Cosmogolem finds home in Chile

Chile becomes home to a new Cosmogolem.

The project connects two remote rural areas in Chile by establishing a network and a bridge between two communities, while spreading the message that art, for everybody, is a Human Right.

On the 1st of August 2019, the Cosmogolem statue is inaugurated at the Cultural Park in Valparaiso, in presence of the artist Koen Vanmechelen, teachers and children from the neighboring communities.

As a preparatory project; his smaller brother – a mini version of the Cosmogolem – travels to the different communities from the first of April onward. This little Cosmo stayed 3 weeks in each school and inspire teachers to organize workshops focused on improving children's writing and reading skills. Each class wrote a letter for the next school. As such, the Cosmogolem also serves as a mail carrier, connecting the different school communities. After visiting Poza Verde school, Casas de Huaquén, Casas Viejas, Pullancón and Valle Hermoso, he met up with his big brother at Parque Cultural.

At the Parque, local teenagers were invited to paint the wooden sculpture, as part of the National Artistic Week with Art and Nature as this year’s central theme. The friendly giant functions as a “collector of memories” and will be involved in all the activities that take place in the park.

In may 2020 the Cosmogolem will travel to its next destination; the Human Rights Museum in Santiago before he finds his final stop at a public school in Temuco.

A text written by Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), Chilean Winner Nobel prize of literature 1945, - herself a teacher in a rural school - is a beautiful way to start and join the journey of the Cosmogolem.

I WRITE ON MY KNEES

I write on my knees and the desk never helped me, not in Chile, not in Paris, not in Lisbon

I think I have never done a verse in a closed room or in a room whose window gave a horrible house wall; I always affirm myself in a piece of heaven (...)

My moods get better if I affirm my old eyes in a mass of trees.

Writing usually makes me happy; always softens my mood and gives me a naive, tender, childish day.

It is the sensation of have been in my real homeland, in my habit, in my loose whim, in my total freedom.

Poetry is in me a simple lap, the sediment of submerged childhood.

Although it is bitter and hard, the poetry I made washes the dust of the world.

Gabriela Mistral