work Archives - JANET TORO

Elegy for a Disaster

sven — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 20:31:04 +0000

Part I

This performance is an exhortation, a cry in the face of the extermination of infants, babies, and children, a wake-up call, a prayer in the face of the Zionist genocide against the Palestinian people. In the desert landscape of the installation Requiem ad Calamitatem, I will prostrate myself on the salt, in silence. Later, I take papers wrapped in gauze from my belly—photocopies of infants—which I then place on the salt, which will also cover those faces terrorized by bombs and catastrophe.

Part II

As we leave the rotunda, many people follow me to the second floor, forming a procession. On the balcony of the museum's central hall, we display baby clothes and words alluding to genocide, such as: GENOCIDE, EXTERMINATION, HUNGER, THIRST, AGONY, ABANDONMENT, MASSACRE DISASTER, SADNESS, BITTERNESS, PAIN, DESTRUCTION, RUBBLE SEGREGATION, MASSACRE, COLONIALISM, INHUMANITY, CRUELTY, INJUSTICE, etc. Finally, we go down to the hall to meet the public.

Listado de participantes:

Cam Castro, Catalina Carvajal, Fernanda Martínez, Josefa Román, Renata Araus, Joselyne Contreras, Javiera Saavedra, Sakin Orellana, Macarena Hidalgo, Daniela Berger, Javiera Roman, Catalina Aguila, Norma Tapia, Javiera San Martìn, Claudia Gutièrrez, Sunai Catepillan, Noemì Ceballos, Antonia Donoso, Francisca Fuentes, Florencia Svideski, Reno Mondaca, Aníbal López, Jacinta Errazuriz, Sebastián Reyes, Dani Vásquez, Anastasia Gasc, Fernanda Quintanilla, Bernardita Neira, Ari Morales, Cynthia Bustos, Ken Montenegro, Francisco Barnet, Sofìa Valenzuela, Sofìa Caldentey, Aracelli Tello, Miguel Lecaros, Marta Cruz, Jacqueline Martìnez, Isidora Garrido, Julia Carrasco, Eva Díaz, Valentina Borcoski, María Fernanda Toro, Guillermo Silva, Mane Adaro, Francis Asafram, Cathy Paiva, Yulissa Yanez, Catherine Moya, Paulina Acevedo, Andrea Verdugo, Melany Erazo, Ama Sepúlveda, Francisca Zuñiga, Beatriz Pèrez, Carla Gonzalez, Raquel Amar, Valentina Dìaz

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Requiem ad Calamitaten (Requiem for the Catastrophe)

sven — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 22:49:58 +0000

Installation As part of the exhibition: "Janet Toro. Radical Intimacy. Overflows and Gestures," curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill National

Production: Pamela Fuentes, Alejandra Rivera
Mounting assistance: Adrián Gutierrez, Marcelo Céspedes, Mario Silva

A requiem for the disaster, a requiem for ethnic cleansing, a requiem for the livid infants, pierced by bombs in the streets of Gaza, from the geopolitics of barbarism and cruelty, in the atlas of contemporary Zionist colonialism. Funereal mathematics of global imperialist power, seduced by territorial wealth, mineral reserves, and the bacchanal of murder with its decorations.

We watch the catastrophe daily on screens that transmit atrocious images to us. We can turn off our devices, but they, those in the Middle East, cannot turn off the machinery of arms, they cannot turn off the armored bulldozers that plow through their homes, the siege of combat helicopters that fire their militaristic hatred from the skies, destroyed schools filled with waste, the blockade of humanitarian aid, destroyed plantations, food savaged, Zionist battalions fracturing hospitals, distorting bodies. Thus cementing the path to domination, suffocation and exclusion spring up in the iron ghetto that denies sunlight.

Home, the landscape, have changed drastically; ruins and rubble are now our shelter.

The genocide is an endless anguish. I can't find appropriate phrases that express the pain of witnessing extermination, the helplessness in the face of illegal occupation, the segregation, the forced displacement, the separation from children, the fragmented city, the confinement, the death traps in the streets, the control.

The scorn is endless; the atrocities are multiplying in occupied Palestine. We cannot remain silent when nearly 60,000 people have been killed, thousands more are injured, and thousands more remain missing beneath the rubble. "And one in four children under the age of 5 in Gaza is suffering from starvation" (Doctors Without Borders). Hunger used as a weapon of war. Malnourished bodies fall in the streets, starving mothers and their infants faint, while the blockade justifies the annihilation.

The life of a newborn and its mother should be sacred, but in the midst of the massacre, they are trivial; nothing matters to the fascists. To destroy everything, the very life of an entire people, that is the goal.

The suffering is beyond infinity. The girls and boys have been deflowered by thousands of perverse explosives. Destruction infiltrates everything, darkness permeates the skin, and bodies decompose, overwhelmed by fateful algorithms.

Souls lacerated in a burning sky, without god, without law, bodies contracted, broken by the systematic invasion. Mouths silenced by authoritarian orders, eyes blinded, beings crushed by the psychotic glorification of war.

Thousands wander toward the wall of exodus. Thousands flee the terror of the colonizers; thousands have had their water, their land, their homes, their gardens, their churches, their books, their pots, their relics stolen from them.

Hearts explode in the strategic equations of advanced drones, holographic/media warfare, and refined weaponry, proving their effectiveness on the defenseless population, on infants just entering this world. I have no words left, no adequate sentences to fully describe the horror. All I can do is create this icy silence.

