An inflatable and soft body—a silver balloon—scatters towards the sidewalk in the heart of Santiago, Chile. People walk by touching the strange artifact, curiously looking at the object moving over the public space. Behind the pillow, the Gabriela Mistral Gallery disappears.
Chilean artist Javier González Pesce proposal for Museo en Campaña (Campaign Museum) —an intervention carried out alongside architect Smiljan Radic— aims to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the gallery with an “act of disappearance that works not as an illusion, but in terms of materials".
Inside the structure (and the gallery itself), a series of works by artists such as Rodrigo Araya, Magdalena Atria, Fabiola Burgos, Jorge Cabieses-Valdés, and Patricia Domínguez, among others, is displayed.
Both the floor and the ceiling of the gallery are now covered. They convey us to another world. Moreover, once we're inside the pillow, we see the silhouettes and shadows of the walkers pass by outside the gallery.
Radic and González worked for months on the proposal, and besides playing with levels of transparency, they expect to showcase the work of young and middle-aged Chilean artists, constituting a platform to show the development of new talents from all over the country.
Florence Loewenthal, director of the Gabriela Mistral Gallery, recently explained:
The gallery harbors one of the most representative contemporary art collections of the last 30 years. It is a public space which has a management model and relative flexibility to address the main problems of the visual arts, giving space to adapt both management and programme to the changing contingencies that we permanently face as a cultural space
