The increase in the price of public transport turned within a few days into an unprecedented popular revolt against neoliberal policies in Chile. After months of protest, Santiago was filled with rubble, graffiti, and artistic interventions that showed the deep discomfort of the population with the structures of society. The residual materials left by the protests destabilized the urban progress but also created an opportunity for reimagining public spaces. In this project, I reconstruct Plaza de la Dignidad (the epicenter of the protest) and its surroundings using 3D scans. Buildings and monuments, that were intervened by protesters are re-combined to give birth to a landscape that communicates a different message than the one originally intended. During the protests, Chilean women adopted hoods as symbols of their protest for equality. Collaborating with Chilean and Berlin-based women and the LGBT+ community, we made masks/hoods to create hybrid characters that will inhabit this virtual landscape to challenge the paradigm of binary identity. Viewers are invited to engage with fragments of collective memory as a creative force for collective transformation.
Valentina is a Chilean media artist based in Berlin. She holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the National Art Center of México and a Master's degree in Kunst und Media from the University of the Arts Berlin. She combines different techniques like video, sound, and VR to create immersive multisensory experiences to explore relationships between art, technology, and society. Her audiovisual pieces aim to show the complexity of the world as an always-changing interconnected system and to use technology to discover and reveal our humanity. Her artistic journey includes appearances at Ars Electronica, Transmedial Vorspiel, Gallery Durchgang Basel, ACUD and Circle Gallery in Berlin. Beyond the gallery walls, she has brought her creations to life through A/V live performances at festivals such as Little Island in Greece, Fiber Festival in Amsterdam, Mapping Festival in Geneva, Strichka Festival in Kyiv, Gamma Festival in Saint Petersburg, as well as Atonal and Dave Festival in Germany, among others.
