Constanza Alarcón Tennen
Constanza Alarcón Tennen (Santiago, 1986) is a multidisciplinary artist. She is interested in transmaterial dialogues, while her work includes sound installations, videos, sculptures and performances, among other media. She graduated from a BFA at Universidad Católica de Chile and the MFA in Sculpture at Yale University in 2015. Her work has been shown internationally at video screenings, collective and solo exhibitions at venues such as Patricia Ready Gallery (Santiago), El Dorado (Bogotá), the XIII New Media Biennial (Chile), Atelierhaus Salzamt (Linz), among others. She has participated in residencies such as Delfina Foundation (London), B.A.S.E Tsonami (Valparaíso) and AIM at the Bronx Museum (NY). Besides her artistic practice, Constanza is a teacher and translates texts. She recently took part in a residency and exhibition at Künstlerforum Bonn in Germany and published her first poetry compilation as an artist's book with Otra Sinceridad independent press.
I think of my work as a place where different elements are summoned. I see myself as someone who orchestrates an encounter between materials, people, disciplines, experiences. I'm interested in objects, sounds, stories, that transgress the boundaries of their own nature, that become multiple and simultaneous. Sculptures of a double existence, fictional memories, orality without words. I see my practice as a space of fluidity, which I understand as a movement where materials and ideas migrate between projects.
Fluidity allows for the construction of technological and technical hybrids, which for me has become an emancipatory way of working from South America. I work in sound, installation, text, and sculpture. But these separate languages are always intertwined, affected.
I am intrigued by what cannot be held or represented, and what is left outside of records, whether for political reasons, or magnitude. This has oriented the way I’ve approached landscape and territory, an important subject in my practice. For a long time, I worked with the experiences of earthquakes. How they are remembered and perceived, and how distant this bodily knowledge is from scientific accounts of the event. Subjective elaborations are more interesting to me, because I care more about the messiness of incomplete memories than the rigorous distance of data. I’m fascinated by emotional inaccuracy.
In recent years, my interest has mutated into the construction of new understandings of nature that arise from an integrated view on storytelling and the possibilities of eroticism, touch, and desire, as a lens through which to see the world of both human and non-human entities.