“Una cabeza con caparazón. Anotaciones sobre la obra de Vicuña” is an essay that was written by Roberto Merino (b. 1961) on the occasion of Miss, the exhibition of works by Juan Pablo Langlois Vicuña (1936–2019) at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Santiago, 1997). The MNBA was the site of Langlois Vicuña’s first intervention, Cuerpos blandos (1969), an art action that Merino describes as a landmark event at the time, though it has not attracted much attention since then. In 2009, forty years later, it was recreated by the museum, with some variations, mainly as regards the length, since the original “large snake” feature was not part of the new installation. The recreation also included an archival version of the original exhibition.
As part of Miss, Langlois Vicuña exhibited his “Misses” series, which were installations made of a variety of materials (sculptures made of newsprint, glue, and plasticine), a process he started in the 1970s. Some of those Misses were called Miss Universal Destiny, Miss Chile Onas, Miss Desaparecidas, Misses vestidas y históricamente desvestidas, Miss Corazones Pescados, Miss Américas, etc. All these pieces refer to the indigenous women who lived in Chile before the colonization. Miss Universal Destiny is a distillation of the ideas that were addressed in the exhibition as a whole. It is a sculptural reproduction of Miss Chile, an approximately 2500-year-old mummy in a fetal or kneeling position that was found in the Antofagasta region of the country. The installation includes a framed pastel portrait of a woman with Western features, mounted on the wall; there is also another woman’s face and a skull, both made of plasticine. The title of the montage is written in gold letters; there are clothes hangers and a vessel made of paper surrounded by fruits and vegetables that allude to the farmers among whom the mummy once lived. The work compares the mummy and her ancestral past with the destiny imposed by colonization and its standards of beauty. The name Miss Chile was inspired by its fine state of preservation, a paradoxical, even offensive name when considering that she in fact existed before what is now known as Chile.
Over the course of his career, Langlois Vicuña produced several artist’s books. In 2009 he published De Vicuña a Langlois, in which he plays with his surnames, inverting the usual order of his parents’ names. Merino notes the difference this strategy created: Langlois referred to the architect and employee, whereas Vicuña was the artist.
