Martha Rosler, Si tú vivieras aquí, exhibition view at MAC Chile, 2019. Photo: Sebastián Mejía. Image courtesy of MAC Chile

Remember, we can all be replaced

One of the sites of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo of Santiago (MAC), Chile is located in Parque Forestal, on the south riverbank of the Mapocho, in city downtown. Families of different composition, size, and nationality seize the opportunity to stroll around. Some renounce the sunny afternoon to explore the cold interior of the MAC, the unpopular siamese brother of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes [National Museum of Fine Arts], with which it shares a building.

In the first floor, you can find Si tú vivieras aquí, the first retrospective show of the US American artist Martha Rosler (Brooklyn, 1943) in Latin America curated by Mariagrazia Muscatello and Montserrat Rojas Corradi, within the context of the second edition of BIENALSUR—the International Biennial of Contemporary Art in South America—as it is announced by the large white letters inscribed outside Room 1, along with a list of national artists invited to dialogue with Rosler’s works: Claudia del Fierro, Cristóbal Cea, Bárbara Oettinger, Bernardo Oyarzún, Voluspa Jarpa, and Máximo Corvalán-Pincheira.

“Who is Martha Rosler?”, ask themselves quietly those who dared to enter the museum. When crossing the threshold they find In the place of the public: Airport, which occupies the first two walls which collide in straight angles. Eight photographs of the series, that show the bleak interiors of the USA and German airports, hygienic and standardized borders, presented in a straight line on both white walls,  surrounded by phrases of different sizes, in black letter, as if the floated: 

control total 

imagen brillante de desalojo

regímenes del escrutinio

No digo mapa, no digo territorio

fantasías de escape [1]

To the left, a flat-screen reproduces a slide of photographs of the ongoing project Air Fare, a series of shots of the meals offered in first-class flights: deformed miniatures, pathetic and industrialized versions, cheese and grape boards, duck à l’orange, crême brûlée. Almost nonexistent portions of caviar accompanied by small glasses of champagne, that the low quality of the shots turn even more depressing and ridiculous. 

Martha Rosler, Si tú vivieras aquí, exhibition view at MAC Chile, 2019. Photo: Sebastián Mejía. Image courtesy of MAC Chile

Two very young women, one with short pink hair and the other with blue long hair, stop in front of the television for a moment, they whisper briefly, and then, head impatiently towards the wood bench placed in front of an old television that reproduces the 1983 video, A Simple Case for Torture, or How to Sleep at Night. The two headphones available are occupied by a woman and her small child. The boy is barely three years old, the mother tries hard to put on the headphones and, with a Venezuelan accent, asks him to stay calm. After she manages to accommodate him, they look for a few moments at Rosler’s hands moving and overlapping written press clippings about the US intervention in Latin America, the one that caused the coup d’etats, denouncing its implicit support of torture, human rights violations. In an hour-long recording, Rosler shows exhaustive bibliographic documentation of the political and economic consequences in said countries, the manipulation of information and pride of the US Americans. Meanwhile, the voice of a man explains philosophy and politics in English. The video doesn’t have Spanish subtitles. 

There is a loud bang in the room that causes several people to be distracted from the readings of the enlarged reproductions of Tijuana Maid (the original text from 1978 and re-adapted this year), one of the Postcard Novels of Service: a Trilogy on Colonization, in which a Mexican woman who emigrated from Tijuana to San Diego recount, in first person, the experience of crossing the border illegally, to then, work as a maid, being victim of abuse and discrimination, while, at the same time, being an object of exoticization and a reason for contempt by her employers. “Will you cook a Mexican dinner for us sometimes?”, says one of the postcards that gather fragments of recipes and common phrases of the Home Maid Spanish Cookbook, the bilingual bestseller that tries to coach the Spanish-speaking domestic service in the customs of the US American family. “The rich don’t like to eat the food of the poor”, asserts the story’s protagonist. The testimony problematizes how extreme xenophobia merged with the cultural and physical devotion of immigrants/invaders, held and enslaved in the intimacy of the bourgeois family.

The child lies on the floor, the headphones far away, and the mother rushes to pick him up. Rosler keeps moving her clippings on the screen, showing books. The mother and the child move away from interventionism, torture, politics, and philosophy.

