"Presente": Weaving memories despite amnesia

Insisting; the colonization of sensitivity supports the multiple forms of fascism, be it from national fascism to military dictatorships, Insisting. On the occasion of the almost 51 years since the coup d’état in Chile, we remember PRESENTE at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo curated by Joselyne Contreras Cerda, Sebastian Vidal Valenzuela, Diego Parra Donoso, a transgenerational collective exhibition that enunciated the relationship between art and its political implications since September 1973.

Among the many activities surrounding the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the coup d’état in Chile, in 2023 the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC, for its initials in Spanish) presented a program related to that moment and historical context. One of the exhibitions was “Presente”, which proposed three reading cores to exhibit the work of seventeen artists from different generations, who have been exploring various ways in which art has been politically linked to what has happened since September 1973.

The recent past – especially the events that occurred in Chile – has a validity that is fundamentally manifested in two aspects: the political reality imposed by the constitutional order of 1980, which determines the life of citizens in all its dimensions, and the violations of human rights, which through state terrorism tortured, murdered, disappeared, imprisoned and exiled thousands of Chileans.

These crimes against humanity are understood as a debt that cannot be extinguished, because for decades the State has not guaranteed policies of justice, reparation and non-repetition, leaving thousands of victims and relatives of those executed adrift. This is an unresolved issue that has deepened the wounds throughout society, as the dictatorship established a political and economic model through the death and disappearance of thousands of people.

50 years have passed since the coup d’état and, despite the insistence of evidence, we still find stories that distort the facts, thus conditioning our relationship with the public through those tricks that determine ways of feeling, thinking and acting

Taking the above as a premise, “Presente” displayed a selection of works and proposals that sought to give relevance to a plurality of practices and languages to visit that recent past, giving an account of that unfinished moment, of the event that gives no respite to time and that continues to be present at every moment.

Attending to the present

Every time we return to the memory of the dictatorship, the fact that its painful legacy is still alive is made present, where the image, the word and the body constituted an effective triad to denounce state violence. Through various media such as painting, performance, photography, video and graphics, the artists activated practices that allowed them to expose the systematic nature of death and censorship during that time, as well as representations to express – from a critical and affective perspective – a discomfort against that negation of freedom.

Given their temporary conditions, many of the works take the archive as a basis to recompose, from a visual perspective, the presence of the imposition of silence and clandestinity. In this way, Constanza Urrutia Wegman‘s proposal visited and updated the last speech by President Salvador Allende, to remind us of that socialist path that was diverted by the imposition of violence; while Nury González recovered the memory of the day of the coup, in the words of someone who did not live in Santiago, but in a rural area, from a perspective that is outside the great official narratives. Likewise, the CADA Action Collective is present with the first re-mounting in Chile of its iconic installation Residuos Americanos [American Residues] (1985), created in 1985 at the Washington Project for the Arts, which consisted of sending a box of second-hand clothes as a form of protest against the North American intervention in the destabilization of the government of President Salvador Allende. This core was accompanied by two paintings by Patricia Israel, which explore her emotional relationship with exile and torture. Also present was the documentation of a performance that Elias Adasme carried out in downtown Santiago in 1980, in which he activated the street dissemination of an artistic and political statement that ended with his arrest. Restoring the human scale of history is the effect of working with memories, which are individual and collective, partial and incomplete.

Making present

The “Present”, inaugurated by the events that the works refer to, established uncertainty as a basic principle of life. For this reason, some of the exhibition’s proposals were located in an area that worked with memory and recording, giving rise to activations that outlined and made what happened into something legible, to update what power forgets and to address what is happening.

Although the first years of the transition occurred against the backdrop of testimonies from victims and family members, as well as judicial investigations, the governments did not operate with the force and persistence to repair the magnitude of the damage done by the State itself. Barely 50 years after the coup, the search for missing detainees was adopted as state policy, an action that is imperative given the resurgence of denialist views that question the veracity of facts sanctioned by the justice system itself.

Javier Rodriguez offered a mural in this core made especially for the exhibition. In it, he recreated, in the form of comic strips – on a black background with white pencil –, scenes from two documentaries about Chile, made a few days after the coup by French television (Chile, in the shadow of the swords by Jacques Grignon-Dumoulin; and the Chile Special, by Jacques Segui). This intermedial contrast was emphasized with a series of drawings on paper, recreating the traumatic case known as La Caravana de la muerte, in which hundreds of Chileans were detained and murdered. This dark mural was in dialogue with another monumental work, La Sabana [The Sheet], by Nicolas Franco, a black painting in which the reference to one of the most important archives used by human rights lawyers of the Vicaria de la Solidaridad (an organization linked to the Catholic Church and created during the dictatorship for the defense of human rights) to find missing persons stands out: La Sabana. This file consisted of several unified papers in which the victims’ data was noted and posted on the walls of the Vicaria offices. As a document, it is once again present today when President Boric announced, in September of last year (2023), the National Plan for the Search for Truth and Justice, the first State policy focused on clarifying forced disappearances.

In front of this painting, the video La sangre de Cronos [The Blood of Cronos] was installed, which was made by the prominent Chilean theorist Ronald Kay, which corresponded to the last edition of the documentation of a happening (Tentativa Artaud) that was part of a seminar dedicated to the work of Antonin Artaud, held in 1974, in the Department of Humanistic Studies of the University of Chile. This was a performative and medial experience that aimed to explore pain and the impossibility of speech in times of censorship and repression. Finally, the work Estrellato [Stardom], by Elias Freifeld, was directly inspired by the emblematic case of the murder of three teachers – Guerrero, Parada and Nattino – in 1985, known as “The Beheaded Case.” On a canvas, Freifeld drew heads and stars which were then covered with an ultramarine blue paint. While making the painting, the artist recorded the process and, when finished, he repeatedly hit the painting with his body, as an act of aggression and impotence in the face of the context in which he lived.

