Violetta Parra

1917 – 1967

Cile

https://www.museovioletaparra.cl/

date of insertion in W.A.D. 12/2024

Biography

Violeta del Carmen Parra Sandoval
(San Carlos,4 ottobre 1917 – Santiago del Cile 5 febbraio 1967)

She was the third of ten children of Clarisa del Carmen Sandoval Navarrete and Nicanor Parra Alarcón, a music teacher.
Violeta had a difficult childhood due to the economic hardships of her large family, one day, around fifteen years old, in 1937 she decided to change her life. She left school and work and left for the capital Santiago de Chile, where her older brother was studying, taking with her only her guitar.
She later met and married Luis Cereceda. From this marriage, which ended in 1948, her children Ángel and Isabel were born
Violeta supported herself by playing in dance halls and sometimes for small radio stations. Deepening her interest in researching the popular traditions of her country in the musical field.
In 1949 she married again and from this new relationship her daughters Luisa and Rosita Clara were born. After 1952 Violeta decided to expand her research by travelling. Armed with notebooks, pens and a tape recorder, alone or accompanied by her children she travelled the country in search of the musical roots of her people. Her aim in anthropological research was to collect the great repertoire of popular songs directly from the voices of the old farmers.
The artist will begin a relentless struggle to obtain recognition, support and funding that will last a lifetime. In 1953, after a recital at Pablo Neruda’s house, she was called by Radio Chile for a program on local folklore. In 1954 she received the Caupolicán Award and began a series of tours that took her to Europe, on the occasion of the Youth Festival in Warsaw, and to the Soviet Union.

She remained in Paris for almost two years. It was in this environment that she met Paul Rivet, anthropologist and director of the Musée de l’Homme, with whom she recorded music and songs from her country in the National Sound Archives of the Sorbonne, as well as the album Cantos del Chile, for the Le chant du monde label.

Back in Chile in 1956 in Santiago she finished writing las Décimas Autobiográficas, a poem written in one of the most popular poetic genres of the Spanish-American oral tradition. And soon after her eclecticism would lead her to new horizons in the field of plastic arts.

During the aftermath of a hepatitis that forced her to stay in bed in 1959, Violeta began to weave jute tapestries, to paint and later to make sculptures. In the colored wool tapestries the artist reproduced the same motifs recovered from tradition and intended as “painted songs” and full of that dramatic sense of life that permeates all her musical production.
“The tapestries are like painted songs,” she will say in an interview, “I try to show in the tapestries the Chilean song, the legends, the life of the people.”

In 1960 she met and later fell in love with the Swiss musicologist and anthropologist Gilbert Favre, to whom she dedicated hundreds of love songs, the best known of which are Corazón maldito.
1961 she goes to Argentina, where she teaches courses in folklore, ceramics, painting and arpilleras. In Buenos Aires she exhibits her paintings and works for television.

In 1962 she left for Helsinki with her children, invited to the Youth Festival. After the European tour, Violeta resettled in Paris in a small room in the Latin Quarter. In the evenings she performed in clubs. During the day, she wrote, painted and wove tapestries, then went out in search of galleries to exhibit them. Violeta Parra continued to create her canciones que se pintan (songs that are painted): a series of paintings, sculptures and embroideries that are in perfect continuity with her music.
The arpilleras – her monumental tapestries – are certainly the most complex corpus of works and, with their ancestral representations inspired by pre-Columbian art,.
A large part of her works are a visual testimony of her anthropological research into the traditional oral and musical culture of her people, an attempt to preserve their memory.
Her oil paintings on wood Las tres pascualas, Casamiento de negros and Macitún. They are inspired by Chilean folk tales. The artist avoids realism to allow the tales to manifest themselves freely.
The artist turns the history of the Spanish colonization of Chile on its head and places the Mapuche people at its center. Fresia y Caupolicán takes up a passage, Canto XXXIII, from the 16th-century epic poem “The Araucanian” by the Spanish soldier and poet Alonso de Ercilla, which describes the Spanish colonization of southern Chile in an epic Renaissance style in the style popular in Europe at the time, representing the Mapuche people only from his point of view.

Parra knew the Mapuche culture very well and was a scholar of Chilean folklore and art and culture. Her tapestry depicts a moment from “La Araucaniade”, in which Caupolicán, the Mapuche toqui, is captured by the Spanish. Unlike Ercilla’s story, the artist focuses on the more intimate impact of this violence on the family of Fresia and Caupolicán. With this work she highlights the injustices of history that have been written from colonial perspectives.

In 1964, she was the first Latin American woman to exhibit her works in a solo exhibition at the Louvre Museum, Decorative Arts section.
1965, her book “Poésie populaire des Andes” was published in France. In Geneva, Swiss television filmed the documentary “Violeta Parra, Chilean embroiderer”. Violeta returned to Chile permanently in June of the same year.

Back in Chile, she installed a large tent (la carpa de la Reina) at the gates of the capital Santiago, which Parra intended to be a cultural center focused on research into Chilean folklore (Centro de las Artes). She was supported by her children and other artists, such as Patricio Manns, Víctor Jara, but she failed to interest the general public.
Also in 1966 Parra recorded her last album: Gracias a la vida, Volver a los 17, Rin del angelito on infant mortality, Pupila de águila, Cantores que reflexionan and El albertío.
On February 5, 1967, at the age of forty-nine, struck by a serious form of depressive disorder, Violeta Parra committed suicide.

In 1992, the Violeta Parra Foundation was created and dedicated to her. The foundation aims to gather and organize the work of Violeta Parra.
1997 On the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of her birth, her visual work is again exhibited at the Museum of Decorative Arts of the Louvre Museum in Paris. The Violeta Parra Foundation and the Directorate of Cultural Affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chile participate.

Coinciding with the 90th anniversary of her birth, a permanent exhibition of her visual work is inaugurated at the Palacio de la Moneda Cultural Center.

2015, the Violeta Parra Museum is inaugurated

2022, Violeta Parra is present with her tapestries at the 59th Venice Biennale, Il latte dei sogni the works exhibited at the Venetian exhibition are all wool embroidered jute fabrics from the 1960s: The Circus (1961), Naval Combat I (1961-1962) and The Tree of Life (1963), works that coincide with the artist’s travels to Argentina and France.
In the work Battaglia navale 1 from 1964 she denounces the abuses suffered by Chile during the War of the Pacific (1879–1884) and represents Captain Arturo Prat, the greatest national hero who courageously holds the Chilean flag while his vessel Esmeralda sinks.