TEMPO AT MAM CHILOÉ: PAINTING MEMORY IN THE HOUSES OF THE SOUTH
Painting is presented here not only as an aesthetic language, but as a symbolic, intimate, and reflective tool that invites us to view the everyday from new perspectives.
At the end of October, the Museo de Arte Moderno de Chiloé (MAM) inaugurated TEMPO, a project that transformed more than twenty-three abandoned houses into living spaces of creation, memory, and community. Over several months, artists Jazmín Vera, Ofelia Lamas, Mauro Olivos, and Rocío Cheuque, together with filmmaker Rory Barrientos, traveled through Curaco de Vélez, Castro, and Chonchi to paint on the original glass windows of unused homes. Each piece depicts faces, trades, and animals of the territory, in direct dialogue with the families and stories that inhabit the Chilote landscape.
In many rural areas of the island, traditional houses have fallen into disrepair due to the passage of time, abandonment, and migration to urban centers. TEMPO proposes a poetic gesture that, through art, seeks to make these structures visible again and to re-signify them as an essential part of collective memory and local identity.
“More than intervening in the houses, it was about listening to their voices. Each window holds the story of those who once looked through it from the inside, and of those who now look at it again from the outside,” says Jazmín Vera, the project’s director. The exhibition at MAM brings these paintings into the museum space through a display that recreates rural windows, accompanied by audiovisual projections documenting the process and a short film directed by Barrientos. Visitors can thus wander through a territory reconstructed through shared memory and sensitivity.
TEMPO invites reflection on living heritage and the bond between art and community—moving painting from the museum into the landscape, and then returning it to the museum as a poetic echo of that journey. The project, funded by Fondart Nacional 2025 of the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage, will continue its path with guided visits to the intervened houses on the Rilán Peninsula, inviting the public to experience in situ the creative process behind each work.
*Cover image: courtesy of TEMPO.
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