AN “ANTI-ARCHIVE” MADE HOME: ANGIE SAIZ AT THE BIENNIAL OF MEDIA ARTS
What turns a place into a home? Chilean artist presents the immersive installation Bemol, which through sound and visuality builds an intimate and subjective cartography of inhabiting again a familiar environment.
Centro Cultural Recoleta (Chile) is presenting Bemol by Angie Saiz through November 21, as part of the 17th Biennial of Media Arts in Santiago. The exhibition offers an immersive aural experience combining an audiovisual piece with a sound composition, alongside texts by curator Nicolás Oyarce and Pablo Vergara.
If a cartography is typically fed by hard data and objective records, Saiz’s proposal is the opposite: the “anti-archive” of a place —built from her own subjectivity, yet broad enough to be interpreted in multiple ways— becomes the key factor for constructing the map.
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Angie Saiz: Bemol
Bemol emerged after a period of displacement and instability for the artist, following the loss of her home in 2019. After three years of hardship, she settled again in 2024 in the Yungay neighborhood of Santiago de Chile. Once the neighborhood became her new home, she began a creative exercise of recording the immediate memory of her intimate space and surroundings through audio captures, photographs, and video, reflecting zones of affection and disaffection.
She thus began to assemble an “anti-archive,” as Saiz describes it: “An irregular cartography, a capricious and ambiguous mapping. An anti-archive is an inexact and undefined record of an ongoing process that accounts only for one’s own gaze.”
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Angie Saiz: Bemol
From this catalog of sounds and images without concrete or identifiable references, the artist produced a work that renders the intimate and subjective imaginary of a landscape she now considers home.
Complementing the installation, two sound-visual concerts are planned. The first will take place on Thursday, November 20 at 2 p.m. in the Adolfo Couve room at the Visual Arts Department of the University of Chile. The second will be on Friday, November 21 at 8 p.m., as the closing event for both the exhibition and the Biennial of Media Arts at Centro Cultural de Recoleta.
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Angie Saiz: Bemol
Angie Saiz (b. 1977, Chile) is a visual artist trained in Fine Arts and Film at the University of Chile. She has produced works in photography, public intervention, video installation, and sound art. Her practice addresses aesthetic questions emerging from biographical imagination, the tensions and crises between old and new technologies, and the concepts of trauma, limbo, and ruin. She has undertaken residencies, exhibitions, and curatorial projects in Portugal, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and the United States. She was featured among the highlighted artists in the book Mujeres artistas en Chile (2010–2020).
Bemol is on view through November 21 at Centro Cultural de Recoleta (Inocencia 2711, Recoleta), Chile.
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