✧✧✧✧✧ ONGOING  PROJECTS ✧✧✧✧✧                         Telenovela and Social Transformation                                                                                                                            Music collaborations with WANNABE, Rayo, Imaabs, Joe Campbell and Gabriel Gassi                            
 CARLA GARLASCHI (aka ✧Princess Prada
hyper-latinpop artist girlfriend-experience daddy Y2K flow narrative hybrid auto-fiction gossip

  InstallatioN    VideO  
MusiC   WritingS    PresS   MemeS   BiO   ContacT 

Mark
Carla Garlaschi aka Princess Prada
(b. Chile) Moves through the roles of fiction writer, performer, visual, soundmeme artist and pop singer. Currently working between London, Stockholm, and Santiago de Chile. She deals with globalized Latin American media genres as imaginary grounds for social transformation. Her cosmology could be described as an elastic telenovela where art world glitterati, cultural workers and academics see their core beliefs questioned by the drive of desire, unexpected empathy, social friction and fantastic events.

Her work has been shown at TATE Modern, London (2022), Club Quarantine (2020), FLAWA, London (2020), Drag Baby, London (2020), Norbergfestival (2019), Way Out West, Sweden (2019), Survival Kit Festival 10.1 Riga (2019), Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm (2019), Mediterranean Museum, Stockholm (2019), Index, The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm (2018), Valeria - The Vagina Consultancy, Stockholm (2018), Galería Departamento 21, Chile (2017), Azores Contemporary Arts Centre (2017), Market Art Fair, Stockholm (2017), IX Biennial of Contemporary Art SIART, Bolivia (2016), Kiosko Galería, Bolivia (2015), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chile (2015).

Musically, she has released the pop songs La Cama (2017), The Princess Prada EP (2018), MONEY MONEY (2019) and Hater (2021). She has collaborated with producers Talisto, HABIB1, Shiroi Kitsune, Imaabs, Wannabe, Gabriel Gassi. She is part of Cherish Label a Stockholm-based independent platform releasing music by people identifying as women/non-binary.

Among other recognitions, she has received the Chilean National Fund for the Development of Culture and the Arts (2021), the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s working grant (2021) and (2018).

Mark
LABYRINTH OF ILLUSION (2017)
D21 Proyectos de Arte, Santiago de Chile


Digital poster, laser print on back light.




Ph: Jorge Brantmayer.

Carla Garlaschi’s Labyrinth of Illusion Satirizes the Art World at the End of the World

- Rotunda Magazine
By Christian Viveros-Fauné


The fact that the phrase “living the cliché” covers the entire wall of the gallery D21 Proyectos de Arte in Santiago, Chile, tells us a great deal about Carla Garlaschi’s newest attempt to satirize the art world. The words refer to, among other demoralizing possibilities, the ubiquitously contemporary experience of doing something only to realize that you have already seen this film, TV show or Youtube video before. The horror!


Titled after a video by the same name Garlaschi shot as the centerpiece of her recent exhibition, Laberinto de Ilusión (Labyrinth of Illusion) unfolds across one of Chile’s better-known galleries like a perverse joke.
Instead of displaying straightforward paintings and sculptures inside the art space, the Chilean artist has chosen to exhibit several lightboxes sporting her own face, a wall of printouts taken from her Instagram account, and a large illustration that details, via fourteen photos and text descriptions, the stock characters that populate her hackneyed histoire d’artiste. Crucially, the narrative is relayed through the use of what has long been one of Latin America’s greatest and most impoverished cultural exports—the telenovela— or as she puts it ‘banality ascamouflage’.


Garlaschi’s videotaped tale—which tells the story of “La Niña,” her artistic alter ego—embraces every cheap showbiz cliché in the book. Her characters include villains and heroes, stooges and straw men. One of them, “The Art Critic,” is told that “his concepts are nothing more than a postcard in an ethnographic museum” before having a wine glass smashed in his face. Others include “The Argentine Theorist,” “The European Curator,” “The Swedish Princess” and “The Artist-Drug Dealer.”


