The term syndemic was introduced in the 1990s in the field of medical anthropology to describe the synergistic nature of disease, namely how a disease interacts with other illnesses. In Syndemic Studies Jarpa diagnoses the multiple, intertwined maladies currently affecting her native Chile. Between October 2019 and June 2020, Chile’s citizens witnessed one crisis after another.
Voluspa Jarpa draws upon the visual vocabulary from this social shock to create a series of new works that explore the languages of power and resistance.

“Nowadays, I am focused on the notion of trauma, which I see as an imperative happening which forces the invention of a language–stemmed from the commotion, produced by actions difficult to assimilate, both at an individual as well as a collective sense. My research is a quest for material and conceptual strategies accounting traumatic events as an anomaly of language itself, as a disruption, whether in text or image. From these notions of collective history construction (historic documents and speeches, city, and patriotic symbols) and their crossing with subjective somatization (body, image, strikeout, smudge) enables me to look for and work in the boundaries of text and image.”