Catégorie : Selected Works
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Dreaming is free, 2020
Gloom and doom, 27.03.2020 
Toxic masculinity, 14.04.2020 -
Swan Dive
Artist: Marisa Cornejo
Documentation: Indoors
Place: Portbou, Catalunya:
Cementiri municipal / Memorial Walter Benjamin / Badia de Portbou
Date: August 10, 2021Le mouvement du Cygne est celui d’un berceau qui se balance entre la modernité et l’antiquité
Walter Benjamin
L’action se déroule en quatre phases: montée au Cementiri municipal, larmes sur la tombe de Walter Benjamin, descente dans le Memorial Walter Benjamin de Dani Karavan, immersion dans la badia de Portbou. Elle peut être interprétée comme une lecture de Le cygne de Baudelaire, où M.C. incarnerait le double Andromaque / cygne, une bouteille de Vichy Catalan représenterait le fleuve Simoïs et les larmes, et le cimetierre de Portbou la Place du Carrousel.
Elle marque en tout cas l’instant et le lieu d’une réminiscence où la dilatation temporelle – du temps mythique des larmes versées dans la Méditerranée au temps historique de la guerre où Walter Benjamin trouva la mort à cet endroit – embrasse le cours entier des catastrophes humaines, par la plongée dans un immense chagrin de veuve versant «ses larmes dans les eaux d’un fleuve qui n’est plus le Simoïs des temps heureux, mais bien un lieu d’exil[1]».Remerciements à Franca Zanelli Quarantini pour sa lecture éclairante de Le Cygne de Baudelaire qui a servi de texte à l’action.
1. Franca Zanelli Quarantini, « “Andromaque” au Carrousel. Une lecture de Le Cygne », Revue italienne d’études françaises [En ligne], 2 | 2012, URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rief/867Le cygne
à Victor Hugo.
I
Andromaque, je pense à vous ! Ce petit fleuve,
Pauvre et triste miroir où jadis resplendit
L’immense majesté de vos douleurs de veuve,
Ce Simoïs menteur qui par vos pleurs grandit,
A fécondé soudain ma mémoire fertile,
Comme je traversais le nouveau Carrousel.
Le vieux Paris n’est plus (la forme d’une ville
Change plus vite, hélas ! que le coeur d’un mortel) ;
Je ne vois qu’en esprit, tout ce camp de baraques,
Ces tas de chapiteaux ébauchés et de fûts,
Les herbes, les gros blocs verdis par l’eau des flaques,
Et, brillant aux carreaux, le bric-à-brac confus.
Là s’étalait jadis une ménagerie ;
Là je vis, un matin, à l’heure où sous les cieux
Froids et clairs le travail s’éveille, où la voirie
Pousse un sombre ouragan dans l’air silencieux,
Un cygne qui s’était évadé de sa cage,
Et, de ses pieds palmés frottant le pavé sec,
Sur le sol raboteux traînait son blanc plumage.
Près d’un ruisseau sans eau la bête ouvrant le bec
Baignait nerveusement ses ailes dans la poudre,
Et disait, le coeur plein de son beau lac natal :
» Eau, quand donc pleuvras-tu ? quand tonneras-tu, foudre ? «
Je vois ce malheureux, mythe étrange et fatal,
Vers le ciel quelquefois, comme l’homme d’Ovide,
Vers le ciel ironique et cruellement bleu,
Sur son cou convulsif tendant sa tête avide,
Comme s’il adressait des reproches à Dieu !
II
Paris change ! mais rien dans ma mélancolie
N’a bougé ! palais neufs, échafaudages, blocs,
Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allégorie,
Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs.
Aussi devant ce Louvre une image m’opprime :
Je pense à mon grand cygne, avec ses gestes fous,
Comme les exilés, ridicule et sublime,
Et rongé d’un, désir sans trêve ! et puis à vous,
Andromaque, des bras d’un grand époux tombée,
Vil bétail, sous la main du superbe Pyrrhus,
Auprès d’un tombeau vide en extase courbée ;
Veuve d’Hector, hélas ! et femme d’Hélénus !
