Gabriel Chaile: “I have no environmental concerns, but my work seems to be”

Gabriel Chaile (Tucumán, 1985) is the only Argentine artist invited to participate in the central exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale — in addition to the participation of each national pavilion, which, in the case of Argentina, will be represented by Mónica Heller —, a mecca of contemporary art who returns after a year of suspension due to pandemic, something only happened between the wars, where she will present five monumental adobe sculptures.

“I accept challenges, they fill me with energy and fears that I enjoy overcoming, it's like eating chili pepper,” he says and laughs. I always wanted to be a great artist, not just because of a personal desire, many people that I love very much have helped me with that desire.”

From Portugal, where he lives, the creator of the monumental Barro Luchonas is preparing the pieces he will present at the Biennial, which this year is inspired by the surrealism of the British Leonora Carrington, an invitation to think about the mutation of bodies and their relationship with technologies and the Earth.

Chaile is a researcher. His work is anthropological, it draws on ancestral images, focuses on the search for its roots and connects with popular culture, with marginal communities and with global elites, who are the ones who today buy that work. When he started making the monumental clay ovens that today admires the cream of artistic criticism, his mother told him you do the same as your grandmother but giant.

His production is structured around what he called “the engineering of necessity” (objects created to alleviate borderline situations) and “the genealogy of form” (unfolding the story that these objects bring in their historical repetition). His adobe ovens are a synthesis of that: ovens that are also birds, which also have a human form, with which emergency geographies intervene cooking and offering food to whoever wants it.

Chaile decoded these concepts and adopted that political gesture (feeding) of childhood memory. His father was a bricklayer and in his house any plaster could be missing, but the clay oven where his mother made bread, the main family economy, was the architecture that had to be attended to. The Aguas Calientes series, which he sold in a few hours at Art Basel 2019, also summarizes these ideas with precision: popular pots intervened and a fired mate intervention heated in a brick with electric resistance.

Eighth son of a working class family, he discovered his art when his mother let him not go to kindergarten and dedicated himself to being alone and drawing all day. It never occurred to him to change drawings for toys. Chaile was going to turn 10 years old in Buenos Aires when she traveled to Lisbon for a residence, had arrived in 2009 to study at Di Tella and in 2017 she had started that meteoric rise that, against all odds of isolation, meant exponential growth in pandemic.

In 2020, COVID made him stay in Lisbon and began a movement that led him to the Heni Artists Agency gallery, in London, and to the new New York headquarters of the Buenos Aires gallery Barro with his exhibition They talk about obscurity but I am dazzled. He participated in an exhibition in Berlin with a large stringed instrument and closed the residence with the exhibition Pies de mud. In 2021 he arrived at the Serpentine Gallery and the Frieze fair, in London, and in October he participated in the Triennial of the New Museum, in New York.

The one who summoned him to Venice was the Italian curator Cecilia Alemani, responsible for the central exhibition of the Biennial that on April 23 will be deployed in the Giardini and Arsenale of the old naval shipyards of a force that was an empire. They had worked together in Art Basel Cities. “In this Biennial there is a strong look at spaces and forms that were considered peripheral,” says Chaile in dialogue for this article. I think that the pandemic made us rethink, among many other things, the categories of power and that here we review some of that: how do those others who were not close to those spaces think”.

This Venice Biennale is entitled “The Milk of Dreams”, the name of a children's book that the British Carrington wrote for her children when she lived in Mexico, and proposes a reflection on the definitions of the human and its link with nature and technologies through the metamorphoses of bodies.

It is difficult not to think of Chaile's ovens and that popular function they undertake around the world, in their ability to modify the bodies of those who know them by taking their food, or their seven-meter-high Luchonas, in the enjoyment that these mothers continue to care for after the transformation of their bodies and a social demand often disheartening.

— How are your themes and narratives linked to the Biennial's slogan?

“I never think how my work is linked to the group exhibitions to which I am invited, I trust the curatorship. But I think what you do makes sense, when Cecilia tells the axes of the Biennial I feel that my work is present because it can coincide with the development of those points. I am very interested in transformation as a means and, before that, the potential of something worthy of being transformed by internal and external factors. I like those ancient and obvious metaphors like the woman or the birdman, which I don't necessarily take from surrealism, the isthmus I study, but from primitive cultures and their way of narrating with images.

—The Biennial organized all its activities on principles of environmental sustainability. Is there a link between what you work with and the idea of the planet as the only habitable house?

“It's strange what I'm going to answer but I'm going to be honest, I don't have environmental concerns even though I was raised with a great respect for nature. A few years ago an artist from Catamarca invited me to make an offering to Pacha Mama, I had never made an offering before. It was nice and intense, I had never seen the earth as a being before, as if we were ticks of the earth. What I want to say is that I am not a committed person or a militant person in the subject, but my work seems like it does, people related to ceramics and environmentalism always write to me, I don't have answers from my opinion but maybe my work does. In this sense, I am surprised by ideas that are outside the ethics of an artist and that perhaps do not match his politics as an ordinary citizen, it is something that I still wonder, it seems that one in the desire to concentrate comes to ideas that are more intense than an artist's own ethics as a citizen.

— “Artists can help us imagine new ways of living together” Alemani said when she announced her participation in Venice. What does this Biennial mean in a world that hasn't finished coming out of the pandemic?

