Voluspa Jarpa

Fantasmática Latinoamericana

In her work, Fantasmática Latinoamericana, Voluspa Jarpa works from photographs of five public funeral processions following the mysterious deaths of five Latin American presidents. Depicting the crowds and the caskets in grey tones, Jarpa’s paintings underscore the wide impact of these tragic events on the people and politics of the region. Voluspa Jarpa’s work is based upon a meticulous analysis of political, historical, and social documents from Chile and other Latin American countries, which she uses to develop a reflection on the concept of memory. Specifically exploring many facets of the cultural notion of trauma, her work might be seen as a subtle and covert examination of history, its subjectivities, constructions, and still-unresolved mysteries. Her work addresses such subjects as displacement, insecurity, abandonment, and destruction, and the means of representation of the pictorial image that represents these subjects in history.