Manuela Morales Délano

The work of Manuela Morales Délano spans a range of mediums, often taking the form of site-specific installations that engage notions of colonialism and the political and economic dimensions of its legacy. This allows her to connect with specific contexts and geographies, which she reconstructs to create tensions between imposed narratives, vernacular legends and historical memory. She is interested in materiality as a way to explore exhaustion, fragility and resistance.

At the Museum of Modern Art (MG+), she presents a new series of drawings made on Kahari paper using soft oil pastels. These are dreamscapes but rooted in her own perception of the ocean and the mountains. As a Chilean, they are of great significance to her both personally and historically. They represent the immense natural beauty that is not without its dark side. As Above, So Below suggests a connection between opposing phenomena. As everyone in Chile is well aware, the ocean and, in particular, a tsunami, can be the cause of great devastation. Similarly, plate tectonics is the cause of mountains in all their breathtaking beauty, as well as the cause of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

On the other hand, many places of great natural beauty across the globe share a history of cruelty and violence. Very often the stories and testimonies of battle, genocide or enforced disappearances are linked to places that were otherwise or at other times revered for their transcendence. In Chile, the ocean and the desert are known to be the final resting places of the many, who were forcibly made to disappear under Pinochet’s military dictatorship 52 years ago.