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Sacra Notitia

sven — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 22:24:19 +0000

Installation As part of the exhibition: "Janet Toro. Radical Intimacy. Overflows and Gestures," curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill National

Production: Pamela Fuentes, Alejandra Rivera
Mounting assistance: Adrián Gutierrez, Marcelo Céspedes, Mario Silva

This installation takes the idea from the previous installation, Sacra Fames, from 2010, but transforms it with new elements and meaning. This time, inside a vintage television are marraquetas, Chilean daily bread, used as a popular source of information. A metaphor for false information restricted to neoliberal ideology. Chile ranks third in statistics with an average of six hours of television watching per day, enough time to be exposed to the influence of propaganda and media manipulation.

Regarding information, philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in his book "Infocracia: Digitalization and the Crisis of Democracy," tells us on page 81: "Information is additive and cumulative. Truth, on the other hand, is narrative and exclusive." And on page 82: "The crisis of truth is always a crisis of society. Without truth, society disintegrates internally. It is then held together only by external and instrumental economic relations."

Within the installation, an empty chair sits in a brackish space, the floor of which is composed of thick layers of salt, bordered in a circular pattern by white cobblestones.

Salt, a fundamental element for human life, plays an important role in physiological functions. Along with other elements, it conducts electricity. But here, the salt accumulated in this way leads us to a stark reality, a barren, white space that contrasts with the black canvas on the front wall, alluding to another, dark reality, one that doesn't appear in the information broadcast on television—a patterned incongruity where the truth is submerged in economic interests.

There are different historical meanings for salt. Egyptian priests urged people to sprinkle it on cities destroyed by wars and epidemics to ward off demons and evil. Salt also has negative connotations; in biblical writings it says that the wicked: "Let him be given a house in the desert and shelter in a salty land" (Job, 39, 6).

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Desgarro

Janet Toro — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 23:57:48 +0000

We observe hell daily, in the media distance that surrounds us. How much more must happen to for us to awake from our lethargy? How many crimes, how much destruction must happen for us to say ENOUGH!?

There are no possible words in the face of genocide, there are no appropriate phrases that are able to draw the terror and the pain when observing the scattered limbs, embedded in the vertices of the debris.

Everything I can say is limited, due to the magnitude of the event, which opens the viscera in the cement and burst your eyes terrified by cruelty, from the atlas of interventionism.

The life of a newborn and its mother should be sacred, but in the midst of the horror of the massacre, It is an infinite tear, an incessant cry, that hurts us and consumes us in the comfortable routines of West.

A requiem for extermination, a requiem for disaster, a requiem for the collapse of humanity, a requiem for the livid bodies, for the faces in frozen rictus, crossed by the barbarism in Gaza and in other regions.

Darkness looms in the streets of Palestine, but also in the streets of the world. Are we blind? Blind that we cannot see the connection of the fibers that unite us? We place emphasis on the separation, in the distance.

How many screams are thrown into the void between the bullets, how many thirsty throats, stuffed with mud, do not. They can articulate a letter, a moan, and in that muteness, they succumb, without finding an answer, or a kiss that saves them from the predatory maelstrom?

How many hands remain clenched at the broken glass, which was previously the windows of their homes? Homes, and today are the sharp knives of eviction?

How many torsos will be nailed to the tiles of dilapidated buildings or burned sidewalks that abruptly transmuted the landscape forever?

How many girls/boys, elderly women, adults, adolescents wander wounded towards the wall? Urban exodus and annihilation?

Families search for their lost offspring, who hang by a thread from shaky rooftops. Tormented women who have seen their bellies burst, due to the immeasurable pain of loss resounding, while they madly nail their cries into the clouds of white phosphorus, which wither them and they mark them.

Souls lacerated in a burning sky, without god, without law, contracted souls, broken by the invasion systematic. Mouths muted by the camouflage of weapons hatred, eyes blinded, beings crushed by the psychotic glorification of war.

Funeral mathematics of world imperialist power, destroying, extinguishing every human cell, in every meter square, deny every gesture of life of the other ethnic group, the other race, the other creed, the other ideology, in territories that succumb to ambitious decorations and the bacchanal of murder.

Destruction floods everything, the birds no longer sing, they get stuck in the dust of the projectiles, while the cups, the cushions, the broken chairs, the clothes fly everywhere... in a chilling, mixed swing with arms, nails, hair, animals, plants.

The mockery has no end, the atrocities multiply on the occupied nation, the arteries are poisoned, muscles and blood with gases from select laboratories. The contemporary holocaust goes around and around overflowing, crushing the kind flowers of understanding. Darkness passes through the skin, and the bodies they decompose, run over by fateful algorithms.

The saliva is now scarlet and so are the tears, due to the suffering that goes beyond infinity. The Girls and boys have been deflowered by thousands of narcissistic explosives. The oppressors applaud the great feat of war technology, they take heroic selfies in other people's yards, showing off their invincible strength of the fascist battalion.

Thousands are fleeing the terror of the colonizers, thousands have had their water, land, their homes, their homes stolen. gardens, its churches, its books, its pots, its relics. Never again will the stars be hope, they have dissected all in the bestial arena of selfishness. How to revive and get out of the ashes? While the ambition fractures hills, hospitals and distorts bodies, cementing the route of domination, asphyxiation, exclusion in the iron ghetto that denies sunlight.

The bones come to the surface like fossil branches, the fragmented limbs, removed from their place, scattered like stones, they mark the path of infamy.

There will be no spring, everything has fallen into the scaffold, a cemetery of voices that will never again speak of love, nor tenderness. Bursting hearts in the strategic equations of advanced drones and refined weaponry, who test its effectiveness with derision, on the defenseless population.

There are no right words, no appropriate sentences, no lyrics that describe the deep tear that is embedded in the flesh, there is a stunned silence.

Essay about this work in Ficcion de la razón from Aldo Bombardiere:

https://ficciondelarazon.org/2024/03/18/aldo-bombardiere-castro-participar-en-palestina-reflexiones-a-partir-de-desgarro-instalacion-artistica-de-janet-toro/