Johanna Unzueta – Where Industrial Buildings Come in Pocket Sizes

C&: I am often cowed by big industrial buildings – they have something indomitable. Yet your work deconstructs them in a very amusing way: You make them appear in unexpected spaces, and the material you use is rather unconventional. Has your relationship to those urban and natural spaces changed since you rebuilt them?

JU: When I started my series of sculptures more than ten years ago, I was thinking about their landscape. My interest was focused on the history that these places contained in their architecture: the iron, the concrete, and the wooden structures. In between all this I somehow saw the humanity of these buildings – grain elevators, gas tanks, cooling towers, windmills, and even the emblematic water towers from the rooftops of New York City. And I decided to replicate them with felt. I don’t really know if my relationship with them changed, but I do feel closer to them now.

C&: In 2013 you started a series of drawings. How do they speak to your other media?

JU: The starting point for this new body of work was simple experimentation and it was also a personal healing process. After years of working with felt, cutting and sewing, I started to have some health issues with my hands and needed a physical break from it. My drawings slowly started growing in dimension and complexity. When I learned how to weave, I also learned to dye the yarn with natural dyes taken from plants and vegetables, which was a profound experience I had in the south of Chile with Eugenia, a Mapuche woman. Although there are some variations from that experience in my current work on paper, the tinting techniques are pretty much the same, specifically in the making of the colors.

C&: Did you develop your work with local people before? And is this also something you will do for your Berlin Biennale contribution?

JU: At this point I am still in the production process for the Berlin Biennale, but what I can tell you is that I will present a series of new large drawings with respective support structures, and a mural piece. I have worked with murals before in different contexts and places in collaboration with local people. I like to think that creating these large drawings in public spaces and involving people from that particular context or community transforms the drawings into more democratic pieces of art. Although I know they are following a set of instructions I give, the experience of making it together opens the work up. In the end, the work is out of there, in the world, available to everyone.

C&: How do you observe the developments within the Chilean art scene from afar?

JU: Since I moved to New York, I have always kept a relationship with Chile. This is important to me because it is not rare that Chilean artists leave the country and then disappear locally. We should stick around. My generation is what we call the 90s. We are the first post-Pinochet generation, which can particularly be seen in the arts as we broke away from the conceptual and political forms of the 70s and 80s. Back then artists collaborated with poets, writers, and critical thinkers. They made shows and performances in alternative galleries and published magazines. It was a very vital and interesting scene, yet also very dogmatic. My generation grew up in the dictatorship, but we trained as artists in the transition period. We had other references too and were probably more international and pop-based, influenced by the early internet. Altogether we tread a bit lighter, or at least our outlook is more positive. We are looking into the future and not into the past or terrible present.

Johanna Unzueta is a participating artist in the 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, taking place from June 9 to September 9, 2018.

Theresa Sigmund is a freelance cultural scientist and practicioner. As an editor/coordinator of Contemporary And (C&) she is based in Berlin.

This interview was initially published in the new C& Print Issue #9. You can read the full magazin here.