Mutations

Everyone agrees that there will be a different world after the current global health emergency. But before we get to that after, we still have to get there. We are in the in-between. The uncertainty of the in-between is the moment of mutation. In the Chilean case, this experience overlaps with unprecedented social and political unrest: the mutation of the constitutional regime that has sustained the country since the 1973 coup d’état. This uncertain in-between where local political transformation overlaps with global instability, is the core of the Mutations a proposal developed at Austral University of Chile.

The program includes four activities that will present the city’s ecosystem and the southern macro-zone of Chile, in relation to historical, cultural, ecological and visual mutations. This artistic proposal includes eight works which address mutation as an internal condition of art: the place of theater in a world that is crumbling, landscapes of inorganic objects, mutations of domestic space in confinement, the boundary between nature and economy, the oral memory of women in confinement, the urban landscape and urban bodies crushed by the violence of the political revolt, the spectral sound of social claims in relation to their suspension due to the pandemic, and the archeology of the technological mutation in Chile. Seismographs of the in-between, these works are unfinished processes determined by the mutation.

Austral University of Chile, Valdivia (CL)

Located in an incomparable natural and cultural ecosystem in the city of Valdivia, the Austral University of Chile is among the top five universities nationwide and the first regional university in the South of Chile. UACh’s mission is to contribute to the spiritual and material progress of society through the resources of scientific and humanistic knowledge, technological progress and artistic creation. The Artistic Creation Department of the Vice-Chancellorship of Research, Development & Arts is in charge of generating regulations and policies for artistic creation and research in the University and supporting the artistic and professional career development of their academics. The Faculty of Architecture and Arts, also part of UACh, assumes the task of building a unifying and contemporary paradigm for the wide variety of arts and architecture, with the aim of making an effective contribution to society, culture, arts and people in the South.