Jorge Armando Ponce Muñoz was born in 1982 in the small town of Paillaco in southern Chile. His early childhood was marked by the loss of his father and the poverty that followed. His grandparents were simple farmers and his mother initially worked as a cook in a school. Because of financial difficulties, he spent several years as a young boy living alone with his grandparents in the countryside, wandering through the forests all day and listening to his grandfather’s fantastic stories about earthquakes, witchcraft, and the wild mountain lion.

When he was eight years old, his stepfather entered his life. The constant moving and changing of schools came to an end. From then on, the family’s economic situation slowly but steadily improved. His stepfather founded a small taxi company, his mother began training to become a teacher, and Jorge was the first in the family to attend high school. During the summer holidays he worked as a fruit picker or on a hacienda, earning money to fulfill a few personal wishes. Realizing that being poor in Chile often means remaining relatively poor throughout life led him to set high goals for himself. He wanted to become a film director, a theater director, an astronaut, or an artist.

At the age of eighteen he moved away from home and began studying Spanish and Media Education in Osorno. During this time he started acting in theater productions at the university and later also teaching theater, an experience that had a strong influence on his later artistic work. For the first time he felt able to express himself freely. While many of his fellow students saw themselves as poets, Jorge considered poetry too intellectual and reserved for an academic audience. Instead he began writing short stories, some of them inspired by the old legends of his now deceased grandfather. Several of these stories were published and he won numerous literary awards in Chile and Spain.

At the age of twenty-eight he spent the final year of his studies as an assistant at the University of Göttingen. The experience of living abroad once again transformed his artistic practice. While his final thesis still focused on a comparison between contemporary Chilean poetry and German poetry slam, he increasingly turned toward video art. After several moves within Germany and a period of professional orientation, he decided to begin another course of study. At twenty-nine he enrolled at the University of Bremen to study Art and Spanish. His work became more experimental and deconstructivist. He explored a wide range of materials and began focusing on mixed media, installation, and performance. A severe personal tragedy within his close family made his art more radical and expressive. Since then, the motif of deconstruction and existentialism has run like a red thread through his work.

Jorge participated in a group exhibition at Villa Sponte and had solo exhibitions at the Fast-Art Gallery and at onetwothree in Bremen, as well as at SLife in Hamburg. He won first prize at the short film festival Flimmerfest in Hamburg, and in 2023 his short film Pulver was selected and received an Honorable Mention at the Around International Award Berlin Film Festival.

Alongside his artistic work, he has published didactic material for Spanish as a foreign language (ELE) with Schmetterling Verlag and Cornelsen Verlag in Germany. Most recently, he contributed two articles on film didactics to the journal Kunst + Unterricht published by Friedrich Verlag (September 2024 issue) and designed the cover for this edition.