Chilean Art

In 1946, while demonstrating in support of a group of striking nitrate workers, a twenty-year-old female communist named Ramona Parra was shot to death by police in Santiago, Chile,  in what has come to be known as the Bulnes Square Massacre. A product of political marginalisation, the details of Parra’s life are sketchy. But for fleeting mentions in art history books she is otherwise a mystery.  Her death, however, has had a far-reaching significance, for she became and remains a martyr symbol of the Chilean struggle against oppression. In particular, her name was proudly taken to identify the artistic movements of the muralist brigade of the Chilean Communist Party (CCP), the Brigada Ramona Parra (BRP) in 1968. 

On September 11, 1973, Chile, and with it the CCP, was thrown into turmoil. The country that homegrown poet Pablo Neruda once described as a ‘long petal of sea, wine, and snow’ was transformed from Latin America's foremost social democracy under Salvador Allende to the region's darkest dictatorship under the military regime of Augusto Pinochet.  The latter ushered in a period of widespread torture and the murder of an estimated 3000 Chileans. Furthermore, the regime carried out an assault on culture that saw the erasure of swathes of leftist literature, film, music, and art, which included the whitewashing of BRP murals that had for five years colourfully decorated and secured Santiago’s streets for Salvador Allende.  As Geoffrey Hutton stated in the immediate aftermath of the coup, ‘Now, a bullet through the head is more effective than a vote in the ballot-box’.

In the process of writing a brief history of the BRP collective, this article contextualises the violence imposed on Chile by Pinochet’s Military Regime; and in doing so documents how members of the left perpetuated modes of artistic expression and protest at home and in exile throughout dictatorial rule. By attributing meaning to the murals of the BRP, the aim is also to contribute, if only moderately, to the reconstruction of a fragmented, distorted, and, in part, whitewashed (i.e., destroyed) past. Interwoven is an acknowledgment of the role the BRP played in the 1988 ‘No’ campaign; in this respect, the efforts of the BRP, which are largely without recognition, to paint and ultimately reclaim Santiago’s streets served as an essential subsidy to the widely lauded and successful savoir-faire TV campaign orchestrated by Eugenio García.

Desde los años setenta, las imágenes de indígenas de Tierra del Fuego han sido utilizadas por artistas y críticos chilenos como signos de identidades marginales y memorias e historias colo- niales. Durante los años noventa, estas imágenes se volvieron un sitio privilegiado por medio del cual se articularon distintos tipos de miradas en torno a la identidad, el arte y la discusión sobre la democracia en Chile. En algunos casos, las imágenes fueguinas sirvieron para proponer hipótesis/interpretaciones sobre la posición marginal que ocupa el arte chileno (y por extensión, el arte latinoamericano) en los circuitos artísticos internacionales. Ello ocurría en un contexto en que las conversaciones en torno al multiculturalismo y las identidades comenzaban a dar paso a una preocupación por los efectos entrecruzados de un mundo cada vez más globalizado. En otros casos, las imágenes de indígenas y lugares imaginados como «extremos» dejaban de ser símbolos de la periferia para pensarse como bases de la experiencia de la marginalidad social y étnica viva dentro de Chile. Este ensayo analiza y trenza algunas instancias en el arte chileno de los no- venta en que se visibiliza una serie de cuerpos que entraron en conflicto con la apertura política, económica y social anunciada durante la transición democrática.

This book explores Violeta Parra’s visual art, focusing on her embroideries (arpilleras), paintings, papier-mâché collages and sculptures. Parra is one of Chile’s great artists and musicians, yet her visual art is relatively unknown. Her fusion of complex imagery from Chilean folk music and culture with archetypes in Western art results in a hybrid body of work. Parra’s hybridism is the story of this book, in which Dillon explores Parra’s ‘painted songs’, the ekphrastic nature of her creations and the way ideas translate from her music and poetry into her visual art. The book identifies three intellectual currents in Parra’s art: its relationship to motifs from Chilean popular and oral culture; its relationship to the work of other modern artists; and its relationship to the themes of her protest music. It argues that Parra’s commentaries on inequality and injustice have as much resonance today as they did fifty years ago. Dillon also explores the convergence between Parra’s art and the work of other modern twentieth-century artists, considering its links to Surrealism, Pop Art and the Mexican Muralism Movement. Parra exhibited in open-air art fairs, museums and cultural centres as well as in prestigious venues such as Museu de Arte Moderna do Brasil (the Museum of Modern Art in Brazil) and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Museum of Decorative Arts) in Paris. This book reflects on Parra’s socially-engaged work as it was expressed through her exhibitions in these centres as well as in through own cultural centre La carpa de la reina.

