A Fragile General and Natural History of the Indies, a spill 2021
Steel, wood, foam, fiberglass, aqua resin, plaster, water pump, unfired recycled clay, water 6 ft x 6 ft x 5.5 feet     Valentina’s work looks to different academic disciplines to reorganize structures of knowledge and power, represented through the categorization and commodification of natural resources and landscape, within the colonial project of Latin America.    Valentina approaches texts and illustrations embedded in imperialist impulses, focused on colonial imagery from historical, scientific, and literary sources. She extracts from illustrations and manuscripts of early descriptions of flora and fauna, as source material for drawings, videos and installations.     Said material translations become colonial residues as a platform from which to enact their dissolution.  By building a reciprocity between research and material investigation, her work aims to unveil power narratives that permeate the ideas of nature and landscape representation through material phenomena, where changes in form and dissolution resonate with the current moment of environmental collapse and global dysfunction.    Interested in performing the quick decay of these temporary structures with precarious materials, where unfired clay dissolving in water, paper backdrops, cardboard and wood models become material manifestations of time and ideology. These become political material operations that explore what decolonial aesthetics might look like.     Valentina Soto Illanes (b. 1988, Santiago, Chile) is a Latin American artist currently living and working in Philadelphia. She has exhibited her work mainly in South America and partaken in interdisciplinary residencies and research projects, interested in how disciplines of knowledge categorize the encounter of flora and fauna.