Constanza Alarcón Tennen

Courtesy of the artist and Nina Johnson Gallery

Constanza Alarcón Tennen (b. 1986, Santiago, Chile) is an artist working at the intersection of sound, sculpture, video, and performance. She is interested in transmaterial dialogues as ways of inhabiting an in-between space of materials and objects. In recent years, she has focused her practice in an integrated view on fiction and the possibilities of eroticism and haptics as lenses for seeing the world of both human and non-human entities.

She holds a BFA from Universidad Católica de Chile and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University (2015), where she received the Susan H. Whedon Award for outstanding student in Sculpture. Constanza Alarcón Tennen’s work has been shown internationally at venues such as PS122 (NY), Patricia Ready Gallery (Santiago), the 13th New Media Biennial (Chile), Atelierhaus Salzamt (Linz), the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan), among others. Recent solo presentations include her exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Santiago), NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY), and Nina Johnson Gallery (Miami). She has participated in residencies such as The Vermont Studio Center (VT), Delfina Foundation (London), and B.A.S.E Tsonami (Valparaíso). She not-so-recently published her first poetry compilation as an artist book through the independent publisher Otra Sinceridad. In addition to her artistic practice, Constanza is a teacher living between Santiago and Boston.

A school without walls

LA ESCUELA___ began in 2021 with a reflection from its artistic director and co-founder, Miguel Braceli, about educational models for social practices and situated learning. This idea of bringing art and education closer to social realities by taking them out into public space became the building block of a project co-developed with the international foundation Siemens Stiftung. From this vision, LA ESCUELA___ was conceived as a “school without walls.”

Rather than operating from a fixed campus or following a predetermined curriculum, this artist-run platform works through a growing hemispheric network of artists, architects, educators, researchers, organizers, independent spaces, and communities. Its projects take shape in different contexts across the Americas, responding to local conditions while creating connections between places and practices.

Since 2022, LA ESCUELA___ has developed more than 45 projects in 13 countries, engaging more than 6,000 participants in online and on-site programs, and collaborating with over 350 artists and thinkers. Its programs include on-site experimental classrooms and online labs, residencies, public art, exhibitions, lectures, workshops, symposia, and research processes. An open-access Library with over 300 essays, interviews, documentation, and pedagogical resources expands this work into a growing alternative critical pensum of Latin American artistic and pedagogical practices.

At the heart of the platform is a commitment to reciprocal exchange: not exporting a model from one place to another, but creating conditions for different forms of knowledge to meet, circulate, and transform one another.