Francisca Rojas
Bio
Francisca Rojas (Santiago, Chile, 1985) is a visual artist who lives and works in her hometown. She graduated in Art at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and in Heritage Restoration at the Universidad de Chile. She completed her studies with an MA in Cultural and Creative Industries from King's College London and a Master's in Visual Arts from the Universidad de Chile.
Her work—made primarily in ceramics and textiles—takes various cultural, historical, and/or traditional objects as reference, redefining them from a contemporary perspective. Her pieces have been exhibited in renowned museums, galleries, and fairs internationally, such as the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts, ROFA Projects all in the USA. In Chile: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo; Museo de Artes Visuales; Gabriela Mistral Gallery; Factoría Santa Rosa; Patricia Ready Gallery; TIM Gallery; D21 Gallery; BECH Gallery; Centro de Extensión de la Universidad Católica; Sala el Farol of the Universidad de Valparaíso; Centro Cultural El Tranque; Centro Cultural Casa Gonzalo Rojas. SWAB and Estampa in Spain, Zona Maco and Omar Alonso Gallery in Mexico, ArtBo in Colombia, among others.
Her accolades include the Premio MAVI Arte Joven (honorable mention, 2020), the Distinción Especial, Concurso Nacional de Arte Joven de la Universidad de Valparaíso (2019), and first place at the Concurso de Artes Visuales CIS (2017 and 2019). She has also been the recipient of the Chile Crea Scholarships (2020), Chile Scholarships (2010–2011), the Beca de Excelencia Académica Padre Hurtado (2003–2006), and various funds from the Chilean Ministry of Culture.
Statement
Francisca Rojas sees her artistic practice as a space in which to enunciate subaltern art, that is to say, art produced on the margins of the world's great capital cities, and that examines the multiple facts of this condition of being on the periphery. Her work, made for the most part in ceramics and textiles, explores the territory and its cultural objects, seeking to blur the boundaries between the fine arts and crafts, and vindicating non-Western aesthetics within contemporary art. In this show the artist explores the ancestral textile creation of the quipus, offering a rereading of these objects of her heritage through their link with current computer technology.
The quipu is an ancient textile mechanism used by the cultures of the Andes region to record and transmit information. Its technology was based on codifying threads and knots, to which were attributed numerical, chronological and narrative meanings. Its use expanded extensively across the Tahuantinsuyu, a territory that today corresponds to Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile and the north-east of Argentina, until, during the Spanish conquest, when it was forbidden to be found standing outside Christian faith, only alphabetic writing was permitted. In that process were lost many of its signifying attributes; today, only the numeric notation associated with knots has been fully deciphered.
In this way, Francisca's work reclaims the quipu as a sophisticated ancestral computational system, one which she links to contemporary digital technology. To make this link visible, she combines two temporally and culturally data organization systems: the binary code —endemic to current computation— and the numeric notation of the quipus. Through sequences of zeros and ones represented by knots, the artist encrypts, in one of her various woven texts, various texts, such as popular proverbs that are part of oral narration, or extracts from historical documents, most of them from the era of the conquest of America. Similarly, she organizes these textile dispositifs into configurations suggestive of chips or integrated circuits, turning them into genuine "memory cards" that explore the poetics of time, technology and cultural heritage.
