By MARIAROSARIA FABRIS*
Artists transformed the dictatorship’s “paths of death” into streets of memory
“I step on the streets again \ of what was bloody Santiago \ and in a beautiful liberated plaza \ it stops me from crying for the absent ones. (Pablo Milanés, I will step on the streets again).
“There he followed me like a shadow \ the face that didn't see me \ and in his ear he whispered to me \ the death that I would appear. (Silvio Rodríguez, Santiago de Chile)
The city in which I live holds the memory of disastrous years in many of its corners. In addition to the Elevado Presidente João Goulart, the popular Minhocão, which, when it opened in 1971, was called Elevado Presidente Costa e Silva, there are others that are part of the “Ruas de Memória” program, launched by the city of São Paulo on 13 August 2015, in order to rename public places that honor actors and supporters of the military regime, such as the Humberto Reis Costa (Sapopemba) and Luís Eulálio Bueno Vidigal (Vila Nova Conceição) squares; the avenues Fuad Luftalla (Freguesia do Ó), Luiz Dumont Villares (Parada Inglesa) and Nadir Dias Figueiredo (Vila Guilherme); the streets Dr. José Bento Ribeiro Dantas (Nova Piraju), Dr. Paulo Assis Ribeiro (Cangaíba), Henning Boilesen (Jaguaré) and Rui Gomes de Almeida (Penha); the street Dr. Trajano Pupo Netto (Lauzane Paulista) and the Escola Estadual Engenheiro Octávio Marcondes Ferraz (Artur Alvim).[1] Since the program was not carried out, it would be more appropriate to call these spaces “Streets of the dictatorship”, as Joana Monteleone does in the text dedicated to the topic.
There are still other places that keep a dismal memory, including the current 36th Police District, at Rua Tutóia, 921, in Paraíso, formerly the headquarters of DOI-Codi (Information Operations Detachment-Internal Defense Operations Center), a of the largest torture centers of the Brazilian military regime, in whose garden the artist Fernando Piola “clandestinely” planted, for almost two years, red foliage to symbolize the blood spilled there (Operation Tutoia, August 2007-May 2009); the Tiradentes Prison, at number 451 on the homonymous avenue, in Luz, of which only the stone portal remains; and, in the same neighborhood, the former headquarters of DEOPS (State Department of Political and Social Order), today partially occupied by the Memorial da Resistência, which, among other activities, is dedicated to collecting testimonies about one of the most brutal moments in the country, to research and preserve the places of political repression, to hold exhibitions about the troubled years of the military dictatorship in Brazil and in other Latin American countries that went through the same experience.
It was at the Memorial da Resistência that I came into contact with the works of Argentine, Brazilian and Chilean artists, mainly in exhibitions that were in dialogue with those I could see in other institutions – such as the Public Archive of the State of São Paulo, the Centro Cultural Banco do Brazil, the Centro Universitário Maria Antônia and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo – a dialogue about which I have already had the opportunity to write some texts.[2]
Despite the impact caused by all the exhibitions, 119, by Cristian Kirby – held at the Memorial da Resistência between October 18, 2014 and March 18, 2015 – was the one that caught my attention the most, although it has as its backdrop the capital of a country that, however, I don't know. 119 (2013-2014), in its São Paulo format, it consisted of 120 archive portraits (one of them a double) of political prisoners who disappeared during the Chilean dictatorship, a panel with files of the detainees and folders that make up the “Dossier – Case of 119”, placed on a table available to the public, in a clear reference to police files, but with the opposite intention.
There was also a video produced by OPAL Prensa, which had in its title the name attributed to the Chilean government's repressive action: Relatives of 119 detained and disappeared people demand justice 39 years after Operación Colombo (Relatives of 119 detained and missing people demand justice for 39 years of Operation Colombo.
