In 1997, chilean artist Juan Pablo Langlois named a series of works presented at the National Museum of Fine Arts «My clothes, those of others, those of many». He writed this sentence by hand on the wall of one of the rooms of the museum and arranged a series of garments on the floor, some of them real and others made with glued paper and paint. 

In this exhibition we present the work of eight artists and one collective from the Il Posto Collection that resonate with Langlois’ desire for representation and encounter with the body in a dimension that tensions the intimate and the popular. The pieces gathered here, placed in an indefinite and opaque time, question the place of the body from a still and suspicious perspective and contribute to imagine new corporealities by recovering lost or disintegrating bodies. These bodies, arranged throughout the room, carry a desire for transformation that becomes visible in the mise-en-scène through their garments, materialities and cosmetics.

The images that articulate this narrative approach the body in its fragile, mortuary and expired dimension through different reminiscences to political history, illness, colonialism and dissident bodies. The different sensibilities that coexist in this exhibition reflect the practices of artists from different generations and geographies, whose methods strain the traditional categories of sculpture, video art, performance, painting and photography.

Nelly Richard reflects on the regularization of life patterns and roles that takes place through/with fashion. Regarding these roles, she states that “they follow one another within a linear sequence of actions without ever overlapping or confusing their scripts.» In her text, which accompanies and demands the works in this exhibition, Ariel Florencia Richards insists on questioning the possibility of the process of dressing and undressing as a catalyst for encounters, discoveries and imagination of new categories and roles in relation to dressing. Her narrative intertwines her personal experience, research and theories on the role of the body in contemporary art as it resonates in each of these glances and gestures that allow us to configure new ways of inhabiting our intimacy, desires and ambiguities.