Magic Block

Recent Chilean artists explore the power of art as a platform for working through confining political structures

This book engages the creative and critical strategies at play in works of recent Chilean art that emerge from a reflection on the politics of invisibility: how the operations of the seen and the unseen are understood to perform equally within the material realities of Chilean society. Stemming from two exhibitions and seminars held in Bergen, Norway and Santiago de Chile, curated and organized by Soledad García Saavedra and Brandon LaBelle, Magic Block underscores the processes of appearance and disappearance, memory and forgetting, writing and erasure as social and psychological intensities. Through the works of Chilean artists and writers, the publication highlights art as a powerful platform for working through the political structures that hold the body in a phantasmic grip, and which can be traced and appropriated through unsteady acts of magic. Expressions of secrecy, camouflage, forgetfulness, dematerialization and covert occupation thus enable a giving narrative to those memories that are often subordinated by history. The book includes works by Catalina Bauer, Juan Downey, Claudia Missana, Eugenio Téllez, Sandra Vasquez de la Horra, Michelle-Marie Letelier, Rainer Krause, Gonzalo Díaz/Justo Pastor Mellado Voluspa Jarpa and Enrique Ramírez.

Brandon LaBelle is a sound artist and writer from Los Angeles. Working in the fields of sound, performance, and installation art since 1992, LaBelle aims to draw attention to the dynamics of sound as it is found within spaces and objects, public events and interactions, language and the body. Through a performative interaction with objects, found sound, and minimal electronics, the work draws attention to the quality and nature of what is already there through an emphasis on and displacement of listening and interaction, as a technological and architectural glitch. LaBelle's interest in site-specificity reflects a desire to consider the relationships and tensions between art and a broader social environment. His work has been featured in "Bitstreams" at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in Amplitude of Chance at Kawasaki City Museum Japan, at the 9th International Symposium of Electronic Arts in Liverpool and Manchester, Sampling Rage Festival in Berlin, the ICA London, Experimental Intermedia in New York, the Arizona State University Museum, and as part of Sound as Media at ICC in Tokyo. His work has been released on the SELEKTION , Fringes Recordings , Ground Fault , and La Bruit Secret labels.