DICHO A MANO - MUSEO DE ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO UCHILE SEDE PARQUE FORESTAL

Who hasn't spoken with their hands at some point?

In Pineda's works, when language fails or context imposes limits, the body takes over as the voice. This situation becomes especially evident in the migratory experience, where language transforms, the familiar becomes strange, and the unfamiliar imposes itself as the norm. For the past year, Felipe and I have been going through our own migration processes: we both moved to Europe at the same time, which led to a shared research project structured around two deeply connected axes.

On the one hand, we study gesture and the body as forms of communication when language is not shared or proves insufficient; on the other, we analyze gestures present in classical sculpture and in the signage systems of traditional European museums, understood as devices that organize behavior and convey a specific perspective to the viewer. In both cases, gesturality operates as an emergent language, seemingly accessible to all, yet loaded with conventions and hierarchies.

Shaped by the migratory experience, we confront new languages, customs, and cultures that exceed the verbal. In this context, the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) becomes central: by conceiving perception as an embodied experience, he proposes that the body is a primary way of being in the world, inseparable from the mind. From this perspective, gesture and corporeality become fundamental tools of communication, especially in contexts of displacement or when learning a new language. Language is not always spoken: it is often performed. The body speaks before the tongue.

This trajectory engages with a second line of research focused on the norms and signals of artistic institutions in the Global North. Questions such as "why can't we touch?" or "how are we expected to understand something without a direct bodily experience?" run through Felipe's work. In his practice, he seeks to open up this language, to explore it, deconstruct it, and reassemble it through sculptural and graphic forms, resignifying communication beyond the verbal because before words, what is needed is to be understood.