Poetics of Resistance

For contradictory reasons—political as well as cultural in nature—Chile played a central role on the international scene in the 1970s. In 1970 Salvador Allende, the candidate representing the Unidad Popular, a coalition of leftist parties, was elected president in a turn of events that was as exceptional as it was hopeful: Chile represented for the world the possibility of a transition to socialism by democratic means in a peaceful revolution.^# The intense involvement of the masses on the urban scene largely revolved around the cultural field. Starting in the late 1960s, the Nueva Canción Chilena movement,^# street theater groups, printmaking, urban murals,^# signs, and posters indicated that a conception of culture immersed in the urban and popular scene had taken hold. In her song "De cuerpo entero" (1966), Violeta Parra (1917–1967) communicated the political emotion that activated multitudes, placing them at center stage. Perhaps no artistic image conveys the presence of the embodied concepts of the masses and of thirst for transformation more powerfully than América no invoco tu nombre en vano (America, I don't invoke your name in vain), a mural-size painting produced by Gracia Barrios (b. 1927) in 1970.^# It was at that juncture that her painting first subscribed to critical realism. The crowd in the image reaches the very edges of the immense canvas; the marching bodies—offset by the white background—blend into a dark mass out of which the faces of men and women peer. The work synthesized what was happening in many cities around Latin America: the citizenry taking to the streets to demand greater representation, more rights, and justice.

But those ideals were not embraced by the entire society, and the lack of consensus grew more patent in March 1973, when the opposition to the Unidad Popular government lost the parliamentary elections. The military coup on September 11 of that year—its most telling image being the Palacio de la Moneda, the Chilean seat of government and president's residence, in flames—put an end to the socialist government. Like thousands of others in Uruguay and in Argentina, Barrios left the country in a process of exile that divided society in two.^# Those who stayed were surrounded by violence and repression, facing imprisonment and torture, and those forced to leave Chile had to deal with the uprootedness that exile entailed.

Before and during the socialist administration, Cecilia Vicuña (b. 1948) developed a body of work that linked the sculptural and the poetic. She looked to the transformative power of "precarious" forms—small spatial constructions with elements taken from nature destined to disappear—and of what she called her Diario estúpido (Stupid diary), the erotic poems with a feminist bent that she wrote from 1966 to 1972. During the military coup and shortly before they were to be published by the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Valparaíso, many of those poems disappeared.^# These are poems that exalt the body, reject the taboos surrounding female sensuality, and elude a revolutionary discourse that was also sexist. For Vicuña the celebration of pleasure was part of the socialist transformation—a vision made abundantly clear in "Misión" (1971), a poem in which she proposes an investigation geared to making the revolutionary kiss the best kiss in the universe.^# During those years she cofounded and formed part of Tribu No, an avant-garde group that staged performances and published manifestos. Along with her life partner at the time, Claudio Bertoni (b. 1946), she also created photographic performances in which objects (a padlock, a razor blade) were placed between the legs of one of her women friends. Vicuña was photographed with a white net on her head, as if she were a piece of fruit, and Bertoni with his face twisted by a piece of rope that seemed to be strangling him. Her text associates torment and birth: "I tied up my boyfriend and wound myself in a net. Life and death are knotted in a thread / the hanged man's rope, / and the umbilical cord." In 1973–74, after she had settled in London, Vicuña was very active in the struggle against the Chilean dictatorship.^# In Bogotá in 1979, in conjunction with Para no morir de hambre en el arte (In order not to starve to death in art), an action by the Colectivo de Acciones de Arte, she created the work Vaso de leche, Bogotá (Glass of milk, Bogotá, 1979). The action revolved around milk in a reference to both the Allende administration's policy of distributing half a liter of milk per child per day and an incident in Colombia in which hundreds of children had been poisoned when a private company added water and paint to milk. The work consisted of the simple act of spilling the contents of a glass of white paint with red yarn around it in front of Simón Bolívar's residence in Bogotá. The action was announced by means of a poster put up on the streets (fig. 1).^#  

Very much a part of the revolutionary movement, women—whether or not they identified as feminists— played a key role in Unidad Popular.^# Their antitheses were the women who, in 1972, participated in the pot and pan protests known as the movimiento de las cacerolas, which contributed to the fall of Salvador Allende's constitutionally elected government.^# Such women were also crucial to the dictatorship's ideology of the family, as articulated by the Secretaría de la Mujer and the Centro de Madres (CEMA Chile).^#

While the years immediately after the coup have been described as a period of absolute cultural paralysis, some signs of resistance did emerge and not only in the sphere of art. Despite repression, more murals were painted—now using spray paint rather than a brush, because it was more immediate and quicker to apply. In 1976 groups of mujeres arpilleras, or "burlap women," were organized. Their works, which consisted of scraps of colored fabric sewn together, addressed social issues (fig. 2).^# The origin of those groups, which were supported by the Vicaría de la Solidaridad, lay in the burlap works that Violeta Parra had embroidered in the 1960s (fig. 3). In 1977, when their works were shown at Paulina Waugh Gallery, they were set on fire in an attack on the show.^# The activism underlying the images revolved around the Taller de Artes Visuales,^# the Agrupación Cultural Universitaria, the Taller 666 theater troupe, and the Departamento Cultural Vicaría Sur. In 1977 the Semana por la Cultura y la Paz was held for the first time at the Cerro San Cristóbal. These various spaces and organizations came together at the Unión Nacional por la Cultura, held in January 1979.^# That year, in a climate of growing popular protest, Mujeres por la Vida engaged in "lightning actions" that inquired into the whereabouts of the disappeared.^# Thus the control of bodies, spaces, and subjectivities established by the dictatorship was increasingly permeated by forms of insubordination.