The essay “Mobiliario e indicialidad en la obra de Alicia Villarreal” was written by the art critic and curator Justo Pastor Mellado (b. 1949) for the catalogue for El primer almácigo de la lengua, the artist’s first solo exhibition, organized by the Galería Gabriela Mistral (Santiago, 1997). Three years earlier Villarreal and the photographer Julia Toro (b. 1933) had shown their work at the exhibition Fuera de caja held at the same gallery. Villarreal used photographs, photocopies, and boxes to create small installations. [For more information on this subject, see the following in the ICAA Digital Archive: “El gran texto del mundo (y sus fragmentos di-versos)” (doc. no. 757328) by Adriana Valdés.] The event was presented with support from FONDART (Fondo Nacional de las Artes), a Chilean government entity that provided financing for projects, for which artists could apply every year.
Alicia Villareal (b. 1957) graduated from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile with a mention in painting, despite the fact that most of what she creates are installations. In 1984 she went to Belgium to continue her art studies. She returned to Chile in 1989 and joined the local art scene in the late 1980s.
El primer almácigo de la lengua included a couple of installations, one set up in each of the gallery’s rooms. The first, Laboratorio, consisted of five tables, four of which had boxes on them in which she had placed rubber stamps, inks, and blank notebooks to be used by viewers to produce their own books. The stamps had excerpts of text and educational illustrations. For example, a drawing of different versions of a horse, which could be used to create variations of the same image with Photoshop. On the fifth table there were two boxes that projected words onto the wall. One of them showed a quote from the poet Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957): “Languages are real countries, though they may not have geological bones, they are invisible territories.” The other box projected images like those on the stamps. The second installation, La lengua maternal, contained 250 books that had been die-cut to represent school furnishings that Villarreal had used in other projects. The books were mounted on the wall, highlighting the die-cut shapes against the white background, divided into two large blocks organized according to cold and warm colors rather than a normal pattern. Extrapolating her thoughts on language, the artist presented the exhibition as a mimicry of the processes of alphabetization and the use of language.