Je pense à la négresse, amaigrie et phtisique,
Piétinant dans la boue, et cherchant, l’oeil hagard,
Les cocotiers absents de la superbe Afrique
Derrière la muraille immense du brouillard ;
A quiconque a perdu ce qui ne se retrouve
Jamais, jamais ! à ceux qui s’abreuvent de pleurs
Et tètent la douleur comme une bonne louve !
Aux maigres orphelins séchant comme des fleurs !
Ainsi dans la forêt où mon esprit s’exile
Un vieux Souvenir sonne à plein souffle du cor !
Je pense aux matelots oubliés dans une île,
Aux captifs, aux vaincus !… à bien d’autres encor !
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A counter catastrophic performance
Artist: Marisa Cornejo
Curated by: Valeska Romero Curiqueo & Cecilia Moya Rivera
With the help of: Stéphanie Pfister, Jesssica Vaucher, Valeska Romero Curiqueo & Cecilia Moya Rivera
Venue: EEEEH! La Grenette, Nyon
Date: April 29 2022In the catastrophe of modernity/coloniality, lands are taken from people who are not considered people while the dispossessed, murdered, raped, and tortured non-people and everything related to them—their creations, habitats, and even self-perceptions—become the targets of endless wars. Fanon concluded that “[c]olonialism cannot be understood without the possibility of torturing, of violating, or of massacring…. Torture is an expression and a means of the occupant-occupied relationship”
Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. « Prologue: Decolonial Psychology as a Counter-Catastrophic Science, » in Decoloniality and Epistemic Justice in Contemporary Community Psychology, edited by Garth Stevens and Christopher C. Sonn. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2021. Pages vii-xiv.In 2013 I performed a series of ritualistic performances called La Huella in Santiago de Chile, Geneva, Switzerland and Plovdiv, Bulgaria, where I reactivated objects from the archive of exile I inherited from my childhood. For this project I would like to do a performance called “A counter catastrophic performance : how not to normalize torture”.
For this, I will print in front of the public in a table or the floor, a series of engraving plates my father Eugenio Cornejo made after he survived prison and torture during the regime of Pinochet and was in exile in Bulgaria in the 70’s trying to process the trauma and memorialize the horrors with his art practice.
Once I finish reprinting my father engravings, I will clean the engraving plates with pure water as a ritual. During the cleaning of the engravings plates, I will share some memories that emerge in my memory from the archive.
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No Monument
Plaza Italia, now Plaza de la Dignidad, is since October 18, 2019
the epicenter of a social outbreak in Santiago de Chile.
In the early hours of Friday, March 13, 2021, the statue on the center of the square was withdrawn.
These images were filmed a few hours later as protesters returned to Plaza de la Dignidad, risking serious damage to their health and physical integrity by tear gas and other police measures.Size: 16:9, ultra HD
Lenght: 5:21
Images / sound: Marisa Cornejo
News footage: CNN, 13.03.2021
Fixer: Joaquin Figueroa
Editing: Stefan Fretz
Many thanks to: Gene Ray, Anna Papaeti, Joaquin Figueroa, Maximo Corvalán Pincheira, Mireia Sallarès, Nora Gatica Krug, Katya Kasterine, Ana Maya Kasterine, Miguel D. Norambuena
Publication dans Issue, Journal of art & design HEAD – Genève
CCC – Programme master de recherche
No Monument
Dernier épisode du dossier
All Monuments Must Fall29 mars 2022
par Marisa Cornejo, Katya Kasterine, Cecilia Moya Rivera
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La Huella
L’installation vidéo «La Huella» est la compilation d’une série de performances que j’ai réalisées et documentées pendant cinq ans dans différents territoires liés à la mémoire de mon exil. Chaque performance a suivi la méthodologie de réalisation que j’ai tirée de mes rêves pour définir ma pratique artistique.
La documentation des performances contient non seulement l’expérience de la réactivation de l’archive artistique que j’ai héritée de mon père dans les lieux de mémoire de notre exil, mais aussi la résonance de cette archive dans les personnes qui m’ont accompagné dans ce processus de dé-traumatisation.