The event referred to in the video is a collaboration between the local government and Operation Condor. Forging false news about the reciprocal elimination between dissidents, through the press linked to official bodies, with the aim of disqualifying opposition organizations, Operation Colombo culminated in the publication of a list of 119 disappeared people, which was also published in Brazil (in part , with the publication of 59 names) and in Argentina (another part, with another 60 names), in periodicals that were circulated only on that occasion: the Curitiba newspaper New The day (“Chilean terrorists in the interior of Argentina”, June 25, 1975) and the Bonaerense magazine Lea (“Those who were silent forever”, July 15). The news then appeared in two Chilean newspapers: The second (“Ferce purge among Chilean Marxists”, July 18; “Exterminated like rats”, July 24) and The Mercury (“60 murdered Miristas identified”, July 23; “Agência Latin investigation into 119 Miristas”, August 9),[3] both from the Group The Mercury.
The choice of Argentina to publish one of the lists may have been determined by the fact that Buenos Aires is the operational headquarters of Operation Condor, an alliance between the military governments of the Southern Cone, which became official at a meeting held in Santiago at the end of 1975, but already articulated two years earlier. Integrated by Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay, Operation Condor operated in the 1970s and 1980s, with the approval of the United States until 1977, in the exchange of information between intelligence services and the planning actions to repress subversion. In the case of Brazil, it is interesting to remember that, in addition to participating in the operation, the dictatorship was concerned about the Chilean situation even before the Popular Unity candidate was elected president (1970), as evidenced by the minutes of the October 24, 1966 meeting of the National Security Council.
Alarmed by a likely shift to the left in Chile, the Brazilian government expressed its willingness to collaborate in a coup d'état to prevent the advance of Socialism and, apparently, during Salvador Allende's mandate, it financed opposition politicians. Regarding the Group The Mercury, it is well known that he received money from the CIA (United States Intelligence Service) to carry out propaganda against Salvador Allende's government.[4]
Appropriating archive images of these 119 missing people, the same ones that the family members use in their demands for clarification of the kidnappings, Kirby printed them, using photosensitive emulsion, on pages of the map of Santiago and the index of its streets. Each portrait is accompanied by a label with full name, date of birth and death, occupation, family details, membership and place of detention (home or public place).
As the artist himself explained, on the Memory Core: “The project began in 2011, with a proposal to document places in the city (residence and public roads) where each of the 119 missing prisoners were kidnapped. Conceiving the project based on the recognition of history in public space meant assuming a photographic language based on its ontological condition of documentation, excluding from my proposal incorporating theoretical and pseudo-poetic elements common to photography such as the concern with contrast, light, composition and the framing. These photographs did not seek beauty but rather translated an experience called: The paths of death. And understand the city and public space as spaces of memory. In the second stage of the project, which began in 2013, the negatives of the portraits are used as traces of light, like footprints of their existence juxtaposed on the plan and index of streets in the city (Santiago), which represents the territory as an experience of the politician and as a support for the construction of social being”.
By pointing out that the project began in 2011, Kirby is also referring to the previous series, Places of disappearance (2012), in which he presented the urban spaces in which some disappeared people were kidnapped, in order to open a wound again and resurface, in the collective memory of the current city, those tragic moments that the democratic transition government (1989-1999) , although without denying them, he had reduced them to an anodyne memory.
If, as we saw, for Kirby, in the first series, photography had a documentary function, in his attempt to “translate an experience called: The Paths of Death”, in 119, the superimposition of faces on map fragments and street lists transforms the city as a whole not only into the scene of the State's repressive action, but also into a place of memory, in that urban fabric in which these people lived, traveled and to which are returned, reinserting themselves into it. It is a way of reaffirming the presence of these beings in the history of the country itself.
Making people present who were absent from a Santiago still traumatized by the bloodbath promoted by the oppressive power had also been Luz Donoso's objective in Support action in a commercial system (1979), by displaying, on television screens for sale, displayed in the window of a magazine on Paseo Ahumada, images of missing politicians. Images that the public had already encountered in Huincha without end, the previous year, in which long strips of paper reproduced, in xerox,[5] photos of detained-disappeared people, protest demonstrations and repressive police actions that shook the city streets, newspaper articles, leaflets, pamphlets and other writings against the dictatorship, the fateful question “¿Where are you?” and the title of the work followed by the phrase “until they tell us where they are".
