An Exhibition by Quiénes Somos and ReSources

2025

Fondart Nacional 2025.

Exhibition at Cava Gallery, Palacio Cousiño Museum.

Santiago, Chile.

In collaboration with Quiénes Somos.

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Who are you?

What is waste?

The first is the question that gives life to Quiénes Somos continually opening traces of the collective based on individual identities.

The second is the seed that gives rise to ReSources as it is an idea that pursues new limits on the value of things, of what we have and what we don´t.

Both projects began a collaboration in 2021, which will see the publication of their work through Selección Descarte [Selection Discard], an audiovisual essay that emerges from the intersection of their subjects of study.

In this context, Quiénes Somos and ReSources offer an exhibition that allows visitors to contextualize themselves in the vanishing point, journey, and vision of each project, in a free and interdependent manner, while also presenting an interest in discovering new points of convergence, meaning, and expansion.

Who you are and what waste means to you are questions we understand to be both important and urgent today, a time when we openly ask ourselves whether the answer to one can actually exist independently of the other.

About ReSources, as stated in the curatorial text from the exhibition.

At the beginning, ReSources unfolded as a shapeless project that sought nothing more than to research the idea of waste. What is waste? While the question will always be relevant, ReSources wants us to also ask ourselves what isn’t waste.

After a first decade studying waste in its material, immaterial, symbolic, and conceptual realms, from the obvious to the profound, ReSources currently reaches certain maturity through its practical and applied research as well as a theoretical and academic body.

Appealing to the freedom within the broad spectrum of waste, ReSources encompasses trash, the ordinary, the invisible, the discarded, the unwanted, the hidden, filth, danger, excess, imperfection, the useless, impurity, taboo, pollution, and so on. At the same time, with the artistic openness to work in diverse media such as installation, photography, poster, typography, performance, assemblage, painting, and ready-made, among others, materializing in diverse contexts such as galleries, public, academic and private spaces, and new media.

ReSources, then, seeks to open paths to facilitate accessibility and the transition toward a sustainable future, while acting as a creative catalyst. Waste, sustainability, and creativity, in short, cohabit here in a symbiotic relationship, sometimes serving as bridges, sometimes as axes.

About Quiénes Somos, as stated in the curatorial text from the exhibition.

Spontaneous. Sometimes brutally honest, raw in their truth. Some are hesitant and shy, while others are confident and firm. Some unsettle, others move or bring smiles. But all, without exception, are profoundly human. These are the testimonies that Quiénes Somos has collected over nearly ten years. Stories of people caught in the midst of the hustle and bustle of the city, the calm of the countryside, or the intimacy of their homes, facing a single question: Who are you?

Thanks to the openness of those interviewed, this documentary record has become a space for searching and reflecting on what defines us as people (or what we choose, believe, or feel defines us), the social reality of the country, human psychology, and existence itself. A corner that has given rise to a dialogue from a more empathetic and conciliatory perspective.

Quiénes Somos confronts us with the most challenging, most difficult mirror: our own. That of self-exploration. And in this, story by story, he has woven a collective memory about identity, both individual and collective.