—Every time I go out, it seems that everything returns to “normal” and that is what scares me the most, I am interested in reinvention, how people have changed our practices in order to sustain the personal economy, what new modes of society appeared and how the powerful ones have always maintained a space that was never in danger. He let his guard down in every aspect and it is time to know what these new practices are going to be, if they can really be an evolution towards a more interesting coexistence. It will depend a lot on how much the pandemic tightened us psychically and economically. We are bugs of habit and comfort.

—With the emergence of new technologies such as NFTs, does the big art scene want to return to the unplugged and artisanal?

“Lately I have been thinking that everything is nature, because everything is born from it, although a body can generate polluting elements. At times I wonder if returning to nature means returning to the earth or to elements derived from it. All that is fashionable, you see it in stores, in clothes, but I don't know how to understand fashion: whether it is the decision of a few capitalists who see that the new big business is going to work out there or if it is the result of the awareness of a few who are gaining visibility with those ideas that try to improve the quality of life of beings who inhabit the earth. I think of the film Nausica, the princess of the valley of the wind.

—You had an atypical 2020 and 2021 for the rest of the world. What does Venice mean in your flight plan, where to continue the journey?

—These are the same questions that I ask myself and at times they strongly affect my mood, they make me think like when I became a monotaxist and I didn't want that because I didn't know how I was going to pay for it, month by month... I won't be able to, etc etc... that is to say adult life. Today I ask myself the same question and I feel that my practice is demanding to have more waist and I accept the challenges, I love them, they fill me with energy and fears that I enjoy overcoming, it's like eating chili pepper. I always wanted to be a great artist, not only because of personal desire, many people that I love very much have helped me in that desire, supporting me, giving me encouragement. I have read stories of the great personalities of humanity, I liked to analyze them. There is a lot of dedication to that and I like conviction and a sense of humor.

—In Portugal you invented the NVS gallery with friends. Is this another one of the possible scales?

— NVS is like those childhood things: between the circus, the laboratory, the library and the TV show, a platform that adapts to our needs and desires. We did a beautiful one-day expo, by Spaniard Juan Perdiguero Trillo, in a clandestine place he chose, full of graffiti. He placed some paintings on boards that he made after a year of discussions. We made choripanes and beers and people came, to the police, who came to evict us. We invited them to watch because it was only going to last six hours. I didn't ask them what they thought.

Chaile and the indigenous, artisan and peronist sentimental education that marked his work

The Tucuman artist Gabriel Chaile reviewed how his very first personal story and the sentimental education that his work marked was his maternal grandmother, “an indigenous woman, artisan and Peronist”, his only anchorage with art, “a woman who did what she knew and wanted and that gave her sustainability and respect in the people” and the one who gave her” sustenance” to his “conviction as an artist”.

The story goes back to Trancas, where his parents are from, “peasant workers of landowners without access to their own land because their employers have it within their property,” he explains, “but one of my grandparents managed to take land and make it his own during historical Peronism: the land belongs to the one who works it and that allowed, once grandfather died, my family was looking for a place in the capital because I thought there would be a better future there”.

“They came from moving to moving and had lived in Tafí Viejo, a city close to the capital where many people disappeared during the last dictatorship. As a child I listened to their stories about soldiers kicking doors and snatching neighbors, in which they had to bury the photos of Perón and Evita. And I was born in San Miguel de Tucumán, with these Protestant parents, who were very Bible scholars and learning about those stories, especially that of my maternal grandmother Rosario Liendro, an indigenous woman, artisan and Peronist, who was my only anchorage to art. A woman who did what she knew and wanted and that gave her sustainability and respect.”

“I tell you this previous story,” he clarifies, “because it is what gave sustenance to my conviction as an artist, although my link with art was always there. I have very good memories of always being drawing, my family says that I never let go of the sketchbook. I also liked to put things together: we invented a circus, a tree house, a science workshop, a library, we had a TV show with my sister and friends from the neighborhood, we celebrated birthdays with anything. Every time an animal died (we had many) they let me open it to see what it had died of and I became the one who gave the diagnosis”.

I also had a collection of newspaper clippings that told the story of Tucumán's past, “pure aristocracy,” says Chaile, “I loved going to a place full of garbage near my home and that's how I started building my library, I still have some books there. I remember my brother bought a dictionary, these from encyclopedias, and I read it. I loved that I had a lot of images and told things from different places, when I was bored I read the dictionary.”

In the summers he liked to make sculpture, he says, “Or try to restore something that I found on the street, I imagined that it would make it incredible but since we didn't have so many tools, it often failed. All this linked me to art, to inventiveness; they told me that before another family lived in our land and I watered the fund all the time because that was how things were found buried. And I imagined what the lives of those others would have been like.”

“This is how my passion for archaeology was born, my art teacher recommended that my mother send me to the Art School. I repeated first grade and the only subject in which I stood out was drawing. Then I adapted but I always kept drawing, I loved science fairs because it showed what we did in the year, I won a prize with a drawing made with chlorophyll, it didn't have colors and I managed to do it. I am the youngest of eight brothers who protected me a lot and didn't let me do jobs that they did, but I saw all those struggles,” he concludes.

Source: Telam S.E.

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