Embracing the belief that the humblest of individuals participated in Jesus’s birth with their presence and their gifts alongside the wisest, Christians of every era have wished to display their own participation and contribution to this foundational Christian event. This article describes the ways in which a traditional, rural-inspired society like that of Santiago, Chile at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries expressed itself through its nativity scenes.

From the starting point of a 1975 artwork made by Norwegian artist Kjartan Slettemark in Sweden to stop a tennis match in resistance to the Chilean military dictatorship, this article reframes the linear image of networks of solidarity and resistance through the gaps and connectivity of a mesh. It expands the figure of the mesh taken from critical materialism into the affective realm of art, historiography, and art institutions by exploring the cases of the museums Museo de la Solidaridad (1971-1974) and Museo Internacional de la Resistencia "Salvador Allende" (1975-1990). As this article delves into various knots and lacunas of the meshes of solidarity and resistance partaking in these museums, and analyzing the relations they wove, it also aims to reflect on the capacity of resilience of arpilleras, as well as on the generative possibilities of the incomplete labor of art history and its ethical and political responsibilities.

Notes on listening to images, based on Cecilia Vicuña's khipus. Text for "Folded Life. Talking Textile Politics." An online research and exhibition project, curated by Grant Watson. Johann Jacobs Museum, Zürich, Switzerland. May 2021.
https://foldedlife.johannjacobs.com/cecilia-vicuna/contextual-material/macchiavello-text/

In the twentieth century, traditional practices and popular culture in Chile went into decline. The situation was compounded by the fact that in the plastic arts, there was already an established hierarchy in which art based on traditional culture and crafts (artesanía) occupied a subordinate position. The Chilean artist and folklorist Violeta Parra sought to disrupt this paradigm. In this article I explore the way Parra sought to defend popular culture through her visual art by creating paintings that were based on traditional culture but were also extremely modern. There is a paradox inherent in the modernism of Violeta Parra's art and the way it sought to re-position popular culture. On the one hand, Parra's work was indigenous. It counteracted the demise of traditional culture that was brought about by modernism. On the other hand, her work was utterly hybrid. Violeta Parra's art enacted a revival of traditional culture through the fusion of a modern-ist aesthetics with motifs and narratives from Chilean popular culture. To explore the way Parra sought to redefine popular culture, I deconstruct the subjects and visual syntax of the paintings Machitún, Las tres Pascualas, and Casamiento de negros. I look at the resonance of her work, which arises from the popular subjects she presents and the way her work disrupts hierarchies in the field of cultural production.

“Our first modernity in Latin America is indigenous, not a discovery in Paris in the 1870s, something happens there that resists academic, scientific and rational thought.”

On the occasion of his recent solo show “Juan Dávila: Imagen Residual/ After Image” at Matucana 100 in Santiago de Chile, we spoke to Juan Dávila (Santiago de Chile, 1946) about some of the themes that have articulated his prolific artistic trajectory like the idea of belonging, nationhood, gender, his relationship to the Chilean avant-garde, Latin America, jouissance and painting. The show not only meant the reencounter of Dávila with the Chilean art scene but also the reencounter of the Chilean art scene with painting as never before so many works of Dávila had been exhibited in Chile.

Excerpt from the book “Astrónomos sin estrellas. Textos acerca del arte contemporáneo en el Cono Sur" ("Astronomers without stars. Texts about contemporary art in the Southern Cone"), by the Chilean art critic Guillermo Machuca. Edited by Diego Maureira and published by the Department of Visual Arts of the University of Chile in Santiago, Chile, 2018.

