«Resistance and Power» – Séverin Guelpa at Casa-Museo Alberto Baeriswyl (Chile)

Selected as one of the artists to take part in the Casa Museo Alberto Baeriswyl’s residency program, entitled Resistance and Power, the swiss artist Severin Guelpa (1974) experienced the landscapes of the Strait of Magellan, in the Chilean Patagonia, between January 19th and February 5th, 2020.

Occupying the Old Wood Factory of Puerto Yartou, the habitable museum is dedicated to heritage recovery, museography and innovation and receives, annually, with the support of Pro Helvetia, Swiss artists for cultural exchanges in artistic residency programs. Strongly engaged with multidisciplinarity, the museum has been increasingly dedicated to creating intersections between art, science and humanities.

 

Cohabiting the subantarctic territory of Patagonia with six Latin American artists, Guelpa developed four site-specific works with the materials he collected from  abandoned houses, beaches, or plastic waste retrieved from the sea, creating devices that, when activated by the wind, reveal the forces, movements and energies of an environment in constant change. 

Interested in extreme territories, his practice usually relies on the displacement or transformation of discarded materials or building materials as to, with the aid of vernacular knowledge, create connections between human actions and nature, calling into question the current fragile balance.