BATALLA ESPACIAL, 2010-B Sculpture

Ales Villegas was born in Quinta Normal (Santiago de Chile) in 1978 and grew up normal. She always wanted to fly in a gyroplane or live in an abandoned factory. From the time she was little she has wondered why people placed such importance on objects, thinking, of course, that people cannot live without objects. Objects make life simpler, or at least try to. She remembers the day when, unsure whether she was dreaming or awake, she found a place where objects went to die. It wasn't a cemetery, but a kind of limbo. And she has been wondering ever since why objects don't learn to die, why people don't take anything with them when they die, what the word is that describes the precise moment when the subject forgets the object. Typical questions of adolescence. She studied areas related to her interests, such as industrial design and architecture in the University of Chile, but she was expelled from both and condemned to ostracism. At that fateful moment she recalled two lessons: the first was how to use a utility knife and paperboard, and second, that no one could explain to her why people tend to just describe and classify. She read fragments of Benjamin, Foucault, Freud, and Baudrillard along with Bradbury, Moore, Ware, Calvino, and others. She began to visit museums, art galleries, attend film series, and frequent appliance stores. She learned fundamental concepts such as ontology, epistemology, or phrases such as "crisis of representation" and "crisis of being." She learned to converse with acquaintances from the art world and with strangers in the streets. But the answers still didn't come"”and the questions increased. One day she realized her true path (serendipity of being) and entered art school. She felt like Diogenes when he walked the streets of Greece, knowing above all that money could not buy what he needed. She collected paperboard, glue, and wood and made installations such as giant nails through the university's classrooms or a lock that closed all the doors. She built prototypes of multi-functional objects for lateral-thinking men, until finally, alone, she understood that the paperboard began to speak and live. Consumed and overwhelmed, like Vesalius among his object-cities constructed stories, utopia-uchronies and dystopias of worlds, potential habitats, the fantasy of objects, she theorized about the mercantile loneliness of being, the ontological denial of the species, mental hyper-textuality, the objectification of feelings.