Existential Parasitism. Contemporary Jewelry Bestiary by Rita Soto Ventura

Artist list

Rita Soto

A journey, like a tale, that takes place in Chile at the end of the 1950s, in the midst of a social crisis in which a female doctor finds parasites on people's clothes, each one of them having a controlling effect on whoever wears them. The story contained in an eponymous book is part of the project that combines wet collodion photographs and the 'jewels' of the exhibition.  
 
Rita’s works have been presented in different spaces and instances, including the Design Museum of London, England, Design Museum of Barcelona, ​​Spain, and the Lisbon Design and Fashion Museum, Portugal. She has recently been selected to be part of the London Cluster Jewellery (2021). She’s the founder of the LAJOIA Jewelry School and president of the Association of Contemporary Chilean Jewelers JOYABRAVA (2014 to 2018) and her work incorporates traditional Chilean handcraft methods such as the horsehair micro basketry (a technique originally from Rari).
 
“Most of the pieces were created during the Chilean social outbreak, in October 2019, and during an unprecedented pandemic in 2020-21. Crafting this imagery in confinement, surrounded by fear, death, hunger and violence, was the perfect instance to trespass the limit between the real and the unreal,” she says, and also to bring up ongoing topics: the Pandemic and the social crisis experienced in Chile, from the personal perspective of the 'Contemporary Jewelry'.
 
Opening Hours: Monday to Friday 10 am to 7:30 pm  Saturday 10 am to 5:30 pm
Online: III Latin American Biennial of Contemporary Jewelry
Book: Existential Parasitism.Contemporary Jewelry Bestiary​
Next Venue: November 12 to 21 , Las Condes Design Store of Medular Diseño