Laberinto de Ilusión resembles the typical Latin American telenovela in other spectacularly clichéd ways, too. Rather than advance through proper plot and character development, Garlaschi’s narrative unfolds, as its common on this genre, almost exclusively via the use of stereotypes and binary oppositions—i.e., love and hate, work and family, art and life, and a great deal of flaming camp.


Modeled after a format that is the entertainment equivalent of fast food, Laberinto de Ilusión employs the archest kind of irony to lampoon the expectations of artists in Santiago, Chile—and other points on the map where artistic excellence is falsely conflated with celebrity and financial success. The American painter John Currin once said that he owed his career to having found a cliché that he could believe in. Garlaschi makes fun of that, too, along with globalism’s obsession with fame, fortune, ambition and romance.


Today, art’s increasingly neoliberal worldview simulates a lot of dumb popular fiction. In Garlaschi’s terms, it resembles the worst possible kind of telenovela. Let’s plainly call it what it is, she suggests: a Laberinto de Ilusión.


LOVE ME LIKE THE SUN (2017)
Galleri Mejan
Research Week
Royal Institute of Art Stockholm
Co-cur. Olivia Berkowicz & Carla Garlaschi

Telenovela:
Hijacking and Autonomy in the Neo Baroque World

Artistic research project by Carla Garlaschi funded by the Artistic Research and Development Projects, Royal Institute of Art Stockholm.

Through the appropriation of Latin American labeled entertainment products, aimed to portray or address matters related to contemporary art.


Artist’s thoughts around the project:

“Through a persona, in the roles of writer actress or artist I work mostly by going into and out of a character - and in sustaining this duality. I think of it as a flirt with telenovela success stories, in this case of artist from Latin America coming to Northern Europe. The idea for me is to conciously slip into  exoticization using the romance content and telenovela. My persona can adapt depending on the context, which over the years has become a relationship that may be even related to trading.

Telling a story and creating a moving image refers to the same pendulum shaping my practice: Latin America - Northern Europe. I thought, ¿could the realisation of a narrative -itself dealing with the meeting of two parts: the lovers- allow me to build a correspondence between the two sides of this pendulum? Dichotomies such as: text/image, love/hate, art/life, private life/persona would alow me the construction of meaning by comparison (Neo Baroque Wold). In this way each of my public appearances, be it a performance, the release of a book or the exhibition of the project would work as a myse en abyme. That’s my gesture.”


The result of the project was a soap opera trailer, a dramatized artist statement, posters, banners. The project also extended to pop songwriting in collaboration with the reggaeton producer Talisto and the realization of the party installation Quinceañera curated by Olivia Berkowicz.


Ph: Gethin Wyn Jones..

QUINCEAÑERA (2017)
Galleri Mejan
Research Week
Royal Institute of Art Stockholm
Co-cur. Olivia Berkowicz & Carla Garlaschi

Image: Carla Garlaschi.

Quinceañera: You’ll never bathe in the same river twice


- Extract, Research Week’s Program (2017)
Royal Institute of Art Stockholm

Quinceañera is an art event in the form of a sweet sixteen party, shaped by the transgressive power of cuteness. Traditionally the Quinceañera is a Latin American adolescent rite of passage -perhaps even a right to passage- which suspends an established order, opening up for self-determination. During this liminal period, even social hierarchies seem blurry.

The party will be a space for togetherness, where prior to the event itself, the sceno- graphic installation will be created during an open workshop together with the artist Carla Garlaschi (aka Princess Prada) and the curator Olivia Berkowicz. Making use of basic handicraft materials, the party props will be directed towards the actualisation of an imaginary coming of age party.

Stockholm-based reggaeton artist Talisto and Princess Prada will open the party. Supported by the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.

Ph: Gethin Wyn Jones..

QUIÉREME COMO AL SOL (2015)
Kiosko Galería, Santa Cruz, Bolivia

Quiéreme como al sol (Love me like the sun)

In a two-month residency in Kiosko Galería in the city of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, Carla Garlaschi worked profiling characters for a soap opera narrative that connected a European the a Latin American art scene in intricated ways.

During the stay there was special attention in establishing a connection with the social context of Santa Cruz. 



Ph: Jeannine Paz

HOW TO BE SOMEONE (2015)
Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Chile
Cur. Juan Castillo

Ph: Montaña Extendida.