Diego Borgsdorf Fuenzalida: A House Containing
7/20—8/24. 2025
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 north-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.
Diego Borgsdorf Fuenzalida is an experimental ethnographic researcher and textile artist based between Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.. Borgsdorf Fuenzalida’s work has been exhibited at Glen Echo Arts Park, Rockville, Maryland; IA&A Hillyer Gallery, Washington D.C., Room 3557, Los Angeles; Launch Gallery, Los Angeles; and Mile 44, Los Angeles. They have held residencies with VisArts Center, Rockville, Maryland and Blue Light Junction, Baltimore, Maryland with published research contributions to the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Santiago, Chile.
Photographic arpillera: photograph printed on cotton, burlap, polyester embroidery thread, poly stuffing
40 x 25 x 5 inches
Photographic arpillera: photograph printed on cotton, burlap, polyester embroidery thread, poly stuffing
40 x 31 x 5 inches
Photographic arpillera: photograph printed on cotton, burlap, polyester embroidery thread, poly stuffing
35 x 25 x 5 inches
Wool (sourced from Chile, partially hand-dyed in a sucrose indigo vat), cotton, copper, clay, burlap, polyester embroidery thread, copper pipe
28 x 25 inches
Photograph of Caleta Abarca, Viña del Mar, Chile, on treated 35mm film, printed on salted wool
7.25 x 11 inches
Wool (primarily sourced from Chile and Argentina) and cotton, fibers are partially hand-dyed with achiote and partially synthetically dyed
14 x 20 inches
Artist book, 40 pages
8.5 x 11 inches
Ephemera and photos related to the Hurtado/Mullican collection
Feathers, wood, and beads
1 1/4 x 1 1/4 x 1/2 inches
1 x 1 x 1/4 inches
1/4 x 1/4 x 1/4 inches
Sofa Compact
Designed in 1954
72.5 × 30 × 35 inches
Hauser & Wirth Luchita Hurtado Gelong Blanket by ROAM
Diego Borgsdorf Fuenzalida
Huellas (Traces), 2025
Photographic arpillera, Photograph printed on cotton, burlap, polyester embroidery thread, poly stuffing
35 x 25 x 5 inches
Encounter, 1971
Oil on canvas
50 x 95 3/4 inches
JFK, 1963
Oil on canvas
75 x 75 inches
c. 1930-1940
Wool
75 x 68 inches
JB Blunk chair and stool
C.1960s
Wood
30 3/4 x 17 x 24 1/2 inches
13 x 17 1/2 x 13 1/2 inches