In Quechua, huincha designates a narrow and long ribbon, made of flexible material; therefore, the term chosen by the artist is in line with the support used, in which the strips are added to each other, constituting an archive under construction, to be constantly completed as more cases are elucidated.
The act of adding also guides the artistic action recorded on video, A thousand crosses on the pavement (1979), by Lotty Rosenfeld. In it, the artist intervenes in the paving of Avenida Manquehue (in the stretch included, significantly, between Los Militares and Presidente Kennedy avenues), by gluing white strips over the stripes that separate the lanes, forming a new sign, which can symbolize either a cross , as the title of the work indicates, as well as the plus sign, that is, one gesture adding to another infinitely, as suggested by the depth of field of the shots associated with the term “mile” in the title, which refers to “thousands”, that is, to an immeasurable set of crosses.
By interfering with signage, therefore in a social convention, Lotty Rosenfeld's stationary cross creates a strangeness, which, combined with the deserted landscape and the artist's isolated gesture, causes a feeling of absence, or rather, of absences to be rescued by the society. In the words of Andrea Giunta: “The artist – a woman alone on the road – is the one who repeats the action. It reinstates and activates ideas of rite and sacrifice. The exposure of his isolated body in an action on the street suggests a constant threat of danger. In this way, Lotty Rosenfeld tries to induce a sense of disconcert, which destabilizes the normality imposed by repressive power and takes on the task of subverting signs that are fundamental for a reflection on the city, art and politics”.
Alfredo Jaar also changed the urban landscape with the intervention Studies on happiness (1979-1981), in which he placed numerous panels across Santiago with the question “¿Are you happy?”. Her gesture was taken up by Janet Toro in another outdoor performance, Two questions (1986)[6], recorded in eight black and white photographs. Holding small signs that asked “¿why are you sad?"and "¿Why aren’t you smiling?”, the artist and Claudia Whinter walked along Paseo Ahumada, where they had a large crowd, but the police soon dispersed the passersby.
In both cases, these were apparently simple questions, as they asked Chileans about their emotions, questions that did not necessarily require immediate answers, whose purpose was rather to insinuate a sneaky uneasiness, which came to question the state of general satisfaction. that the government advertised. The discomfort that appeared in the series’ photos Los dormitos (1979), by Paz Errázuriz, also corroborated this fissure between reality and what the system preaches: poor people, left to their own devices and dominated by apathy.[7]
Santiago's public places were the setting for other works by the photographer, such as recording the women's meeting on March 8, 1985, International Women's Day March, a demonstration that interrupted traffic and that the police suppressed with water jets, taken from the top of a building in the center. And yet, in the photos from the series Protests (1988), in which Paz Errázuriz portrayed both sides of the confrontation between forces of order and members of Women for Life. Created in November 1983, this group was characterized by large mobilizations – such as the one on Paseo Ahumada, recorded by Tatiana Gaviola in the video Do not forget me (1h03')[8], in 1988 – and lightning actions – such as the one recorded in photos by Kena Lorenzini, also in 1988 –, which inquired into the whereabouts of the disappeared detainees and called for the restoration of democracy.[9]
Interventions like Support action in a commercial system, A thousand crosses on the pavement, Studies on happiness, Two questions (1986) and the group's demonstrations Women for Life they transformed public space into a territory of constant conflict, not only by trampling on official discourse and crossing traditional exhibition sites, but by making the streets the ideal place to debate issues of collective interest, as Iria Candela attested.
