CAMILO YÁÑEZ

(Santiago, 1974)

A core figure in Chile’s art scene, Camilo Yáñez’s career as a visual artist, curator, and academic spans almost two decades. Between 2001 and 2008, Yáñez served as curator at Centro Cultural Matucana 100, in Santiago; between 2015 and 2016 he contributed to the creation of Centro Nacional de Arte Contemporáneo Cerrillos, where a former airport was turned into Chile’s first contemporary art center. As an artist, his concerns revolve around “the crisis of institutions,” namely with regards to “politics, the media, and the truth.” His video-essay Poetics, Putrefaction and Polyvision (2018-19) takes biological processes such as decomposition, putrefaction, and reproduction as metaphors of political and social cycles. In his piece, which alternates images of microbiology and the pork industry with excerpts of political documentaries, a voiceover states that “when something is decomposing, elements for construction are being made available.” However, while the content communicated by these fields offer messages of hope for the course of global history, they also “emphasize the notion that decadence is life’s only horizon, and that the engendering of life inevitably comes from death.”