The characteristic tune of Star Wars that musicalizes the parody video Chile On the Road to NAFTA (1997), performed by Escuela de Suboficiales de Carabineros [Instrumental Band of the Carabineros Petty Officer School], fills the room. The projection light is weak and fails to overcome the lighting of the place. The images of rural Chile in the nineties and the giant poster of a huge arm that wields a can of Coca-Cola, located in the middle of deserted land, allude to how Chile went from a socialist government to becoming the “neoliberal laboratory” of Latin America. Star Wars, the fist, mule-drawn carts, the epic trumpets, Coca-Cola. The installation can’t but cause a melancholy laugh.

Martha Rosler, Si tú vivieras aquí, exhibition view at MAC Chile, 2019. Photo: Sebastián Mejía. Image courtesy of MAC Chile

Two ladies are surprised to see that the work is about Chile. They are surprised to see themselves presented and observed by the producer and observer from the US, the world’s viewpoint.

Claudia del Fierro (Santiago, 1974) occupies the Southeast corner of the museum, turning its back on the Andes Mountains. Her work Políticamente correcto [Politically Correct] (2001-2019) is a video performance reproduced in two simultaneous projections. In one, we see Del Fierro walk along a path towards the neighboring projection to then return. In the second, dressed as one of the seamstresses of a clothing factory, we see how she manages to enter and leave the place with the rest of the workers, without anyone noticing that she does not work there. Del Fierro “disguises” as a textile worker to meddle in their world. On the floor, lightly lit, uniforms, costumes, are stacked. Outside, a flat-screen reproduces the montage of images of immigrants crossing the border of first world countries, interspersed with violent red flashes, which make up the piece Who Said We Did Not Know (2018) by Barbara Oettinger (Santiago, 1981), the only artist who does not refer to Chile. Next to it, the three biometric photographs of a “mestizo” face, together with a reproduction of a spoken portrait of similar features, exceed two meters high and are part of the iconic work Bajo sospecha [Under Suspicion] by Bernardo Oyarzún (Los Muermos, 1963). The face portrayed in the blowups is that of the artist, who in 1998 was arrested by the police and unjustly accused of having committed an assault. Oyarzún reflects on the criminalization of his Mapuche features, offering his face to scrutiny, to trial. The presence of this work reminds us that in Chile racism and classism persist as a consequence of the Colony. An echo in popular culture that points to this is the critical humor program Plan Z, which in the 1990s parodied this situation with a sitcom called Mapuches millonarios [Millionaire Mapuches]. An absolute contradiction in Chile. “Sometimes I think I should dye my hair black and change my last name,” regrets in a scene the white and colorful maid of the Mapuche family represented in Plan Z.

Oyarzún also presents 164 photographic portraits of people with some blood affiliation with himself titled La parentela o por la causa [The Kinship or The Cause]. The racist typification of the Mapuche trait emerges in the bridge of a nose, the shape of the neck, the flesh of the lips, the color of the skin, something that for many generations was and remains a cause for shame. Having the face of the poor, of a criminal. Having a “maid face”, as they shouted in an edition of Lollapalloza to the Chilean musician Anita Tijoux.

On the wall a text recites:

Tiene la piel negra,
como un atacameño
el pelo duro,
los labios gruesos
prepotentes
mentón amplio,
frente estrecha,
como sin cerebro. [2]

They are the scars of the original sin. The portraits are a mirror, they reflect us. Their “kinship” is also ours. 

Martha Rosler, Si tú vivieras aquí, exhibition view at MAC Chile, 2019. Photo: Sebastián Mejía. Image courtesy of MAC Chile

The amount of written information contained in the following room could make up a huge book. Informe Rettig [Retting Report] (2017), by Máximo Corvalán-Pincheira (Santiago, 1977 ), installs three volumes of the Informe de la Comisión de Verdad y Reconciliación [Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report] intervened with fire on the wall until it almost disappears. The work recovers the stories of political prisoners in the Chilean dictatorship. Next to it, Secuenciación del azul marino [Navy Blue Sequencing] (2017) and White Page Sequencing present sheets of the telephone book of Santiago and New York, respectively. The first intervened with blue watercolor is an allegory to the people killed by the dictatorship as they were launched into the Pacific Ocean. They are the only pieces of the exhibition that try to explain and contextualize themselves by means of a text inscribed on the wall, which some stop to read, casually glancing at the pieces. Beside them, part of the project by Voluspa Jarpa (Rancagua, 1971), La biblioteca de la no historia [The Library of the Non-History], works around the declassification by the US Secret Service of more than 200 thousand documents referring to Chile. A closed declassification: 70% of the information was crossed out, erased, perpetuating the trauma.

