Camil Téllez
Camil Téllez /they/ (Chile – 1982)
Is a transdisciplinary artist who moves between performance, writing, and audiovisual practices. Their artistic practice is informed by their autobiography and their lived experiences, such as migration, sexual and gender based dissidence, and neurodivergence. Recently arrived to Vienna after living in Bilbao for eleven years. They studied Visual Art in Santiago de Chile (2004) and after that, they specialised in Scenic and Performative Practices in Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid (2013). During their years in Chile they taught Drawing and Art Theory for eight years in the same university they graduated from. They have developed their work mostly between Chile and The Basque Country, creating an art practice strongly focused on collaboration with other artists.
“When the space is not its own—a product of migration—the body seeks patterns to establish links with the past of another place: the climate, familiar faces, similar corners, a type of plant, the moon from a different perspective... ”
I am a Chilean transdisciplinary artist who migrated from Chile since a while, so I live between my body memory and the places I decide to stay. In my recent artistic work I investigate through autobiography, traces of this body memories, gender and their connection with migration and inhabitance. I’m approaching these topics embodying different expressions of my fluid identity in connection with the “transitionary spaces” I have inhabited. This is a slow process of understanding myself and the surrounding with the hope to dissolve the distance of my particular neurodissident body in relation to others, whether it is an audience or the public in different proposals for the mediation of places, circulating between performative, textual and audiovisual practices. I create fictional characters or spaces in which queer subjectivities as mine may feel reflected. I have conducted my work mostly between Chile and The Basque Country, developing an art practice, that in many cases, is strongly focused on collaboration with other artists from different disciplines, places and backgrounds.
In my development as an artist, I have two lines of research related to the body, which have been continuously intertwined over the years: One is a spatial, expanded, and dispersed search for an “entity state”; and the other is a specific and autobiographical search for an “identity state.” My practice moves between these two contradictions.
This first line of inquiry has to do with how the neurobiological body inhabits a specific space—one that is not its own—for a certain period of time, which implies not only adaptation but also a permanent interpretation and translation of signs. When the space is not its own—a product of migration—the body seeks patterns to establish links with the past of another place: the climate, familiar faces, similar corners, a type of plant, the moon from a different perspective... The body heightens its sensory sensitivity and tries to connect with the place as if it were a tactile surface. In this process, it ends up imagining a parallel reality called adaptation, which organizes its own structures and maps to navigate spaces as a bodily experience and invites others to be part of this experience.
The second way is like pulling a thread from your own sweater or a vein from your fingertip in front of an audience, and following it as you follow your own story, the one that gives you ownership and meaning in the world, the one that makes you and others uncomfortable, the autobiographical one, family migrations, dictatorship and childhood memories, traumas, queerness, neurodivergence, and with this, telling your unique and valuable story in the world. Sharing it, whether others care or not.
