By Cristián Velasco
What story did they tell us when they told us that we had to do something, and what did we have to do? I don’t remember very well, and that’s why I have no choice but to start again: to start from scratch to be here and show the reader the story I was told.
Suddenly you find yourself immersed in an inherited story. For different reasons, you pay attention to some part of it, and you push that belief woven between the story you were told and what passes through your various levels of perception. Then you outline the possibility of creating a personal account, developing your own thinking, and intuiting an idea of freedom that every gesture and every decision threatens.
We learned behaviors, inherited wounds, and built our personal beliefs in a time that happens with every breath. Despite that, we keep the same questions and live with the same or greater uncertainty in the face of the future. Doubt and vulnerability determine an essential part of our activity. They permanently dismantle what we have learned through the story we were told about the social, political, and cultural order.
I believed in common art as an activity through which I could build my own path, or at least I thought so when I approached the practice of painting in the early 90s. I believed in art as a place that welcomes doubt and permanent exploration, a place to reflect on collective and individual identity, and a way of inhabiting the world as a collective and individual activity done every day and providing a solid transforming power.
Cristián Velasco Guzmán is a visual artist. He was born in Santiago, Chile, on April 1, 1971. Since 1995 he has been a publicist and social communicator at the Mónica Herrera School of Communication, Santiago, Chile. In 2002 he received a Diploma in Visual Arts, from UNIACC, Santiago, Chile. Sensitive to the link art-life, Cristián Velasco has set himself at the crossroads between the individual and the space he inhabits, investigating conceptual and aesthetic problems associated with the body, memory, and the concepts of habitability, territory, and time. Interested in the processes of work and the combinatory possibilities of industrial and artisanal work, he moves freely through painting, textiles, video, photography, performance, and installation.
Cristián’s work can be found at Yam Gallery, at the Instituto Allende.
