Woven Ground (2025)

Glen Echo Arts Park, Glen Echo, Maryland - Stone Tower Gallery

February 22 - March 23, 2025

Curated by Kristina King

Exhibition Text

The Stone Tower Gallery presents Woven Ground, a solo exhibition by artist and ethnographer Diego Borgsdorf Fuenzalida. The exhibition uses textile sculptures to map the emotional topographies of the afterlives of 20th century political violence in trans-pacific Chile. ”While much scholarly and public attention has been (rightfully) paid to studying the history of political violence and dictatorship in Chile and Latin America more broadly, the roles of non-human, affective, and environmental actors in political violence is less theorized,” says Borgsdorf. Using critical materials like copper, salt, wool, and cotton, Woven Ground is a celebration of weaving as a daily rhythm of and gesture towards verticality. 

Artist Statement
The soft sculptures, weavings, salt crystallizations, quilts, and videos I make are not images, but rather, textures. They congeal and materialize what it feels like to live a life in the emergent trans-Pacific diasporas following 20th century dictatorships—a life after apocalyptic violence, loss, grief, and unknowability.

Throughout the 20th century, extractive mining and agricultural projects in Chile have spurred forms of political violence. Local activism to resist extractivism—for example, the movement to nationalize copper production in the 1970s—have been met with swift and unrelenting repression. It is from this history that the Pinochet civic-military dictatorship (1973-1990) emerged and brutalized its opponents. Despite the nation returning to democratic rule in 1990, the post-dictatorship era is continually haunted by controversies surrounding accountability, justice, and truth. For, while Pinochet’s junta has long been gone, the economic and political institutions he created live on, and Chileans contend with extreme economic inequality and neoliberal economics prioritizing free trade over social services. The dictatorship’s unresolved legacies continue to define Chilean public life. Yet, the roles of the critical materials — copper, wool, salt, and cotton, amongst others — in the formation and maintenance of these economics continue to be overlooked.

As a diasporic Chilean, I work in a trans-Pacific world thrown together in the face of the mass migration of Latin Americans in response to extractivism, political persecution, and economic inequality. My work as an ethnographer documents the stories and images of this worlding. As an artist, I am interested in how critical materials associated with this history can be assembled in ways that capture how post-dictatorship life feels. In my installations, I utilize my ancestral textile traditions to create affective exchanges, whereby the materials and objects I work with have the potential to sweep viewers up into the uneasy and ambiguous feelings about history, memory, and violence that haunt the trans-Pacific world.

Review of Diego Borgsdorf Fuenzalida: Woven Ground in Warp DMV “On View: Ft. Glen Echo Park, Hamiltonian Artists, Art Enables + Predictions” by Shelby Hubbard (2/26/25)