La Locura

(The Rage) 1998
Center for experimental art La Perrera, Santiago, Chile

Over months I'm collecting and selecting 3,000 fallen leaves from the street. I'm storing them between sheets of paper. I'm putting them under pressure, so that they remain straight.
Later I'm building a huge rectangle with them in the central hall of La Perrera Arte. The leaves are arranged in an obsessively, mathematical manner, side by side, out of their context. Like a giant mandala, unexpected, spread where the garbage was burned, the dogs and the fetuses of clandestine abortions.
There are the leaves, witnesses of the rapid death of the forests of the planet.

On this organic tapestry I walk, dressed in white, barefoot, slowly. I'm carrying in my hands the last sheet that will close the rectangle. I drop to the ground, there are rumbling noises from the city and guttural shouts. I start to run and with my hands I am destroying that order, that impeccable filigree of leaves, in each slap dementia is confirmed, scraps of leaves, waste leaves. I take a bowl of animal blood from the slaughterhouse, I puring gushes of blood spurts onto the rotten leaves, everything is bespattered, it becomes a shapeless mass.

The alienation waves like a common flag, there is a negation of nature, a broken link. I throw myself to the ground naked, I impregnate myself with blood, I lie in fetal position among thousands of fragments of bloody leaves, some stuck to my skin like dark scales from a time that has already expired.

Photo-Documentation: Claudio Jaramillo, Ximena Riffo
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