One of the greatest challenges of the coming decades will be adapting the archaic construct of the nation to the diverse identities that shape our contemporary societies. The Cosmonación exhibition, presented by the Chilean Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale arrives at Bonniers Konsthall to show the work of Swedish-Chilean artist Valeria Montti Colque within the framework of a global debate about human displacements and territory. The project draws inspiration from the term cosmonation, coined by Michel S. Laguerre, to conceptualize the experience of ”being or feeling national” within diasporic communities in the United States. Laguerre argues that people in diasporas do not sever ties with their places of origin; instead, they maintain transgenerational connections through cultural, material, and emotional means. In this sense, displaced or diasporic individuals are part of a multisite or multilocated nation—a cosmonation—where two or more geographically distant territories are interconnected through personal life stories.
Valeria Montti Colque belongs to the Chilean diaspora in Sweden. She was born in Stockholm in 1978, two years after her parents fled the Pinochet dictatorship and settled there, supported by Sweden’s institutional commitment to the overthrown government of Salvador Allende. She grew up on the outskirts of the city, in a suburb that became a haven for exiles and displaced people from various countries during the 1980s. The unique social environment that shaped her early childhood—characterized by cultural richness, solidarity, social engagement, and nostalgia for her parents’ homeland—has been a constant source of inspiration for her artistic practice since she began performing in the streets at the age of twenty.
Like other women artists, Montti Colque uses her body, and more specifically her masked face, as a strategy of camouflage against the hostility of contexts where operate different othering and exclusion technologies. The mask works as both a shield and a bridge, allowing access to “other modes of existence” (Latour) that are neither pure nor fixed but instead formed through the interplay of diverse cultural fragments—akin to a mosaic or a collage as she used by her in many works. Montti Colque creates a space where symbolic and material elements from all the nations she inhabits converge. These nations include not only Chile and Sweden but also invoke the Andean communities and the African diaspora, both of which intersect with her personal biography. This approach disrupts the ostensibly homogeneous nature of national identities. As Stuart Hall writes: ”Diasporic subjects are bearers of particular histories and cultures, traditions of enunciation, languages, texts, and worlds of meaning that have irrevocably shaped them […] Yet the traces of these identities’ formation are never singular but multiple, and, as such, they always resist being coherent within a single narrative of belonging.”
In both her more intimate works, such as paintings, drawings, and sculptures, and her public pieces, including performances, murals, and installations, Montti Colque shares her vision of a cosmonation populated by strange presences, hybrid subjectivities, and animated objects. These figures, always in transit or on a journey toward an undefined destination, embody indeed the fluid, multifaceted nature of identity.
Cosmonación is the result of an institutional collaboration between the Chilean Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage and Bonniers Konsthall. But also, the exhibition is the outcome work and the sisterhood surrounding Montti Colque’s artistic practice—a practice that connects worlds and channels what humanity urgently needs to reclaim. Many hands and hearts came together to create Mamita Montaña (Mother Mountain), a monumental textile sculpture born from nostalgia and the artist’s longing to experience an Andean horizon within Nordic lands. As the same was raised collectively, Mamita Montaña can be a symbolic refuge for all bodies and identities that inhabit the imagined nation beyond the constraints of the official nation-states. The artist and knitter Elvira Espejo Ayca uses the Aymara expression yanak uywaña to describe “the mutual nurturing of the arts,” an ancestral concept that helps us understand the profound symbolism of this piece.
Besides the textile sculpture, in the Bonnier Konsthall show, we will find a procession of characters and ceramic figures that are part of the rich artist’s universe. They are deities, mythological and fantastic beings that jump here from a sketchbook, from a familiar moment in the kitchen or a magical ritual over the snow. In the video, a woman undertakes the arduous climb to the summit. What is she looking for? And how many times must she climb? Her body is a territory populated by dreams and memories; it is where her strength lies. In the Cosmonación – Modersberget show, the natural landscape merges with the urban, and the collective sadness from a long delocalization transforms into a carnival. Come in! Everyone is invited to explore this personal geography that connects two peoples. Welcome home! Join us to celebrate the hopeful beauty of diversity.
Andrea Pacheco González
Andrea Pacheco González is a Chilean researcher and curator based in Madrid. She holds a BA in Social Communication, an MA in Curating Art and New Media, and is pursuing a PhD in Fine Arts at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her research has focused on the debates that permeate notions of memory, identity, diaspora and territory. She was recently curator of the Chilean Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024), with the exhibition Cosmonación by the artist Valeria Montti Colque, and co-curator of Colonial Memory in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection (2024). She has also been part of the expert committee for the revision of the collections of the National Museum of Anthropology in Madrid (2024). She is currently preparing the Cosmonación project tours to Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, co-curated with Joanna Nordin, and later to the National Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago, Chile. A selection of her highlights projects include: Asunción Molinos Gordo with the solo show Déjà Vécu. Lo ya vivido (2024) at the CA2M, Madrid; Juan Castillo with Geometría Emocional (2021) at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo and Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Santiago de Chile; Dagoberto Rodríguez with Guerra interior (2020) at the CAAM, Gran Canaria; Teresa Margolles with La carne muerta nunca se abriga (2019) at the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Santiago de Chile; and Los Carpinteros with La cosa está candela (2017) at the Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia, Bogotá. She has also organised group exhibitions such as Corazón Pulmones Hígado. Pensar con las entrañas as a guest curator at the Matadero Madrid Centre for Artists in Residence during 2019. Next group exhibition Latina. Women, Music and Glamour in the Gladys Palmera Collection, co-curated with Tommy Meini, will be open in 2025 at Casa de América, Madrid. She has worked as Head of Exhibitions at MAC Quinta Normal – Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Universidad de Chile and is professor of curatorial studies at Nebrija University.
Image: Valeria Montti Colque, Under Carlitos Vingar (detail), 2024
