Chilean artist, Valeria Montti at the Venice Biennale

Valeria Montti Colque, artist: “I wanted to tell our story, the story of those of us who were born outside of Chile”

Daughter of Chileans exiled in Sweden, she is the first artist born outside of Chile to represent the country at the Venice Biennale. Her proposal is an installation that brings into play the ideas of identity, diaspora and nation, and that revolves around a six-meter sculpture: "Mamita Montaña."

In the surroundings of the Venice Arsenal, a 12th century Byzantine shipyard that is today used as a space for the art biennial, a mountain was installed. A colorful sculpture full of birds, clouds, family portraits, textiles and Andean symbols. The installation by artist Valeria Montti Colque is called Mamita Montaña and is the central work of the Chile pavilion. “One of the nice surprises of this biennial,” commented the French magazine Beaux Arts, which highlighted it among the best of the exhibition.

Inaugurated last Sunday, the Venice Biennale is the most extensive and popular art fair in the world: it ends on November 24 and receives close to a million visitors. Directed by Brazilian Adriano Pedroso and under the motto Strangers Everywhere, this year 300 artists explore themes such as migration, the displaced, the legacy of colonialism and the environmental crisis, in 90 national pavilions.

In this context, the work of Valeria Montti Colque is distinguished by its network of memories and its imaginative power, as commented by critic Ben Luke, from The Artnewspaper.

-Each person who comes to see it has her story, and maybe they can understand me or the people who live in the diaspora -comments the artist.

Daughter of exiled Chileans, Valeria Montti Colque was born in 1978 in Söderhöjden, Sweden. With her project Cosmonación de ella, curated by Andrea Pacheco, she won the competition organized by the Ministry of Cultures last year. It was a choice of historical edges: she is the first artist born outside of Chile to represent the country at the Venice Biennale.

-It's very exciting, I'm very happy. When you are born in another country, for forced reasons, you feel that you are not from that place, but neither is it from where your parents came from. One feels that one is neither from here nor from there. "That they chose me makes me feel welcome," she says.

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