In this sense, another urban action that deserves to be highlighted is Foundation of the University of Chile, carried out on the Juán Gómez Millas campus by Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, during a student occupation at the Faculty of Arts (1988). In it, Pedro Lemebel and Francisco Casas, riding bareback on a mare, in an allusion to Lady Godiva, entered the campus along Las Encinas Street, in the company of poets Carmen Berenguer, Carolina Jerez and Nadia Prado. In the performance, on the one hand, they emulated the equestrian statue that, in the Plaza de Armas, immortalized Pedro de Valdivia, founder of Santiago; on the other hand, they lent the figure of the conqueror an erotic connotation, by contrasting male homosexuality with military virility.[10], with the aim of promoting the entry of minorities into university.[11]
Reflection on the public places seized by the military coup is also the theme of The Persistence of Memory (2014), in which Andrés Cruzat intervened on black and white images taken in the heat of the moment by Chilean photographers – such as Horacio Villalobos and Juan Enrique Lira (from The Mercury) – and foreigners (among others, Chas Gerretsen, Koen Wessing and David Burnett), inserting them into current color shots, to compose photomontages[12] in which the past erupts into a present in which people are not very interested in living in the shadow of the events of September 1973.
Cruzat's conception of photomontage has as its reference point the computerized rephotographs of the Russian Serguei Larenkov (2009-2010), in which the angle of the current shot recreates the camera position of the original images taken in several European cities during the Second World War.[13]
So in The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Allende (in his last photographic record in life), on the balcony of the Coin Palace, is observed by some people inscribed in a luminous circle, while others do not pay attention to what is happening. A family, passing by number 80 on Rua Morandé, remains completely unaware of the work of firefighters and soldiers to remove the president's body through a side door of the government headquarters.
Employees loyal to Salvador Allende until the end are arrested due to the indifference of passersby. Mothers and children walk carefree in a battle scene, at gunpoint. On a busy avenue, a girl is being searched by a soldier, without anyone noticing. The Military Junta, with Augusto Pinochet in the foreground, appears inside the Church of National Gratitude, where, on September 19, 1979, a mass of thanksgiving was celebrated.
Through this disturbing contrast, Cruzat proposes a reflection on the apparent normality of the present and the threatening climate of a recent past, that is, on the relationship between the marks of memory and current Chile. By intervening in images from the past, the artist injects them with a particular meaning, as his gesture allows us to re-contextualize a collective historical experience.
It's the same gesture as Alfredo Jaar in the video 11 September 2013 (1h55”), in which, after the historic seizure of the La Moneda Palace in flames (an image that has lost its original meaning as it was so used in the 2013 celebrations), makes the current appearance of the building “emerge” from the rubble. Having installed a fixed camera in a building located on the east side of Constitution Square, it starts to capture the government headquarters, between 11:45 am and 12:45 pm, that is, half an hour before and half an hour after the 1973 bombing, which began at 12:15 pm. Transmitted to a room and the website of the Salvador Allende Solidarity Museum, the silent images provoke a kind of temporal suspension[14], as viewers may get the impression that the attack did not happen or immediately create a counterpoint between the tragedy of the past and its removal in the present[15].
The works of all the artists mentioned in this text are important for the commitment with which they took a stand against the attempted loss of memory engendered in their country, but among them I ended up highlighting those of Cristian Kirby and André Cruzat, which were not carried out in public spaces, but had with the theme. If the first returned to the urban scene faces that had wanted to be erased, the second inserted figures from the past into the present, allowing them to step back onto the streets of Santiago, not as shadows, but as presences still throbbing with life. By intertwining temporal layers to resurface, from this kind of palimpsest constituted by their works, bodies dragged by the whirlwind of History, the two artists transformed the “paths of death” of the dictatorship into streets of memory.
*Mariarosaria Fabris is a retired professor at the Department of Modern Letters at FFLCH-USP. Author, among other books, of Nelson Pereira dos Santos: a neo-realist look? (edusp). [https://amzn.to/3PYm91L]
Expanded version of “Yo pisoré las calles nuevamente”, published in Book IV of the collection “Pensar a América Latina e o Caribe”: Actors, activities and cultural policies in Latin America: communication and culture. São Paulo, FAPESP-PROLAM/Editora, 2019.
