About – MICHELLE-MARIE LETELIER

Michelle-Marie Letelier (she/them) is a Chilean artist based in Berlin.

Reverberating her early life in the Atacama Desert; between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, her multidisciplinary work orchestrates transformations of so-called ‘natural resources’, alongside extensive wide-ranging, interdisciplinary research into the sea-landscapes where their exploitation and speculation take place. Through her work, she blends different epochs, regions and societies, examining political-economic, historical and cultural aspects.

Letelier lived eight years in Chuquicamata, a mining camp located in a vast area of mineral deposits, exploited since pre-Hispanic times, annexed by Chile in the Saltpetre War (1879-84) and home to the largest open-pit copper mine in the world. When the town was to be buried due to new mining policies, the artist returned to document this process — a pivotal moment that ushered in her practice.

Since establishing in Berlin in 2007, she has been particularly invested in examining coal, copper, saltpetre, wind, salmon and, more recently, slime, in order to create a poetic work applying their properties — such as electrical conductivity, crystallisation, agency and plasticity. In her practice, she experiments with chemical and physical transformation processes that produce the artworks themselves, as well as their poiesis, beyond the extractive industry and its forms of control.

Supported by private and public entities, such as the Chilean Ministry of Culture & Arts; Deutscher Künstlerbund e.V.; KORO – Public Art Norway; Goethe Institutes in Chile, Canada & Norway; IFA and Berliner Senate in Germany, Letelier’s work has been included in Videonale.18 in Bonn; Screen City Biennial 2019 in Stavanger; Bienal Sur 2017 in Buenos Aires; 5th Mercosur Biennial in Porto Alegre and X Video and Media Arts Biennial in Santiago.

With solo exhibitions such as at Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (2022-2023, Santiago de Chile); Or Gallery (2021, Vancouver) and El Museo de Los Sures (2014, New York), she has participated in numerous international group shows including at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (CH), Gropius-Bau (Berlin, DE), Tabakalera (Donostia/San Sebastián, ES), Kunsthall 3,14 (Bergen, NO), the Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Museum of Fine Arts (both in Santiago, CL).

Letelier graduated from the Universidad Católica de Chile and has participated in Organismo | Art in Applied Critical Ecologies study program (2024, TBA21, Madrid), Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt art IT (2010, Berlin) and was a guest student in the Experimental Media Design studies at the University of Arts in Berlin (2007-2008).

Her videos and films have been screened in numerous festivals including in Harstad, Berlin, Marseille, New York, Vilnius, Santiago and Shanghai.

She has been resident at Atelier Mondial (Basel, 2023); The Blue Cabin (Vancouver, 2023); Læsø AiR (Læsø, 2023); Prater Digital (online, 2021); Resonancias (Punta Arenas, 2021); Troms fylkeskultursenter (Tromsø, 2019), Kunstnerhuset (Svolvær, 2018); ISLA (Antofagasta, 2018); Magallanes2020 (Punta Arenas, 2018); USF (Bergen, 2017) and ISCP (NYC, 2014).

Michelle-Marie Letelier’s work carries heavy geopolitical overtones and it is eloquently reflective, especially in times of crisis of the neoliberal model and the unfolding planetary ecocide.

Studio Michelle-Marie Letelier

Greifswalder Straße 207
10405 Berlin
Germany
post(at)michellemarieletelier(dot)net

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