Fernando Prats

Fernando Prats - Mute map

Biografía del Artista: Fernando Prats is a visual artist born in Santiago de Chile in 1967. His work has been highlighted by the expeditions and actions he has carried out in various places in Chile, such as Acción Lota, Acción Géiser del Tatio, Acción Salar de Atacama, among others. These actions have led Prats to explore the limits between art and nature, in works that seek to create a unique and transformative aesthetic experience. Prats trained at the Escola Massana in Barcelona, ​​at the University of Chile and at the University of Barcelona. His artistic career has been recognized with various grants and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006-2007, the Honorary Scholarship of the President of the Republic of the Government of Chile in 1997-2000 and 2002-2003, the Pilar Juncosa and Sotheby's Special Prize in 1994, and the First Prize Ciutat de Palma Antonio Gelabert d'Arts Visuals in 2010. Prats' work has been exhibited in multiple international exhibitions, and he represented Chile at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. He has also participated in the Mediations Biennale 2012 in Poland, the Chile Triennial in 2009, and the Universal Water Exhibition in Zaragoza in 2008. In addition, in 2017 he installed the permanent work Acción Medular at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile in homage to the Chilean artist. Barcelona City Council has now commissioned Prats to carry out a monumental project in the city's Plaza Pablo Neruda. The project focuses on the work of welcoming Republican exiles led by the poet, and will surely be another work in the impressive career of this Chilean artist.

The starting point of these works is the idea of ​​a cartography of lost traces that identifies routes, displacements, losses and an underground resistance. The action of crossing the surface, the layers, the strata, the sediments, is represented with an incision that emerges as a displacement of a story and reinterprets physiographic limits. These limits are related to history, territory and biography, where the body itself becomes a geography that is inhabited. The work thus transits through territories of political and human resistance that form a memory map of the exodus, with smoke as a conductor, revealing the deep substratum of the sediments of a human condition that becomes inhuman.