Installation view from Operational Excellence, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, April 2 – May 29, 2022. Master’s thesis exhibition curated by Isabella Achenbach. Photo: Olympia Shannon 2022.
Ignacio Gatica’s work reflects on the contemporary repercussions of the American neoliberal project in Chile, which introduced the free market economy as an experimental endeavor under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in the 1970s. This installation features a series of credit cards printed with photographs that document the boarded facades of banks in Santiago—a response to protests that broke out in 2019 and 2020 over increased metro fares. Each card is encrypted with unique messages gathered from graffiti tags around the city. Visitors can swipe the cards at the card reader, which in turn interrupts the stock ticker’s live market feed with the street poetry, building the work both in its urgency and in its dynamic form of a poem, or chant, that is indicative of the class disparity in Chile. Printed and programmed in this way, Gatica’s subversive cards are charged in the spirit of freedom, rather than debt. Stones Above Diamonds presents a sensitivity to language that empowers the human voice and collectivity in resistance to predatory financial enterprises.
— Isabella Achenbach