installation Archives - JANET TORO

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/

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Words in Captivity

sven — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 18:21:06 +0000

How many words have we left behind our tongues, or are crowding our vocal cords, how many words do we read daily in the news, on social networks, on WhatsApp, in the newspapers. A whole web of concepts, messages, impressions, news, anecdotes, feelings that overwhelm us.

Everyday expression is not enough to say what we crave, what we feel, what we think, what we demand from inside the confinement. They are linguistic and emotional signs that remain entangled inside the home between the chairs, the table, the curtains, or they vanish in the walls of confinement, in monotony or functional pragmatism, or in the infinite coordinates of the Internet.

My wings are tied, all the urban projects I had have vanished, impossible to do anything today, in the city in the midst of the state of exception and its punishments. However, I cannot remain undaunted in the face of overwhelming reality. How to remain silent in this event, in the ups and downs of an invasive virus, the deaths, the healing, the pain, the injustices, the hopes...?

I imagine countless things, dozens of ideas to do something, to demonstrate and not let this pandemic and its restrictive measures make me succumb to silence. Nothing seems enough, nothing calms my contained pulsation, my need for expression.

I want the emotions to come out, the words to jump out of their intimate context, to adhere with chalk to the exterior bricks of the building, a blackboard,... so many voices that expand on its reddish surface.

The facade of the house I live in is now an exposed leaf, an architectural poem, a fabric of strokes, a prayer, a cry...

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Exposition Entre Lineas / An archeology of the contemporary

sven — Tue, 05 Nov 2019 23:23:26 +0000

7. November - 5. Dezember 2019
16:00 - 20:00 Uhr

Galerie AFA
Av. Providencia 1614, Piso 2, Santiago, Chile

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El mar, la calle y las sillas

Janet Toro — Fri, 24 May 2019 20:35:27 +0000

This work consists in a large format installation that uses the city and its history as a starting point. The habour of Valparaíso retains a dark memory, sealed in implacable pacts. This is the starting point of this work, a reflection on the brutal secrets that the sea contains beneath its waves: the horror of the bodies thrown from helicopters to the deep sea, the horror of the bodies tortured in various Navy ships.
The sea is just a few meters from the Centex building, whose architecture with horizontal, white stripes was the support of this work.

This work consists of an installation on the façade of the aforementioned building, based on several black chairs, hanging separately, inverted; whose trajectories evoke a void, fallen human beings, absent human beings. Their tracks are getting lost within the coastal foam and is almost oblivion.

The chairs taken outside (imitating the custom of the inhabitants of Valparaiso, that use the facades of their houses as a canvas), are transformed here into an irritating element that intervenes the city.

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Installation La Torre Vive

sven — Thu, 23 May 2019 22:26:44 +0000

Beyond the cement, the iron structures, the retaining walls of this building, I was interested in investigating the spirit that animated and promoted this construction, an emblematic building. From his story I was moved by the passion that shaped him, as part of an ideology that promoted human development and fundamental rights, ... subsequently violated, in long years of darkness and terror.

The tower lives is the first installation of a series of several interventions that will cross the city of Santiago, in all its cardinal points, I refer to Urban Intersubjectivity, which is based on a critical reflection on the relationship we establish with the places we inhabit, in the places we work, where we live and where we love.
Places define our way of acting and thinking, in places the control of bodies is also established.

The tower lives rescues the collective memory, gives life to a space that is empty and wasted, thus inaugurating another architectural biography of this building, which is beating in its corridors, in its halls.

The tower lives is a visual poem about existence, reflected here in dozens of things, which belonged to present and absent people.
This installation speaks of diversity in all its senses, in addition to suspending materiality, as contemporary exoduses suspend the destinies of so many human beings across the planet.

This installation questions, sacrifices matter, also asks what we are through the objects that surround our steps?

The Tower lives, exposes the objects of daily life to appropriate this space, creates a patina of forms on the facade of the building to inhabit it from art, with the small of each day.

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Gang

Janet Toro — Tue, 19 Mar 2019 12:23:47 +0000

In the frame of 17th Chapter, We will be-Episode of transition.

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Habeas Corpus

Janet Toro — Thu, 28 Feb 2019 18:12:21 +0000

In this installation I wish to insist on the material need for a sign of that negated body, which will allow us to fulfill at least on a symbolic level, the rite of burial, hence the presence of the earth, as the last element of a life cycle, that closes or opens to a new relationship with absence. But also in this exhibition context, a land questioning the murder and resignation in view of it.

I have centrally worked with the portrait, focused here as nostalgia and longing for the absent body. The photograph of Enrique Toro Romero, the only visual and private document that directly relates to him, is photocopied many times. This repetitive gesture is emulating the search, thus reproducing the method used by the families of Disappeared Detainees and political prisoners, when they got out into to the streets holding photocopies of the faces of their children, daughters, brothers, fathers, etc.

In the element of glass the fragility of this topic is concentrated, also the cutting.
its transparency and its capacity to reflect, represents the illusory, quality of the non-body. The concave shape alludes to a reality that demanded extreme introversion ... that sinks inwards. It is a curve that does not close, incomplete, that becomes saturated with adhesive fabrics ... until the last vestiges of the loved one are erased.

* Habeas Corpus: is a judicial injunction that has the purpose of protecting the freedom and physical integrity of detained individuals as well as those who fear being arrested for no reason or feel their physical integrity threatened.
Of the 5,400 complaints requested between 1973 and 1983, only ten were granted, according to information from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of american states.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the American Convention on Human Rights dictate the Habeas Corpus.

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Radiografía

Janet Toro — Thu, 28 Feb 2019 18:11:50 +0000

To denude the habitable to the scrutinizing, radiographic gaze of the spectators, putting at the reach of their hands each of the objects that I use daily, opening the drawers, unpacking the suitcases, hanging from the walls of my apartment all my belongings, from the most intimate to the most profane.

Here is a rupture of the private / public space and also of the museum / galleries, in the radical gesture of opening the personal housing as an exhibition space to unknown visitors for two months.

In an extroverted scene those things that we transport from one place to another are exposed, in an emigration that seems to have no end ... as a reflection of the global human displacements.

Who are we through the things we have? What stories do things hold, in the tacit, the diverse and extensive of its ontological capacity? A multiple color, which calls from all corners, corners and that is spun with the viewer's gaze.

An installation that is a hybrid mirror, which encourages visitors to dialogue with their own hidden beings and calls them to cross a border that is commonly forbidden, otherness in their private life, with their secrets, their joys, their latent fears ....
Blouses, books, ladles, cushions, brushes, shoes, keys, cups, brushes ... Infinite forms that are assembled as living sculptures, of the daily life of an immigrant woman.

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