Performance can be a mechanism for using language directly and without mediation, matching urgency to the speed of mass media and its modes of address. In her latest work at Barro in Buenos Aires, La Chola en el aire (La Chola on the air), La Chola Poblete uses an exhibition featuring her paintings as scenography for a live performance that makes room for gossip, comedy, and autofiction through voice rather than image. She folds television conventions into underground performance culture and the provincial nightclub aesthetic of the 1990s, with its decadent and overdone decoration. The paintings, flat planes of color and geometry referencing Andean cosmology and the construction of her own identity, become the backdrop for a critique of the institutional frameworks that have defined the artist’s practice.

There is an identity-based localization that typecasts La Chola in a particular slot: Her becoming-an-artist in Guaymallén, a small village in the province of Mendoza, and the aesthetic elaboration of the religious and material culture in which she was raised informs her transition and her reclamation of a position as a Brown artist. It is this problem that Andrea Giunta takes up in her curatorial text: “Is it possible to think about La Chola’s work beyond the frameworks that have so far structured the biography she herself narrated and constructed?… Can we unlearn what we know and look at her work with new eyes?”11Andrea Giunta, “LA CHOLA POBLETE, En el aire,” 2025. In the performance—with script and direction by the artist Beto Villa—La Chola takes on this question with precision, making clear that the story she has told about herself is just one possible story among others.

In previous work, her concept of Pop Andino, a personal avant-garde style and outgrowth of both the happening tradition and the extended colorism of 1960s painting, spread through her watercolors with references to rock bands, inscriptions, and slogans. Here the paintings are sparse; they function more as a pause, a flutter in another direction. Place, subject, and identity are not called into question at Barro so much as examined under a different register. A local, off-kilter humor, free from artist commissions or expectations, unfolds new versions of this charismatic artist: She vulgarly shows off her looks to the audience and then mocks them, just after her stellar entrance down a catwalk was ruined by her pathetic singing performance.

In La Chola en el aire, the artist inhabits a character with only slight differences from her present reality as an artist: She triumphs in institutions, gets invited to the Venice Biennale, wins awards, is in demand. The performance, repeated several times throughout the run of the exhibition, takes the form of a pilot episode for a television program in which the outraged director constantly interrupts, asking “Where is La Chola?” while the other performers argue and point out how little talent she has for singing and moving onstage. Over the course of forty-five minutes, the script interweaves her success in the art world with her bad luck in love. “I’m simply a girl in front of a boy asking him to love her,” she says. “My gender is artist.” The performers compulsively share autobiographical stories of overcoming adversity with the camera, moving on- and off-stage to canned applause, while the backstage area is artificially revealed amidst exaggerated gestures and a set whose symbolism directly evokes the Andean, with a floor covered in a Mapuche pattern and a braid that doubles as an arch. The show wraps with a never-ending, over-the-top, melodramatic poetry reading by the performer Marcelo Estebecorena, who strips naked as La Chola finally interrupts him to end because she thinks “it’s too much.”

With this performance, the artist grasps the difference between ground and figure, and finds a voice capable of commenting on its own situation. The first person serves her better at a distance from the discourse demanded of her. This same distancing effect makes the viewer feel uncomfortable in the face of such artificiality, which only serves to exaggerate the image of a figure like La Chola that we, the viewers and herself, have created. It’s from there, in the register of humor, that she takes aim at how the art world’s issues of the moment tend to move.

This meta-representation of TV production also situates itself within a specific local genealogy: from Marta Traba walking through the city in her televised series Historia del Arte Moderno contada desde Bogotá, to Eduardo Bergara Leumann and his program Botica del Tango, moving through the studio interviewing singers, millionaires, and artists; from Federico Klemm and his El Banquete telemático show explaining art history in a neobaroque language suspended between simulacrum and artifice in the 1990s, to Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos alongside Tato Bores singing in primetime. The clearest reference, however, is Batato Barea—Argentina’s first travesti clown—and his appearances on the program hosted by vedette and artist Moria Casán, A la cama con Moria. What connects all of them, and what La Chola draws out, is how certain outdated modes from theater and television can still hold valid forms of address.

Even if television is now an obsolete form of contemporaneity, La Chola uses it here to pose a question that long had been troubling her work: How can an artist reconcile the idyllic, alienating, and ultimately false prison of institutional and curatorial agendas with their own research and genuine desires?