Diego Borgsdorf Fuenzalida: A House Containing

Wolfpack HQ presents A House Containing, an exhibition by artist and ethnographic researcher Diego Borgsdorf Fuenzalida. Conceived between Santiago and Los Angeles, the project centers on fiber-based works initiated by a return to their grandmother’s childhood home in Caleta Abarca, Viña del Mar, seventy-five miles west of Santiago. There, on a hillside above the sea, Borgsdorf Fuenzalida encountered an abandoned structure vacated by the family on the eve of the Chilean military coup of 1973, where personal rupture intertwined with political upheaval.

The artist traces connections between objects found under a layer of dust in the Caleta Abarca house—a propane tank, a Chilean flag, devotional imagery—and research at the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Santiago, where they assisted in preserving arpilleras, hand-sewn documents of resistance produced under dictatorship. “My life became museological labor,” Borgsdorf Fuenzalida writes. “I had to study my neighbors—material and immaterial, living and dead, human and otherwise.”

In 1968, Luchita Hurtado, Lee Mullican, and their two sons lived in Santiago Chile for a year through Mullican’s faculty exchange program with UCLA. While there, Mullican exhibited at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes where his striation works appeared alongside plants and sunlight, dissolving exhibition and domestic display. Hurtado painted from a closet-turned-studio, producing early works from her I Am series. Installed in the archives of Hurtado and Mullican, A House Containing draws from their collapsing of boundaries between art, life, and collecting, presenting masterworks by both that carry the tactile charge of woven pattern. 

The exhibition explores how collecting—whether artifacts, household items, or souvenirs—reveals the fraught entanglements of memory, power, and desire. It draws from Hurtado and Mullican’s collection and the broader mid-century habit of absorbing Indigenous objects into the home as markers of cultural connection.

For Borgsdorf Fuenzalida, the house, archive, and museum are interwoven vessels where histories gather and reconfigure through contact with the present.