Natalia Villanueva Linares

Chillona of the Forest 1 + 2

Chillona.of the Forest.1+2

A three-day exhibition by Natalia Villanueva Linares
At Mana Contemporary, Chicago
June 19 + 20 + 21, 2026

Opening reception: Friday, June 19, 6 to 9 pm
Gallery Hours: Saturday, June 20, 10 to 6 pm
Closing: Sunday, June 21, 10 - 2 pm, Artist talk 2 - 3pm, Performance 3 - 6 pm

Mana Contemporary
2233 S Throop St, Chicago, IL 60608
West Entrance (Throop St.)

During a three-day exhibition, French-Peruvian maker Natalia Villanueva Linares introduces a long-running project named Chillona, Spanish word for crybaby. For years, the artist has been writing untold stories, secrets, thoughts we are not meant to say out loud that open a state of vulnerability and "make us cry." To exorcise these laments, the artist writes on large pieces of paper. Villanueva Linares puzzles the material into rolls, wraps them, cuts them, and submerses them in water to never be read again.

A major part of the presented works highlight how nature altered her work during a first residency Villanueva Linares was awarded in 2023 at Loghaven (Knoxville, Tennessee). The calmness, the walks, the architecture of the studio space, invited the forest, the light, and the sky to enter the practice and asked something new of it, altering the project to Chillona of the Forest.1. Now her stories are carried by branches, mimicking, like an instrument, the sound of chanting tree tops moved by the wind. She also gathered 3 days of rain distributed in multiple jars, keeping them for three years in her studio…waiting.

Returning to Loghaven in early 2026 for a much shorter winter residency, Villanueva Linares brought back all the written secrets and rainwater. She underwent a ten-day-long experience in a sleep-deprived state, accompanied by dance and music to fuel the rhythm and energy needed to give the material a completely new form; distilling the writings into small bricks, extracting color from the accumulated water and ink, and pulling out what she calls a "sensitive mathematical formula of transformation and goodbye."

Through projection film, sound, photography, and installation, the exhibition is organized in three movements. The third, opens onto Chicago, including the metallic structure the artists’ originally intended to hold the stories, branches fallen from windy tempests in Chicago, gathered from city streets, holding fresh rolls of hidden stories written since the artist's return from the forest.

Villanueva Linares will close on Sunday June 21st, Chillona of the Forest.2 transmuting this landscape.