The spectators surround the works, they partially read. An older man with bifocals sticks his nose in the documents, frowning. Tilts the head. Textual information is unfathomable, as unquestionable is the history of horror. In these works, erase, cross out, sink the individual’s stories and their names, alludes to the disappearance and torture of their bodies. But, on the other hand, their dehumanization. For the dictatorship, the subjects must be Others, forgotten, or else disappeared. The murder of opponents is a desperate attempt to erase their existence, where citizens and their history are only data, replaceable versions. But recovering the “data” is not an empty statement, it is to inscribe on paper, and thus, in memory, the presence in the world of those who were tried to be extinguished. It is to remember and recover the place of the only thing we have left of them.

Separated from the Chilean works, the last room returns to Rosler’s work. As the afternoon falls, the humidity inside penetrates the bones. Only some people manage to reach this last moment. In this room, works that have been classified as feminists predominate, nevertheless, from the close perspective of white feminism which has homogenized the identity of cisgender women, leaving in the background their social, ethnic, territorial and class inscription. A place of enunciation of discourses and production of images that goes beyond the thematization of the works or the installation of the topics associated with “the feminine” in it, where, as in these works, there is a critical visibility to superficial sexist stereotypes, without further reflection.

The voices of the mother and son of the video Domination and the Everyday (1978) share space with the photomontages of the popular series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (1967-1972), returning to the issue of the media invasion in private spaces, denouncing indifference; on the power of information. A loop of the parodic Semiotic of The Kitchen (1975) is presented over a plinth, this is the only video that contains subtitles in Spanish, a small fissure in the English language tyranny going through the exhibition over the works and identification cards. On the other end, Martha Rosler Reads Vogue (1982), in which through the headphones we can hear the voice of the artist asking and answering while browsing the magazine: “What is Vogue, what is fashion. It is glamour, it is excitement, drama, wishing…” On another wall, the photographs of the singer-songwriter Víctor Jara (San Ignacio, 1932) Manifestación en la vía pública (Vietnam Solidarity Campaign) of 1968 share the space with the text in Spanish La restauración de la alta cultura en Chile [The Restoration of High Culture in Chile] (1977) by Rosler. The text delivers a brutal line: “The meeting appears on Television or at least those who had access to television, after the coup—as the New York Times states—to remind the people of Chile: ‘Remember, you can be replaced’”. The work coexists spatially with photographs of transients and workers of the series Cuba (1981) and Chile (1995). We, the replaceable. 

Exhibition view: Cristóbal Cea, Hawker Hunter (v.11), 2015, as part of Si tú vivieras aquí at MAC Chile, 2019. Photo: Sebastián Mejía. Image courtesy of MAC Chile

Almost arriving to the exit of the museum, like a hiccup, cornered against a pillar the video of Cristóbal Cea (Santiago, 1981), Hawker Hunter (v.1.1) (2015), is installed on the ground; a 3D animation, reproduced in a loop, of the flight of the British plane with which the military bombed the Palacio de la Moneda on September 11, 1973, and whose control cabin Cea covers with what looks like a huge fabric, boycotting its trajectory, its destructive objective, trying to prevent the irreversible.

The pre-spring afternoon ends. In Santiago it is already night. People wrap themselves in coats, surround their necks with scarves. They abandon the silence and whisper to comment on the experience as they descend the steps of the museum. Rosler has condemned indifference. Our indifference or theirs? Her work, at the time, responded to a contextual, political need, and her propaganda, non-artistic desire was criticized. Now that we know, can we remain the same? Outside some stop to taste the smell of caramel from a cart of cabritas [3]. Knowledge is not enough if one does not have power over that information. Do we have power over that information? Maybe they are right. We can be replaced. 

—

Kati Lincopil (Independencia, 1989) Graduated from Art Theory and History from the Universidad de Chile. Bookseller. Editor and co-founder at revistadesastre.cl

[1] Total Control
bright eviction image
scrutiny regimes
I don’t say map, I don’t say territory
escape fantasies

[2] They have black skin,
like an Atacameño
hard hair,
thick lips
overbearing
wide chin,
narrow forehead
as if they didn’t have a brain.

[3] Popcorn.