Des personnes qui faisaient souvent partie des associations de victimes de la dictature militaire de Pinochet, des amis de mon enfance en exil ou des collaborateurs solidaires qui ont vu dans mon travail une possibilité de réparer les dommages causés par la dictature. Pour la commémoration du 50e anniversaire du coup d’État militaire au Chili qui a touché tant de consciences dans le monde, je veux clore ce cycle de travail en réalisant une installation qui rassemble ce travail expérimental et rituel pour rendre visibles les fissures et les dommages qui sont encore présents dans le présent et les possibilités de solidarité qui nous permettent de ne pas l’oublier.
Marisa Cornejo, 2023
Commissaire d’exposition: Cristóbal F. Barria Bignotti
Assistante: Anna Tretiakova
Soutien technique: Fred Duchêne, Stefania Saladino, Cristina Da Silva.
Accrochage et objets: Stéphane Fretz, Olaf Berkhuijsen, Thomas Kasterine et Zacharie Fretz
Remerciements: Stéphanie Prizreni, Edgar Soarès, Maël Denegri
La Huella, installation pour l’exposition No Memorials, Genève, 2023 
Vue d’ensemble 
©2023, ar_photo.ch 
©2023, ar_photo.ch 
©2023, ar_photo.ch 
©2023, ar_photo.ch 
©2023, ar_photo.ch
LES VIDEOS
La Huella #01. Caja negra
Galeria Espacio Flor, Santiago — 01.2013
Duration: 6:08
Images / sound: Espacio Flor
Host: Enrique Flores
Editing and mixing: Roberto Duarte
La Huella #02. Plovdiv
Plodviv Station, Bulgaria — 08.2013
Duration: 18:03
Images / sound: Valeria Deisler
Hosts: Vania Mincheva, Ana Salazar
Editing and mixing: Roberto Duarte
La Huella #03. Escotilla 8
Escotilla 8, Estadio Nacional, Santiago — 11.2013
Duration: 16:59
Images / sound: José Miguel Guzmán
Host: Wally Kunstmann / Asociación de familiares de víctimas del Estadio Nacional
Editing and mixing: Roberto Duarte
La Huella #04. Estadio Nacional
Estadio Nacional, Santiago de Chile — 11.2013
Duration: 3:40
Images / sound: José Miguel Guzmán
Host: Wally Kunstmann / Asociación de familiares de víctimas del Estadio Nacional
Editing and mixing: Roberto Duarte
La Huella #05. El Caracol
El Caracol, Estadio Nacional, Santiago — 26.12.2015
Duration: 14:24
Images / sound: José Miguel Guzmán
Host: Wally Kunstmann / Asociación de familiares de víctimas del Estadio Nacional
Editing and mixing: Roberto Duarte
La Huella #06. Notas para la Huella
Usine Kugler, Genève — 13.11.2017
Duration: 37:12
Images / sound: Bani Silva
Host: Association Cheminée Nord
Editing and mixing: Roberto Duarte
Estrella verde
Santiago de Chile / Madre Selva — 12.2019–12.2022
Duration: 17:03
Images / sound: Marisa Cornejo
Collaboration: Nora Gatica Krug / Stéphane Fretz
Voices: Mónica Pizarro, Inés Erazo, Nadia Poblete, Maria Rosa Verdejo, Semiramis Lobos, Lissien Corvalán and Lena Kirberg.
Editing and mixing: Roberto Duarte
LES PERFORMANCES
Artist: Marisa Cornejo
Places: Santiago, Chile / Geneva, Switzerland / Plovdiv , Bulgaria
Dates: 2013 – 2015Between 2013 and 2015, Cornejo did 6 performances going back to some places related to the wounds of her exile. Two of them are places of memory, Escotilla 8 and El Caracol from the Estadio Nacional, the football stadium that after the coup d’etat in Chile was used as the largest concentration camp. There, thousands of people were imprisoned and tortured, among them the father of the artist, an art teacher, Eugenio Cornejo. Also in the train station of Plovdiv, Bulgaria, where she lived with her family in exile between 1977 and 1978, and Geneva. She realized the performance “La Huella” by reprinting with her body the engraving plates done by her father in bulgaria. With this performances she activated the memory of the exiled people that will never return, as her father who died in Mexico in 2002 unable to find a place in an extremely neoliberalized chilean society. She used this performance as a tool to reweave the history of the chilean diaspora, and an attempt to repair the transgenerational trauma of imprisonment, torture and exile still present in our communities.
