The Journey was a mid-career survey of Chilean-American artist Guillermo Bert, whose practice traces the migration experience through the entanglements of colonization, capitalism, and cultural memory. Born in Santiago in 1959 and based in Los Angeles since 1981, Bert builds his work from the metaphorical resonance between migrant journeys, the harsh emptiness of border landscapes, and the systems that commodify both bodies and belief.

The exhibition gathered works from across Bert’s career, alongside new pieces produced specifically for the show, presented in a range of traditional and contemporary media. Series such as Encoded Textiles and Border Zone exemplify Bert’s distinctive approach: weaving ancestral practices together with contemporary technologies — including QR codes embedded into traditional Mapuche weavings — to create works that invite viewers to actively participate in their decoding. In doing so, Bert keeps Indigenous traditions in living circulation while giving voice to communities that colonial and capitalist systems have systematically marginalized.

The Journey was accompanied by a major publication published by the Nevada Museum of Art. The publication includes an interview between Bert and me, alongside scholarly essays by Alma Ruiz (independent curator and former senior curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), Tressa Berman, Ph.D. (anthropologist, curator, and writer), and Ximena Keogh Serrano (writer and transdisciplinary scholar).