Being present

50 years have passed since the coup d’état and, despite the insistence of evidence, we still find stories that distort the facts, thus conditioning our relationship with the public through those tricks that determine ways of feeling, thinking and acting. In these narrative frameworks, images and artistic practices have played a central role not only in deepening the stories in relation to the crimes of the dictatorship, but also in their potential to enter into political discussion. In this core, the complex link between autonomy and social responsibility was explored, while realizing the need to look again at what urgently needs to be brought into the public space and preserved in memory.

Rainer Krause‘s work explores a personal and intimate archive that ranges from his own documentary experience to the murals painted in different towns in Santiago in the mid-1980s: a street photographic record that has been kept for 50 years and is displayed in the exhibition for the first time. In it, we see how the population resisted silence and resorted to images as a method of denunciation, but also as an opportunity to produce popular monuments in memory of their fallen. With the street as its center, Francisca Montes‘ photographs present us with a public space that is in permanent dispute; her aerial views of the march on September 11, 2011, at the General Cemetery of Santiago, show the effluvia of memory that are still present in Chilean society.

In order to question the aesthetic policy of the dictatorship, which attempted to force the celebration of military heroes by changing the names of squares, streets and public buildings, as well as installing its own monuments ―from “eternal” flames to large statues and small busts―, Paz Errazuriz portrays the latter in her series Proceres [Heroes], with images that show a foundry in which small statues were made which populated public squares in practically all of Chile’s municipalities: Bernardo O’Higgins, Jose Miguel Carrera, Arturo Prat and, to a lesser extent, Manuel Rodriguez, recognized as Fathers of the Nation, ―always men, always military men―, who become ridiculous artifacts, simple objects that seem to be exorcised of their historical and monumental aura. Along the same lines, Gonzalo Diaz displays the polyptych Politica de la perspectiva [Politics of Perspective], comprising four panels made using silkscreen, where images from Paolo Uccello‘s painting, The Battle of San Romano (1456), are contrasted with press clippings from the newspaper La Tercera, where we see carabineros on horseback against protesters, in a march within the framework of Sebastian Piñera’s government project that sought to reformulate the “anti-terrorist” law, a piece of legislation that originated during the dictatorship and is the legal instrument through which the political model of the 1980 Constitution, in force and ratified by the last referendum in Chile, has been protected. This instrument, in fact, still allows for the repression of the crowds that take to the streets to protest, as if there could be no progress when dissent becomes the protagonist of public debate. Finally, the artist Pablo Rivera presents us with a powerful photograph of the Palacio de la Moneda, completely covered by a black cloth, which was taken by the artist when the building was being renovated, in 1999. The temporary dark cloth that covered the Government Palace contrasts with the series of Chilean flags that were raised in the adjacent Plaza de La Constitucion. This architectural mourning highlights the fact that, today, political memory, despite attempts at reparation, remains a deep debt.

Entry and exit points

The proposals of Enrique Ramirez, Claudia del Fierro and Alfredo Jaar highlight the complexity of re-exhibiting, making visible, in order to look again in the present at that which needs to be brought to the public space to be preserved in memory.

Alfredo Jaar’s work, ¿Es usted feliz? [Are you happy?] asks about happiness in a society that recognizes itself as full of fears and uncertainties, where the precariousness of life has led us as citizens to devalue democracy. The large sign that greeted the visitor and could be seen from the street, somewhat impertinently raised a question that contains various answers, some of which we may not feel comfortable hearing. This work, with the characteristics and dimensions of roadside advertising posters, offered the viewer the invasive power of a simple and acute question in its timelessness.

Activating the closing and opening of the exhibition, the audiovisual works of Ramirez and Del Fierro bring us closer to visions that, although they may seem distant, are the plot with which the memory of the dictatorship has been woven. On the one hand, Enrique Ramirez, in Brisas [Breezes](2008), challenges the viewer with the vision of a man who returns from the sea to walk through the city downtown until he reaches the Government House. This is a metaphor for the untimely nature of memory, the uncontrollable way in which the memory of those who are no longer with us appears in our daily lives; it is a poetic way of reminding us of the debt that the State has with the victims. While Claudia Del Fierro in El Complejo [The Complex] (2014) produces a documentary work that reveals stories that the democratic transition preferred to cover up, since they do not match with the official story of the fight against the dictatorship (the idea that Pinochet was defeated with only a referendum; without any violence involved). The video shows how part of Chilean society wanted to actively challenge the dictatorship by using weapons and, in turn, how the latter managed to undo this initiative using all its violence and power. The wounds left by this process are so deep that even today the territory of Neltume (where the events described by Del Fierro occurred) continues to bear them, while it is ravaged by the logging and tourism industries.

With the memory still vivid of the difficult events that Chile experienced with the social outbreak or revolt, where demands for equality and social justice were furiously expressed in the streets, “Presente” activated similar questions from the past, in which the same problems were inherited and perpetrated during the democratic years. The aim is to make visible how the State and our civil society have failed to develop a historical memory policy that facilitates, on the one hand, the remembrance of the victims (with the corresponding justice), and on the other, extends the culture of human rights into the present, strengthening democracy and ensuring that events like those that took place during the dictatorship never occur again.

Artists:
Paz Errazuriz, Alfredo Jaar, Gonzalo Diaz, Nicolas Franco Guzman, Nury Gonzalez, C.A.D.A., Javier Rodriguez, Ronald Kay, Rainer Krause, Pablo Rivera, Francisca Montes, Patricia Israel, Elias Adasme, Constanza Urrutia, Claudia del Fierro, Enrique Ramirez and Elias Freifeld.