References
CANDELA, Iria. Art in Latin America 1990-2010. London: Tate Publishing, 2013.
COLOMBO, Sylvia. “Condor 'voted' murder of opponents”. Folha de S. Paul, P. A14, 17 April. 2017.
FABRIS, Annateresa; FABRIS, Mariarosaria. “Chile (11/9/1973-…): the persistence of memory”. In: ARAUJO, Denize et al. Dictatorships revisited: cartographies, memories and audiovisual representations. E-book, 2016.
GIUNTA, Andrea. “Poetics of resistance”. In: FAJARDO-HILL, Cecilia; GIUNTA, Andrea (org.). Radical women: Latin American art, 1960-1985🇧🇷 São Paulo: Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 2018.
HINOJOSA, Lola. “Manifesto. Hablo por mi differentiation (Manifesto. I speak from my difference)”. Available in:www.museoreinasofia.es/coleccion/obra/manifiesto-hablo-por-mi-diferencia-0>.
“1988 / Fundación de la Universidad de Chile”. Available in:www. yeguasdelapocalipsis.cl/1988-refundacion-de-la-universidad-de-chile/>.
MONTELEONE, Joana. “Streets of dictatorship”. In: MONTELEONE, Joana et al. Waiting for the truth: businesspeople, jurists and transnational elite, stories of civilians who led the military dictatorship. Sao Paulo: Alameda, 2016.
MEMORY CORE. “In 119, Cristian Kirby exposes art as a record of social memory”, 2014. Available at:http://www.nucleomemoria.org.br/noticias/internas/id/ 598>.
SION, Vitor. “Coup against Chile, before Allende”. In: MONTELEONE, on. cit.
SION, Vitor. “Operation Condor in the CNV report”. In: MONTELEONE, on. cit.
Notes
[1] Large businesspeople, generally members of Ipês (Institute of Research and Social Studies), FIESP (supporter of Oban) and/or other associations such as American Chamber (Brazil-United States Chamber of Commerce), as recorded by Monteleone.
[2] They are: “Remembrances of a time of war” (2014), “The past portrayed” (2017) and “Identidades parted” (2019), published in the annals of Cinema em Perspectiva, Curitiba; “Revolving the past” (2016), for the electronic magazine palau; “Chile (11/9/1973-…): the persistence of memory” (2016, co-authored by Annateresa Fabris) and “Portraits revealed, past rescued” (2018), published in ebooks organized by Denize Araujo et al., Dictatorships revisited: cartographies, memories and audiovisual representations e Imag(em)inary: images and imaginary in communication, respectively; “With a present body”, lecture given at VII Cocaal (2019), São Paulo. These writings are part of a set of essays in which, since the end of 2013, I have been dedicating myself to addressing the representation of military dictatorships in artistic manifestations in the Southern Cone, the others being: “Anni di sogni e di sang” (2014), published in Brand new (catalog of the exhibition on contemporary Latin American cinema held in Italy) and its adaptation in Portuguese, “Anos de dream e de sang” (2014), published in the annals of ANPUH-Rio; “The cordial torturer” (2014), for the annals of ANPUH-São Paulo; “On the lookout for adults” (2016), which is part of the volume Image, memory and resistance, organized by Yanet Aguilera and Marina da Costa Santos, also published on this website, in which I also published “Mulheres insurgentes” (2021, co-authored by Annateresa Fabris).
[3] Mirista: MIR militants, Movement of Revolutionary Izquierda (Revolutionary Left Movement).
[4] In life diary (1977), which is part of the “Imbunches” series, Catalina Parra presented a stack of editions of The Mercury, sewn on the four edges and tightly pressed between two acrylic plates, held by four screws. The work gives a good idea of the repressive role played by the newspaper, aligned from the beginning with the government of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), if we think that, in Spanish, the press refers to both the press and the instrument for compressing or flattening. Regarding the term Mapuche imbunche, it designates an obstructed body, like those in the series in which the artist wanted to symbolize how people's daily lives are subject to violence and the control and manipulation of verbal expression.
