LOCAL Arte Contemporáneo. Santiago, directed by Javier González Pesce and Ignacio Murúa since 2011.

LOCAL began in 2011 as an exhibition space in a house in Barrio Italia. At the outset we set out to develop projects that would question the art system in Chile. Over time, our space transformed from the exhibition-space format into a space of sensory experiences. We work with artists and other agents privileging the production of working processes over the production of exhibitions. In 15 years many artists have occupied our space, among them Gonzalo Díaz, Elizabeth Burmann and Tris Vonna Michell.

LOCAL is a house that lends itself as a space to shelter working processes, encounter and creative reflection. LOCAL is a structure offered for material interactions, encounters and contacts with those who develop projects associated with it. LOCAL transforms and activates in interaction with the processes that take place in it.

The curatorial work we have developed at LOCAL for some years now involves the writing of a novel. It is about a house that has gone mad; unusual things happen in it. Each exhibition is a chapter in the novel; these chapters narrate the ways artists transform the space. Sculpture and interventions are treated as the symptom of our space as a house that suffers a kind of madness.

Since 2026 LOCAL is a flooded exhibition space, half house, half basin. We want to offer a room whose atmospheric and spatial conditions are particular, in that what is installed inside it can drift floating through the house as if the sculpture behaved a little like a wandering animal. The possibilities are many; those invited to think of exhibition experiences at LOCAL will have to invent ways of living with this space, whose anomaly reconfigures the ways exhibitions inhabit spaces.