The theorist Justo Pastor Mellado outlines his curatorial approach for the exhibition 1973–2000: Transferencia y densidad. He begins by defining concepts such as “curator,” discussing the term’s evolution in Chile and its different meanings as applied to practices of various kinds, and goes on to highlight the work of Nelly Richard, who originally came up with the idea of “Escena de Avanzada” (Advanced Scene). He explains the criteria that guided his curatorial work: absence, movement, transference, and density. Regarding the movements or displacements of painting, printmaking, and the object, Mellado refers to a greater density in the visual arts in the 1980s, which brought that decade’s problems to bear on the exhibition. He calls the 1970s a “deferred transference” from the 1960s and sees in the 1990s a re-reading of the previous decade. Mellado describes exhibitions as a diagram crisscrossed by inscription and recovery; he presents himself as a “producer of infrastructure” who relativizes and questions programmatic writings based on academic (Universidad de Chile) and museum (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes) systems, and whose role as regards history consists of an exhaustive critique of the text. Mellado believes that all exhibitions are pedagogical texts, strategies used to introduce problems.  

This is the introductory text for the last of the three catalogues produced for Chile: 100 años de artes visuales (Chile: 100 Years of Visual Arts) organized by the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile, the trilogy of exhibitions that, among other things, prompted discussion on the role of the curator and launched a critical revisionism of the hegemonic narratives of the history of Chilean art. All of that is explicitly covered in Justo Pastor Mellado’s curatorship of the final exhibition 1973–2000: Transferencia y densidad (October 19 to December 31, 2000), presented in eight rooms: Historias de Anticipación, Historias de Cuerpos, Historias de Manchas, Historias de Disposición, Historias de Localización, Historias de Identificación, La Cita de la Historia, and Historias de Recolección. The exhibition’s major proposal (“the curator as producer of infrastructure: analytical documents, archives, presentation of primary sources, milestones, and omitted documents”) is a vital contribution to the critical revision of the history of Chilean art. Specifically, it is a useful introduction to the forms it takes and to the country’s particular art system. Mellado’s goal is to demythologize and rectify certain narratives concerning its origins, during a recent and particularly complex period (at a political, social, and cultural level).   

[For a complementary view on one of the references mentioned above, specifically the concept of the 1960s as a precursor, see the ICAA Digital Archive “Berlín, Berlín, ¿dónde estoy?” (doc. no. 736090) by Francisco Brugnoli].