[5] The technique of photocopying photographs was also used by Roser Bru – a Catalan artist exiled in Chile since 1939 – in the work Quicklime (1978), created as a multiple funeral portrait of nine of the fifteen corpses found in a mass grave, in deactivated lime mines, located in Lonquén (metropolitan region of Santiago).
[6] Parallel pointed out by Andrea Giunta. Jaar's series is available on the internet.
[7] The series, available on the internet, refers to a set of photographs taken by Pierre Verger, in various corners of the world, and brought together by Raphael Fonseca in the exhibition Sleepers, held at Caixa Cultural in Rio de Janeiro (January 21-March 18, 2018). I limit myself to pointing out the coincidence, as I don't know how widespread Verger's work was in other Latin American countries.
[8] Available on the internet.
[9] The group, when promoting demonstrations street, not only kept alive the memory of the fateful September 11, 1973 and its disastrous consequences, but also preached insubordination, encouraging the population to return to the streets controlled by power. Women for life emerged as a reaction “to the death of Sebastián Acevedo, who set himself on fire after the disappearance of his two children. The movement was made up of opposition women coming from different professions and social classes and with different political affiliations”, as Andrea Giunta reports. In Peace for Sebastián Acevedo (1985), Lotty Rosenfeld will also pay tribute to her desperate father's self-immolation. Women for life played an important role in raising awareness of the female condition, although there had been previous artistic manifestations, such as, for example, Gloria Camiragua's video, popsicles (4'47”), performed between 1982 and 1984. In it, while continually repeating the prayer Ave Maria, as if they were unraveling a rosary, girls and women suck on popsicles whose sticks are little plastic soldiers. These, in the end, are placed near a rosary, on a table covered with the Chilean flag. The voices of the protagonists are superimposed by a recording of a rosary prayed by women and led by a priest, inside a church. In this way, a playful gesture, not free from erotic connotations, becomes a political act, by revealing the union between the Catholic Church and a militarized state in the subjection of women.
[10] The artistic duo was created in 1987 and, thanks to their unforeseen and provocative actions, soon established themselves in the field of counterculture. Despite being a supporter of Communism, Lemebel was sometimes harassed in his circle because of his sexual orientation. In September 1986, during a secret political rally by leftists at Mapocho railway station, the performer she intervened in high heels and with eye-catching makeup that, starting from her mouth and ending at her left eyebrow, depicted a hammer and sickle on her face. On the occasion, the artist read his manifesto in the form of poetry Hablo for me differentiates. The performance actions of Pedro Lemebel and Francisco Casas are available on the internet.
[11] Talk about Lemebel and Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis It means talking about the body as the beginning, middle and end of a work. It is important to remember that, from the 1960s onwards, the body was reinvented, often becoming the support for artistic representations. This new perspective made the body a political object to which aesthetic and social manifestations converged, in which, not infrequently, sexuality played a preponderant role. In Latin American countries governed by military dictatorships, the body has also become a territory of violence, a violence exercised in all degrees by repressive apparatuses. In Chilean art, the body was often evoked by its absence or reproduced in a metonymic way, that is, a part (generally, the face) for the whole, rarely represented in its entirety.
[12] Small explanatory texts accompany the images. I thank Ignacio del Valle Dávila for recommending Cruzat's work, available on the internet.
[13] Material available on the internet.
[14] Already in 1974, in another work entitled September 11, Jaar had caused this same kind of temporal suspension by intervening in a calendar from the previous year, which, from the fateful date onwards, repeated the number 11 until the end of December. The frozen date generated a question in the viewer: was it an endless day, which paralyzed the country, or the desire to halt the course of History at the exact moment of that event so that it would not happen?
[15] The analysis of this video by Jaar, available on the internet, and the works of Kirby and Cruzat is based on the text “Chile (11/9/1973-…): the persistence of memory”.
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