Photographic exhibition “The silence of applause”

Photographic exhibition “The silence of applause”

• Elsa Martin Room, Raddatz House, Av. Vicente Pérez Rosales 1305, Puerto Varas.
• Opening: Saturday 3 August – 11:30 am.
• Until the 15 of August.

Following the lockdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, hundreds of performing arts venues remained silent, uninhabited and frozen. These places of encounter, movement and creation remained completely silent for almost a year as mandated by the government.

The photographic series “The silence of applause”, by national photographer Daniel Corvillón Achondo and curated by designer and visual communicator Carola Ureta Marín, is presented as a testimony to the vulnerability of culture and, in particular, of the performing arts in our country. The project, managed by the Fogata Cultura Foundation, seeks to make this loneliness and abandonment visible through various images of theatre and dance spaces, as a cry of protest from deserted theatres.

In 2021, during the second wave of confinement decreed by the government, Daniel Corvillón visited more than ten cultural spaces in the Metropolitan Region. Through his camera, he captured that stillness, that darkness, and that silence. The central and leading element of the series is light. Using only the lighting of the spaces themselves, the contrast allows us to measure the abandonment and the lack of the vital engine of these venues: the artists, the public, and the work team behind each place.

“To portray this abandonment, this emptiness, I intervened in the space as little as possible, so lighting was vital. We used the light in each room, according to the possibilities and limitations of each place, without external interventions. In most of them we only used the guard light, that dim and subtle light with which the theatre welcomes us, inviting us to take a seat, which illuminates the absence and evokes the melancholy of returning to inhabit the room, the stage, the seats,” reflects Corvillón.

The closure – and subsequent limited capacity – of the venues exacerbated the exhaustion of uncertainty and job instability of the artistic community, which, combined with the dependence on competitive funds, confirms the precariousness of this sector year after year.

“The path towards sustainability in culture and the performing arts is related to their social value. During the development of this project we were faced with the instability of cultural spaces, the dismemberment of work teams and the absence of the public. So we sought to capture this emptiness through photographic images to contribute to reflection and raise awareness, in an artistic way, of this situation as a small cry of protest that would remain engraved in the historical cultural memory,” explains Tania Araya, co-founder of Fogata Cultura, a cultural management and communication studio dedicated to promoting and disseminating the performing arts.

Cultural venues and centers are a meeting point, they generate community, they build a collective identity. There is an emotional relationship with the community that was on the verge of disappearing due to the pandemic. How do these places manifest themselves without an audience, without their artists? How do they vibrate? How do they breathe? “The silence of applause” is an invitation to revisit these places, take a seat in their seats, breathe the emptiness and listen to the absence.

The photographed spaces that participate in this exhibition are Teatro La Memoria, Teatro Sidarte, Centro Nave, Teatro Municipal de La Pintana, Matucana 100, GAM, Teatro Nacional Chileno, Estación Mapocho, Teatro Aleph and Espacio Vitrina.

The exhibition will be held as part of the Month of Photography at the Centro Cultural Bosque Nativo in Puerto Varas. On Saturday, August 3, it will be inaugurated with a discussion with the artist Daniel Corvillón at 11:30 a.m. at Casa Raddatz.

About Daniel Corvillon

Photographer with more than 20 years of experience in the field, with outstanding participation in the editorial, advertising and artistic fields in Chile. During his career he has portrayed important national and international figures, architectural spaces in various environments, stage works by great directors and developed different campaigns, catalogues, product and fashion photographs. Inspired by the composition and construction of light, he has dedicated himself to rescuing and recording unique moments that hide a story, a memory, an identity, an emotion, a beauty that he tries to capture in each shutter.

“The silence of applause” is the third project that she has carried out together with Carola Ureta. The first corresponds to the book “Giovandy: If you don’t shine, you don’t exist” (2016) in memory and tribute to the artistic work of the stylist Giovandy. The second was “The city as a text” (2020), where they portrayed and immortalized the memory of the walls of the main avenue of Santiago during the Social Outbreak of 2019, days before their whitewashing.