Author: Gertjan Oskar
GoMulan presents the oeuvre of Fabiola Burgos Labra (b. 1984, Chile) for the first time at Art Rotterdam 2025 in the New Art section, from March 27 to 30.
Fabiola Burgos Labra's artworks can be read as representations of, or moments in, a layered process-based practice. In them, she explores topics of gender, colonization, her own family history and our culturally determined relationship with materials. In search of different approaches to these materials and objects, she manages to create meaningful and sensitive sculptures and installations through simple gestures and fragile materials.
Burgos Labra's work subverts the dominant assumptions about the art object that shape the very framework of the art market. The friction with prevailing conceptions of completeness, permanence, object value and ownership is driven to its extreme in the context of the art fair.
The series Mummies - mami, consisting of textile “wrapped” fruit and vegetable bodies, is emblematic of this. Cotton and wool thread are carefully crocheted around the produce, giving them a sculptural quality. However, the new guise of equilibrium is deceptive: life continues unabated. Where the soft fruit slowly “paints” the fabrics from within, in other cases life seeps out (cfr. Mummies - mami (Onion), 2024). The objects find themselves in a state of constant flux. They are inherently unstable and uncontrollable. Their slow but certain disintegration demands attention and care. Indifference is out of the question.
Where in some cases a final mummification, a stillness occurs, in others a fragrant dissolution follows: “Mummification is an act of conservation and care for life itself, with a recognition of human dependence on nature. Cotton is used to weave blankets and the decomposition of the living body is witnessed. The mummified objects tell a particular story, the cycle of life and death, and how to care for a “living sculpture.”” (Fabiola Burgos Labra)
Fabiola Burgos Labra's art demands physical involvement, firstly from the artist herself, and secondly – though equally – from the “audience”. The bronze-cast blackberries from the Ways To Return Home series (2023) so require both physical and mental activation through interpersonal exchange: “Place the blackberry in between your hand and another hand. Hold and press while you tell a story. Open your hands. The print is on both palms.”
Fabiola Burgos Labra's practice is marked by a deep appreciation for indigenous knowledge of materials and techniques in South America. She calls our attention to the devaluation to which such knowledge has been subjected in the West for centuries. Indeed, the global colonial projects of the modern era required a total disregard for the value of indigenous knowledge and traditions connected to land and nature. After the pervasive division of labor brought about by the Industrial Revolution, and the outsourcing of (manual) labor to the Global South, our relationship with natural materials and manufacturing processes is in dire need of repair. Through her work, Burgos Labra offers us a hand.
The (weaving) techniques employed by Burgos Labra have been passed down from mother to daughter for centuries. It is this kind of embodied knowledge of materials and processes that has enabled countless generations to resist certain consequences of Western colonization. This same capacity for adaptation gave diasporas the resilience to build new lives in unfamiliar, often hostile environments. Burgos Labra's works are temporary, adaptive expressions of this cultural flexibility.
In her series of panels and towers, she thus deploys everyday, inexpensive and often found materials such as gift ribbon and steel wire. The towers function as units of measurement that grow and shrink according to their context. They are ushered into the public sphere as architectural beacons or totems, entering into dialogue with its urban or rural surroundings. The materials used are intuitively selected, carrying varying symbolic meanings attributed after installment.
Fabiola Burgos Labra resolutely adopts the primacy of action and tactility, as opposed to that of object and contemplation. By ennobling attention, time and embodied engagement, Burgos Labra - in an economy characterized by unbridled speed and detachment - digs in her heels.
Gertjan Oskar works as an assistant curator at Kunst in de Stad (Middelheim Museum) in Antwerp. Additionally, he writes about modern and contemporary art and has contributed to multiple books on Belgian postwar art history. Under the title Common Ground, he regularly organizes gatherings focused on contemporary arts and culture.