Inclusion, Incision, Imbunche: Catalina Parra’s Collages and the Question of Justice

• In Event: Inclusion, Justice, History

Abstract

At the height of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, the catalogue for Catalina Parra’s influential art exhibition titled Imbunches includes an unattributed poetic text that begins, with no clear syntax, “unir reunir,” and continues with paratactically situated descriptions of acts of suturing that recall the indigenous (Chilote) figure of the imbunche, a mythological prisoner whose orifices are sewn closed and yet is paradoxically a seer. That is, the notions of unification and reunification, ostensibly appealing, especially in a country rent by violent repression, are associated with closure, censorship, and a mending of wounds that is more violent than curative. The poetic text is followed by collages that include different kinds of text and images of Parra’s imbunches, which are themselves sculptural collages made primarily from newspaper and cotton. Parra’s formal techniques, then, engage and interrogate the actions of “unifying and reunifying” so ambivalently announced in the opening text, in a work that evidently addresses the question of justice in relationship to the powerful injustices perpetrated by the Chilean dictatorship. Her work did not start or end with the dictatorship, however, and this paper considers her use of collage in relation to the nature of disjuncture and connection in different historical moments, as recently as 2016. Although her work tends to be understood as a simple protest against censorship and repression that ended long ago, I will argue that her work addresses complex and enduring questions about the nature of community, justice, and representation.

Author

• Kate Jenckes, University of Michigan