Camila Lobos

A few days before her next exhibition at the Concrete Gallery located at Centro Cultural Matucana 100, we visited the workshop of visual artist Camila Lobos Diaz (1988), nominated for different prizes and awards such as: Red Mansion Art Prize 2018 (UK-CN), UCL Museum/Slade Collaboration 2018 (UK), The Social Art Award 2021 (DE), The Alpine Fellowship, (UK). Camila, a graduate of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and a master's degree in sculpture from the Slade School of Fine Art, is preparing her next solo exhibition to open on August 27 entitled Del Espacio Quebrado at the Concrete Gallery. The exhibition will be curated by Pedro Donoso and is a site-specific installation in the three rooms of the gallery.

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The cracks (a long, narrow opening resulting from the separation of two materials) are gestures that we can see throughout Camila's visual production: sculptures, photographs and texts that refer to our multiple bankruptcies as a society.

On April 21, 2023, the exhibition “Broken Landscapes” opened at MAC Quinta Normal, where Camila presented various installations composed of tree roots, bronze pieces and transparent threads, reflecting on borders and territories. The artist highlighted the ability of roots to transcend political and geographical limits.

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“For the past few years I have been working on geopolitics, national symbols and the idea of nation and belonging, their representation and their limits. In this search, which involves making visible what is invisible, such as the borders between countries, I began to imagine what are the characteristics of geopolitical boundaries and how they are represented” — Room sheet at MAC Quinta Normal, Exhibition “Broken Landscapes” by Camila Lobos Diaz.

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This year, the exhibition, which will be open until October 6 at Galería Concreta, welcomes the spectator with a labyrinth of threads that is built from the study of the cracks that were already on the floor of the room. These cracks rise during the tour, first through the walls of the gallery that pierce the space, revealing an installation with soil and wild plants and weeds that the artist stole from the city, and finally, they settle in the sky in the form of neons of white light that are reflected on a water mirror. For Camila, the crack is not only a break, but it is also a possibility of seeing something new, these ruptures of material, specifically concrete, we can read them as living materials that are in constant transformation.

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Camila shares that for her the work of an artist is part of an unfinished process, that seeing a work is like witnessing a moment in the life of this creator and therefore, pieces such as exhibitions are always connected. In addition to the exhibition at Matucana 100, on September 3, he opens his exhibition “How a Line Changes Everything” at the Cultural Center of Spain in Santiago, and in November, Lobos will present a new exhibition entitled, Shared Borders, in Lisbon, Portugal, for the Vasco Vieira de Almeida Foundation, where he will transfer a continuation of his exhibition “Broken Landscapes” at the MAC Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, Chile.

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