Kennedy Bahía fue un artista chileno que desarrolló una singular obra de tapicería por espacio de tres décadas en Brasil. A dieciséis años de su muerte se esboza una breve biografía que busca rescatar su vida marcada por el color, el paisaje humano y natural de Bahía, estado de la costa del Nordeste que eligió como su hogar.

Katarzyna Cytlak, “The City of Plovdiv as a New Latin American Metropolis. The Artistic Activity of Latin American Exiles in Communist Bulgaria.”  In: Arrival Cities. Migrating Artists and New Metropolitan Topographies in the 20th Century, edited by Burcu Dogramaci, Mareike Hetschold, Laura Karp Lugo, Rachel Lee and Helene Roth, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2000, pp. 371-387.

Central text for exhibition Nacionalismos y Desterritorialidades: ¿Por Qué Seguir Pensando la Historia Oficial? Travelling exhibition presenting the work of twenty Chilean artists at three national venues, including
Casa de Arte Diego Rivera in the city of Chillán; Pinacoteca in the city of Concepción; and Casa de la
Cultura in the city of Puerto Montt, Chile, 2016.

Ensayo en torno a la video instalación de Gonzalo Mezza, La Cruz del Sur, 1980, exhibida en el 6to Concurso de la Colocadora de Valores. Publicado en el catálogo de la exposición Mezza: archivo liberado curada por Sebastián Vidal en galería D21, Santiago.

In 1946, while demonstrating in support of a group of striking nitrate workers, a twenty-year-old female communist named Ramona Parra was shot to death by police in Santiago, Chile,[i]in what has come to be known as the Bulnes Square Massacre.A product of political marginalisation, the details of Parra's life are sketchy. But for fleeting mentions in art history books she is otherwise a mystery.[ii]Her death, however, has had a far-reaching significance, for she became and remains a martyr symbol of the Chilean struggle against oppression. In particular, her name was proudly taken to identify the artistic movements of the muralist brigade of the Chilean Communist Party (CCP), the Brigada Ramona Parra (BRP) in 1968.[iii] On September 11,1973, Chile, and with it the CCP, was thrown into turmoil. The country that homegrown poet Pablo Neruda once described as a 'long petal of sea, wine, and snow' was transformed from Latin America's foremost social democracy under Salvad...

Excerpt from the exhibition catalogue “COMBO BREAKER" by the artists Marco Arias and Wladymir Bernechea, held in Galería Metropolitana (Chile) and Design Festa Gallery (Japan), on January, 2018. For the publication, Diego Maureira wrote an introductory text called “Combo Breaker” and “CHAPTER 1: THE PROBLEM BOYS GANG”.

Santiago, Chile.
January 2018.

This essay proposes to understand the overall production of Violeta Parra as a single work composed using multiple practices and behaviors that the artist embraced during her lifetime. This single work, in turn, demands a reading that exceeds the traditional accounts that pair Parra with Chilean folklore and with a national essence. In response, this essay proposes exploring Parra’s work in general, and her visual components in particular, as manifestations of the “opacity” defined by Edouard Glissant. This allows for an unfixed meaning, one dependent on the relation of the work with its outside rather than one that adheres in its alleged root.

During the rise of the Chilean Left in the 60s, important public
art organizations emerged that revolutionized strategies for political propaganda. Created in 1968 at the 6th Congress of the Communist Youth of Chile (JJ.CC), the Brigada Ramona Parra (BRP) was arguably the most remarkable of these organizations, as its members re-imagined the limits of public space through contingent muralism composed of written slogans. Yet, in the climate of a highly ideological society, the BRP was not an exception to developing radical contradictions in its modes of production, organization, and collectivity. In this paper, I first explore the paradoxes within the BRP after Salvador Allende’s presidential election on September 4, 1969, by analyzing its contingency policies in relation to the Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (CADA), an art group active in the late 70s and early 80s. Second, I investigate why and how the BRP, beyond its internal paradoxes, re-signified public space as gendered and open, implicating the participation of women in the country’s social and political demands.