« C’est un rêve qui a soufflé à Marisa Cornejo la suite de son parcours artistique. «Quelques jeunes artistes m’aident à imprimer avec mon corps les plaques de gravure que mon père a
faites durant son exil», dit l’avant-dernier songe publié dans I am (art&fiction, 2013). Quand elle était enfant, en Bulgarie, il lui avait fait poser ses pieds sur l’encre d’une plaque gravée, avant d’imprimer leurs empreintes sur une feuille qu’elle a conservée.
Elle se lance alors dans une réflexion sur ce geste porteur de mémoire et de transmission. Un work in progress La Huella qui prend la forme de performances publiques exécutées dans les lieux du passé, en Bulgarie et au Chili, revisités du coup en actrice et non en victime passive. La démarche est libératrice.
Son travail sur la brutalité de la dictature passe par le corps, qui devient «une métaphore, une archive à activer par le biais des rêves». Le cadre (de ce projet de performances) ouvre également un dialogue avec des auteurs et des textes, des activistes et des historiens, grâce auxquels elle a le courage d’aller dans la chambre où son père a été torturé, au Stade national de Santiago de Chili. «J’ai pu confronter ce grand monstre dans ma tête, ce lieu interdit.» Elle y donne une performance lors de laquelle elle finit nue, en écho au récit sur la torture qu’elle vient d’entendre de la bouche d’un rescapé. «Je ne veux pas qu’on oublie, ce n’est pas fini», dit Marisa Cornejo. L’art peut aider à ce travail de guérison collective. Et si «tous les Chiliens n’y sont pas prêts», elle ne porte plus seule le poids de l’histoire. Les rêves se partagent. »
(Anne Pitteloud, La vie rêvée, Le Courrier, 18 janvier 2014.)
La Huella 1, performance, Espacio Flor, Santiago, Chile, 2013 
La Huella 2, performance, train station, Plovdiv, Bulgaria, 2013 
La Huella 3, performance, Escotilla 8, Estadio Nacional, Santiago de Chile, 2013 
La Huella 5, performance, El Caracol, Estadio Nacional, Santiago, Chile, 2013
L’ÉDITION
Poster « La Huella », ink print on paper, 70 x 90 cm, 2014
Photography: Baptiste Coulon and Rebecca Bowring -
The Ancestor II
Artists: Eugenio Cornejo and Marisa Cornejo
Place: Political, artistic, sporting, and cultural International Congress of Women who Fight, Caracol Morelia, Chiapas, Mexico
Date: 9 March 2018The 9th of March 2018 in the context of the “Political, artistic, sporting, and cultural International Congress of Women who Fight”, called by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico, (EZLN) I proposed to the organizers of this event: to do an art demonstration and art selling of an engraving my father Eugenio Cornejo (1940, Santiago de Chile-2002, Puebla, Mexico) did as a refugee in socialist Bulgaria in 1977. The authorities of the autonomous organization granted me permission in 15 minutes and offered me a piece of cardboard and a public space to sell my engravings. I became part of the art market for the first time in my life in an autonomous community.
New collectors. 
Drawing My Dreams, from State Terrorism in Chile to Exercising the Revolutionary Law of Women: A Talk with Images
An agreement with Mother Earth
« A dream that I managed to put into practice recently, but it took me 16 years, was the first one I had with my father after he died.[1] In that dream I was having problems with my papers (I was a migrant). I was alive but in a rush, and suddenly he was crossing me in the opposite direction, looking beautiful, relaxed and wearing some beautiful embroidered white cotton indigenous clothes while riding easily a bicycle towards Chiapas, Mexico, where he was going to join his last girlfriend Celia.
