Valeria Montti Colque Carries a Mountain of Memories

Where does one identity end and the other begin? In Valeria Montti Colque’s work, it’s challenging to determine. Layers of the visible and invisible, material and symbolic, sediment on top of one another to create new modes of expression, a global sense of belonging, or its absence.

Valeria Montti Colque is a Swedish-Chilean visual artist whose personal life significantly influences her work. Fluidity is a key concept for understanding her artistic approach, encompassing the diverse mediums and materials she engages with as well as sources of inspiration from pop culture, art history, religion and folklore.

In this current exhibition Cosmonación - Moderberget at Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm, she meditates on her transnational being, meandering between her Chilean heritage and Swedish upbringing. Materiality becomes the vessel as she intertwines colorful fabrics, paintings, cutlery, and dishes in an interplay of diverse cultural fragments. They accumulate in a way that makes the borders of each object disappear, making it irrelevant.

Memory is material. To remember is to reach for the tangible, to sort through objects, to feel their materiality, to relive through touch. Clothing, more than anything, becomes a fetish of remembrance, an archive of time, a body that wears stories as its second skin. Fabric becomes a suitcase, laden with histories, some lost, some lingering, all alive in the folds of the material.

In the video performances, the body struggles under the weight of fabric, breath is heavy, making its way through the snow, pressing forward against the cloth. The garments are not passive, they wrap, they drag, they resist and become a sensorial bridge between the past carried and the present endured.

Mamita Montaña serves as a centerpiece, with its gravitational pull bringing various characters together, creating a community and a nation of its own. What even is a nation in the era of deportations, migrations, and the flow of people in exile, searching for a better life or fleeing its negation?