Adriana Valdés wrote this essay for the catalogue for an exhibition of works by Mónica Bengoa. Organizing her text around six themes, Valdés writes about stories, pixels, the unspeakable, “To the sound of a smooth, soft movement,” daily life and its subtle differences, and daily life: the truth as a project and as resistance. The first of these sections suggests a parallel between a story by Julio Cortázar and Bengoa’s work. The second discusses the two works in the exhibition and notes the artist’s intent to show different paradoxes that go beyond binary considerations. The next one posits that the idea behind the work “creates a scene for the unspeakable.” The essay continues with a discussion about the main work in the exhibition, a large mural made of hand-colored napkins. The final sections focus on the connection between Bengoa’s work and daily life, construed as an intimate space and a place of micro-resistance.  

The art critic and essayist Adriana Valdés (b. 1943) wrote this essay for the catalogue for Enero, 7:25, the solo exhibition of works by Mónica Bengoa (b. 1969) presented at the Galería Gabriela Mistral (Santiago, 2004). Valdés later included this text in her book Memorias Visuales. Arte Contemporáneo en Chile [Visual Memories. Contemporary Art in Chile] (2006) but changed the title from “(quisiera hacer un texto tan fino como tu obra)” [I Would Like to Write a Text That Was as Fine as Your Work ] to “Mónica Bengoa. Al son de un suave y blando movimiento” [Mónica Bengoa. To the sound of a smooth, soft movement]. Valdés played an important role in the field of writing about the visual arts. She started working in the 1970s and was among those who wrote about the Escena de Avanzada, the group of neo-avant-garde artists that coalesced during the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973–90). The name Escena de Avanzada was coined by the theorist and cultural critic Nelly Richard (b. 1948). In her book, Memorias Visuales. Arte Contemporáneo en Chile, Valdés included a number of texts she had written over the course of three decades for presentations, catalogues, book reviews, and prefaces. She described it as her journal.  

This text marks another phase in Valdés’s critical writing, since Bengoa is an artist who belongs to the Nineties Generation, by which time Chile’s institutional situation had changed due to the return of democracy. Bengoa’s work is known for its exploration of the photographic image, printing, painting, drawing, and embroidery—which is why it is considered to be in the realm of handcrafts—taking images apart and reassembling them manually in large murals and small works. In late 2017 Bengoa had a retrospective exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes en Santiago that looked back at 25 years of her work.    

Two works were presented at the exhibition Enero, 7:25. One was a homonymous mural that measured 3.64 x 14 meters and was made of 2,600 hand-colored paper napkins that represented a child’s bed seen in profile. The other one was called 7:25 (pirata, cositas, tortuga, elefante, avión) [7:25 (pirate, little things, tortoise, elephant, airplane)], a set of five embroidered pieces, each one measuring 62 centimeters in diameter.