina Guilisasti’s investigation has progressively involved field work and «field trips», instances in which the artist engages in a direct dialogue with the agents and producers of both tangible and intangible culture.
The heritage object, one of her main interests, embodies that unpaid and non-payable debt to the past, being a container of a key paradox in contemporary societies, that of living amidst oblivion and «musealization», between amnesia and accumulation.