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Contribution to Book
Globalization: Voluspa Jarpa's Altered Views and The Hegemonic Museum
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Music and Art (2024)
  • Mark W. Rectanus
Abstract
This chapter examines Chilean artist Voluspa Jarpa’s installation, Altered Views, presented in the Chile Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. I argue that Altered Views creates a “reversed cultural space” (Jarpa) that interrogates the legacies and epistemologies of European hegemonic museums while also foregrounding the Biennale as an historically contested site for national representation and as a global platform for “world art.” Altered Views unfolds in three installations: The Hegemonic Museum, The Subaltern Portraits Gallery, and The Emancipating Opera (directed by Felipe Ríos). While The Hegemonic Museum establishes a knowledge base for Altered Views through a series of case studies that document how hegemonic discourses and practices were universalized through colonialism, The Subaltern Portraits Gallery and The Emancipating Opera provide aesthetic interventions (i.e., portraits and a video-opera) that present counter-hegemonic narratives and emancipatory voices of art and music from Chile. Altered Views takes visitors on an expedition that proceeds from a documentary of hegemonic relations under colonialism – emanating in Europe and extending across the Americas – to the mobilization of insurgent forces of the subaltern, by fusing the visual, musical, and political dimensions of the portraits and video-opera. In conclusion, I suggest that by directly addressing visitors in the Biennale and the Chile Pavilion, Altered Views not only brings critical discourses on the contested histories of hegemonic museums into a productive tension with the Biennale, as a platform for world art, it also contributes to debates on how ethnographic museums might connect processes of (un)learning with Indigenous voices, visions, or artworks. 
Keywords
  • globalization,
  • art,
  • museums,
  • Venice Biennale,
  • Chile,
  • Decolonization,
  • Video-Opera
Publication Date
Spring 2024
Editor
Sarah Mahler Kraaz (Anthology Editor), Charlotte de Mille (Anthology Editor)
Publisher
Bloomsbury
Series
Bloomsbury Handbooks
Publisher Statement
This volume brings together prominent scholars, artists, composers, and directors to present the latest interdisciplinary ideas and projects in the fields of art history, musicology and multi-media practice. Organized around ways of perceiving, experiencing and creating, the book outlines the state of the field through cutting-edge research case studies. For example, how does art-music practice / thinking communicate activist activities? How do socio-economic and environmental problems affect access to heritage? How do contemporary practitioners interpret past works and what global concerns stimulate new works? In each instance, examples of cross or inter-media works are not thought of in isolation but in a global historical context that shows our cultural existence to be complex, conflicted and entwined. For the first time cross-disciplinary collaborations in ethnomusicology-anthropology, ecomusicology-ecoart-ecomuseology and digital humanities for art history, musicology and practice are prioritized in one volume.
Citation Information
Mark W. Rectanus. "Globalization: Voluspa Jarpa's Altered Views and The Hegemonic Museum" LondonThe Bloomsbury Handbook of Music and Art (2024) p. 215 - 229
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/mark_rectanus/15/