Laager

So, taking The Laager to a post-Pinochet Chile at the invitation of the Santiago Museum of Contemporary Art, and paid for by the United Nations, provided considerable political affirmation for Barker's rational and romantic art mission.

"I met a poet who was friends with a guitarist whose hands got cut off by Pinochet's thugs. I met artists who had been blindfolded by the dictatorship - for months - and then taken out of the cells and shown the light. All these people became part of my Santiago exhibition."

Tiempo de Amor

The bulk of the work was called Tiempo de Amor/Time to Love and was the genesis of what would - over the coming months of European travel - become Barker's first European solo, Nothing Gets Lost in the Universe.

Time to Love was shown outside The Laager, in a lift shaft of the museum. It included a neon "love" sign and a Hoopoo bird, newspaper headlines and, for the guitarist, a wax hand bought at the religious market in Rio, where it would have been used as an effigy to pray for healing of the body part.

From Santiago on, wax worked its way into Barker's palette with ease. It was second skin. Like the army uniforms or the white pigment of Xhosa boys undergoing initiation into manhood, wax would return frequently as an agent of transformation in Barker's later work, at times evolving into latex and even chocolate.