©Artilugios y Conjeturas, 11 de Septiembre (September 11th), collage. All images courtesy the artist. The image reads: “There is a lot of broken glass shattered like the lines of an open hand.”

This week is dedicated to Chilean photographers working in a variety of photographic genres. Today our focus is on Amanda Sotelo Silva, a visual artist working under the pseudonym Artilugios y Conjeturas (Gadgets and Conjectures).

Chilean visual artist Amanda Sotelo Silva mines the history of a country that still bleeds from the burdensome scars left by colonial, state, and military violence. In her political collages, the artist reassembles found photographs, historical texts, and poetry into melancholiously mutilated compositions. The works reveal an artist’s surgical attempts to make sense of her country’s shattered and convoluted historical consciousness. The sentiment resonates with many younger generations who have grown up in the aftermath of gross human rights violations and continue to fight for justice and historical accountability after the country’s transition to democracy.

A young leading voice in the Chilean collage scene, Sotelo’s attractive cross-generational visual lexicon is witty and symbolic, allowing her to make captivating connections between the nation’s cacophonous trauma, popular imagery and literary references. In 11 de Septiembre, Sotelo’s dissection of the Chilean flag into twelve red, white, and blue stripes serves as a backdrop for the haunting pictures of detained civilians after the 1973 coup. The brutalized individuals, restrained together an shrouded in blankets, bleed through the fabric of the image and assume the silhouette of mountain peaks — a profoundly powerful gesture considering that the white section of the flag they cover symbolizes the snow-covered peaks of the Andes.

Fast-forward fifty years, and Sotelo’s attention is drawn to contemporaneous social uprisings against economic inequality, police brutality, and human rights abuses. Works like 18 de Octubre link the Andean nation’s subjugated territory to the oppressed anatomy of a chained, crestfallen, naked man. The comparison is representative of a much needed mind switch: Will we ever protect the land as we do our own bodies?

©Artilugios y Conjeturas, 18 de Octubre (October 18th), collage. The image reads: “Everybody wants a piece of the Chilean revolution.”

In her mournful and pensive oeuvre, however, Sotelo chronicles wounds that long precede the country’s most recent and infamous chapters of chaos and political turmoil, tracing the lineage of brutality hundreds of years back to the genocide of the territory’s Indigenous people. This is most evident in Genocidio, in which the artist superimposes the face of an Indigenous individual over a book page that reads words like “foreigners,” “progress,” and “annihilate.” Like many other works in her archive, the piece is inspired by the country’s lesser-known history of the Selk’nam genocide in Tierra del Fuego, where thousands of people were systematically brutalized, mutilated, and killed for bounty.

Harrowing and critical, Sotelo’s alchemy of sorrowful visuals and succinct stanzas, spanning centuries of violence and desolation, honors the history of a country where wounds doesn’t seem to heal and where memory, contrary to popular belief, weights heavily in the hearts of their populace.

©Artilugios y Conjeturas, Genocidio (Genocide), collage.

Amanda Sotelo Silva (Rancagua, Chile, 1995) is a Chilean visual artist who works with the collage technique under the pseudonym Artilugios y Conjeturas. Her work has been developing since 2017, addressing themes such as painful childhood, death, the tearing of identity, war, anomalous corporealities, Indigenism, questioning romantic love, and more. She has exhibited her works in various spaces, notably participating in the 15th Regional Exhibition of Contemporary Art MAM Chiloé 2023.

Amanda Sotelo Silva, (Rancagua, Chile, 1995) es una artista visual chilena que trabaja la técnica del collage bajo el seudónimo de Artilugios y Conjeturas. Su obra viene desarrollándose desde el año 2017, abordando temáticas como la dolorosa infancia, la muerte, el desgarro de la identidad, la guerra, las corporalidades anómalas, el indigenismo, el cuestionamiento al amor romántico, etc. Ha expuesto sus trabajos en distintos espacios, destacando entre ellos su participación en la 15ª Muestra Regional de Arte Contemporáneo MAM Chiloé 2023.

Follow Artilugios y Conjeturas on Instagram: @artilugiosyconjeturas

©Artilugios y Conjeturas, Latinoamericana Kiltra (Latin American Kiltra), collage.

Artilugios y Conjeturas

Artilugios y Conjeturas (Gadgets and Conjectures) is a self-managed artistic project that I have been developing since 2017. Through the technique of collage, I seek to create a intersection between visual poetry, imagery, and the destruction of the latter, in order to reach the formation of a “kiltra” work. The circulation of these visual materials is through booklets, fanzines, and individual works that I sell at low prices, with the aim of making collage art accessible and approachable.

Artilugios y Conjeturas es un proyecto artístico autogestionado que vengo desarrollando desde el año 2017. A través de la técnica del collage, busco generar un cruce entre la poesía visual, la imagen y la destrucción de esta misma, para así llegar a la conformación de una obra kiltra. La circulación de estos materiales visuales es a través de plaquettes, fanzines y obras individuales que comercializo a bajo precio, con el fin de hacer accesible y cercano el arte del collage.

©Artilugios y Conjeturas, Ausencia (Absence), collage. The image reads: “How do you name a tongue marked by absence?”

©Artilugios y Conjeturas, Abandono (Abandon), collage. The image reads: “I, sir, was never wanted by anyone.”

©Artilugios y Conjeturas, from the series Infancias (Childhoods), collage. The image reads: “I am a Wound / that from its silent letter / bleeds the word / Home.”

©Artilugios y Conjeturas, Cordillera (Mountain Range), collage.

©Artilugios y Conjeturas, Flores (Flowers), collage.

©Artiugios y Conjeturas, Cuanto de ti (How much of you), collage. The image reads: “How much of you is there in me?”

©Artilugios y Conjeturas, ¿Cual es la herida que tocas? (What is the wound that you touch?), collage. The image reads: “What is the wound that you touch?”

©Artilugios y Conjeturas, Manos (Hands), collage.

©Artilugios y Conjeturas, Pájara (Birdy), collage.