So when the first historical encounter of “Political, artistic, sporting and cultural International Congress of Women who Fight” was called by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas, Mexico, (EZLN) in march 2018, where around 9000 women from all over the world engaged in the defence of women’s rights and the protection of mother earth, I trusted the dream and went[2] . In that context I felt more loved and safe than in 12 years living “safely” in the settlements of the Geneva Headquarters of the International Organizations. Reasons I will developed further on.
Once there, trying to choose from the hundreds of seminars proposed, I went to a workshop on feminist internet[3] bringing awareness on how internet has become a shopping mall, how we are giving to multinationals leaded by white privileged men, our information and how these companies extract wealth from our information. They exposed how instagram and Facebook do censorship and take political decisions, as well as promote individualistic narratives to exacerbate the celebrity culture and competition as the only way to have a life.
I also heard the Compañeras from Landless Movement in Brazil, breaking the silence of the situation of women in the agroindustry of the northeast of Brazil. Where most of the pineapples and tropical fruits exported in to the US and European markets, are leaving their drinking water full of chemicals, due to monoculture and the excessive use of pesticides. They explained how the women of this communities are facing premature illnesses on their own, the lack of health facilities and the poisoning of the land. If there is something to say about terror today we should listen to them.
I also listened to the collective Subversiones, an autonomous publishing house presenting the book “Nosotras”, a jewel at really affordable prices, where the testimonies of other women, their struggles and victories to recover their bodies, territories, memories and dignity gave us useful tools. https://subversiones.org
While in the encounter, I proposed the 9th of March 2018 to the organizers of this event: the women from the EZLN to do an art demonstration and selling of the engraving I called The Ancestor my father Eugenio did in Bulgaria in 1977. The authorities of the autonomous organization granted me permission and offered me a piece of cardboard and a public space to reprint and sell my engravings. I became part of the art market in 15 minutes in an autonomous community. I have been trying to find a commercial gallery for my work for 12 years in the modernity of Geneva and haven’t got there yet. I got told “your art is not contemporary” by a publicly funded art institution when I show them the drawing of the dream of my father in the bicycle, as if I was coming from another time. But in this encounter effortlessly I found my place and joined the grand majority of women of this planet, whose only heritage is the memory of the violence neocolonialism is using to dispossess them from earthly wealth and human rights leaving them only with the testimonies of how their grandfathers, men, fathers, son’s received the brutality of patriarchal capitalism in its hopefully last stages.
So yes, I am coming from another time, the time of the zone of non being. Where the lack of basic human rights leaves us exposed to a slow progress, full of obstacles called: injustice. But also full of sisters traveling towards transmodernity. The pluri-modernities in which we are all contemporary because we are. There I found the first enthusiastic collectors of the engravings of my father and had enough money to buy the art of the other local artists.
And where are we? In the dream, the daydream or the nightmare? when we come to Europe we are not contemporary enough because in the nightmare there is always a wall, a labyrinth for those who come from the dream of another world where there is an us. And the daydream I leave it to those who live in the nightmare and don’t even see the wall or the labyrinth. The Zapatista women and this encounter gave me all the hope I needed: I was in the dream and I wasn’t sleeping. They give us a place to sleep, organic food produced in their communities and a pedagogy that the whole planet needs urgently. Something I had never seen happening in Geneva. They gave us all of that but with one condition: to do an agreement with them to stay alive and fight without fear for our right to live. » From the paper « Drawing My Dreams, from State Terrorism in Chile to Exercising the Revolutionary Law of Women: A Talk with Images » presented in Trise Conference, Athens 2018 -
My tibias are like baguettes
Exhibition: À dessin 5
Artists: Gilles Bingisser, Julien Bouissou, Rebecca Brueder, André Cervera, Maureen Colomar, Marisa Cornejo, Nicolas Daubaners, Eva Debreceni, Paola de Prima, Marie Claire Esposito, Charlotte Gautier Van Tour, David Houzer, Amandine Lasa, Jessica Noris, Severine Peron, etc
Place: Chapelle du Quartier Haut, Sète, France
Date: November 2019
Performance: My tibias are like baguettes, Marisa Cornejo, 20’ min., Chapelle du Quartier Haut, Sète, 2019
