Curator: Alexis Fabry

Leonora Vicuña portrays the sinister Santiago of the darkest days of the dictatorship: the poorly lighted streets, the bars, the restaurants, the dives frequented by waiters, dancers, drunks, transvestites, and poets. People whose lives could be written in chalk on the slates and whose silhouette she caresses with the tip of her colored pencils on silver gelatin: ashen nights of curfews, when the few sparks of desire still shone. In those same years, together with Ramón Díaz Eterovic, she edited the poetry journal La Gota Pura, which was distributed internationally, in spite of the censors. She also created, with the help of others, the Asociación de Fotógrafos Independientes (AFI), whose images managed to escape the ironclad control of the Chilean military.

Leonora Vicuña Navarro:

Photographer, born in Chile in 1952.

With a degree in Anthropology from a French university in Paris, she completed her professional photography studies at the Escuela Fotoarte in Santiago de Chile. She was awarded a diploma in multimedia production from the French film school École supérieure de réalisation audiovisuelle in Paris (ESRA).

Both in Chile and abroad, she has participated in numerous exhibitions: Días de tango (1980), Hotel-Chile (1981 and 1984), L'écume des bars (1985), Intérieurs (1987), Photo-Peinture (1990), Illuminations Paris-Santiago (1992), Mythographies (1994), Les faubourgs de Barcelone (1996).

Her work has also been displayed in group exhibitions: Rencontres Internationales d'Arles (1986 and 1994), Photographier l'Amérique latine (1988), several itinerant exhibitions organized by the Vrais Rêves gallery in Lyon (1989-1999), Seis visionse (1995) and Paris/Flash in Santiago de Chile (1996), Latin America 1940-2013 in New York (2014), PhotoEspaña (2015), Expo Voces 2015 in London, at the Armory Show in New York (2016), FotoMéxico (2019 and 2020), among others.

Her multimedia photographic works Bares y garzones, Un homenaje visual and Nosotras Lafkenche de Huapi have been exhibited in Chile, France, Germany and the United States.

She has received several awards including: Amigos del Arte (1981), Fondart Nacional (2001 and 2006), Fundación Andes (2002), Fondart Regional (2006) and the Altazor de las Artes award (2010) as well as the Fondart for excellence in integrated arts in 2006.

Her work forms part of private collections in her own country, as well as Spain and France.

Since 2021, she has been directing the Puerto-Peral space, a place for workshops and residencies for poets and visual artists, in the commune of Carahue, Araucanía, close to her current home.

Portrait by Mauricio Ascencio Zúñiga.

The exhibition Carrusel de melancolías is supported by Bodega Catena Zapata and Sinteplast.