1 - Violeta Parra: The Genesis of her Art

Summary

Violeta Parra began her creative work, an integral part of both the legacy and the destiny of folk culture, during the first half of the 1950s, particularly following her first trip to Europe in 1954. Her output then quickly deepened and matured, reaching its conclusion by around 1965. It thus covered a brief period of a little over ten years. A surprisingly short time, considering the assurance and intensity of her artistic expression and the complexity of her work as a whole. Parra's output is a universe formed of distinct spheres of creation, in some of which, such as the areas of poetry and song, her yield is prolific. This is less surprising, upon discovering a telling detail: in Violeta, the creative drive did not progress linearly, through successive transformations of knowledge, as occurred in other cases, where suddenly knowledge met its own limitations and, facing the ghost of rhetoric, opened up to a new scenario. In this sense, Parra's creative drive lacked ‘history’. The learning process might have taken years, but when Parra began her authentic creation, she already knew what she needed to know and, instead of transforming it, she realised its potential. This knowledge, and the urgent need to artistically communicate it, act as an energetic nucleus from which the different spheres of her creation emanate, in a movement that is similar to the growth and expansion of concentric circles. Instead of linearity, there is superposition. Around 1965 the energetic nucleus seems to have been exhausted, and the cycle came to an end. Could Violeta's suicide at the beginning of 1967 have been a way to render visible this exhaustion and closure?

Violeta's art includes poetry, music, painting, pottery, embroidery (arpilleras) and wire sculptures. These are, of course, diverse spheres of creation. The primary material employed in each is different: word, sound, colour, wool and metal. And diverse are the figures and images built with those materials. However, the diversity of these spheres of creation is simply a plurality of faces in which the same themes return again and again; Parra's creativity reiterates itself, reproducing the same pattern of correlated elements in each of the genres in which she works.