listen to Nelly Richard produces a strange effect. She speaks modestly, as if removing herself from the conversation, as if she were not one of the essayists and art critics who worked best around the chilean modern artone of the people who understood it best. Page 12 He finds her sitting in front of a bare table, while a few meters further back the montage of Lotty Rosenfeld: Crossroads of memory (1979-2020)the retrospective exhibition in tribute to the fundamental trans-Andean artist which will open in two parts: on Friday the 26th, at the MATTA Cultural Center (Tagle 2762), next to the Chilean embassy; and on Saturday the 27th, in the Parque de la Memoria. Richard is the curator of the exhibition – originally mounted in the National Museum of Fine Arts of the sister country in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the overthrow of Salvador Allende. In Buenos Aires it will offer a conferencewhile in another activity the prestigious Argentine curator Andrea Giunta, the Chilean writer Diamela Eltit and the historian Mariairis Flores will dialogue.
The exhibition, mounted in complementary sections in both cultural spaces, works on “the common wounds” that both Chile and Argentina have regarding their last civil-military dictatorships. The exhibition covers part of Rosenfeld’s video art production (a field in which she was a pioneer in her country) and – in addition to presenting others – gives an important place to the work of crosses, one of the most powerful urban interventions of all those produced. by the artist in opposition to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
In that urban intervention, Rosenfeld drew transversal lines on the street, confusing the universal urban traffic code. A simple gesture (a chalk line on the pavement) that was designed to be read as a disruption of the norm, a questioning of the paths predetermined by society and, of course, the obligatory nature of the actions imposed by the dictatorship.
“It is important to know that in Chile at the end of the ’70s, in the midst of the dictatorship, a field of works and artistic practices were generated that had quite unique features,” Richard contextualizes. “First, they emerged from the field of opposition to the dictatorship, but at the same time they had a markedly experimental character in relation to what was the committed art of a more militant left.” Around Rosenfeld and the CADA (Collective of Art Actions), which he helped found, a double questioning was ordered: the political order and the language of art. Rosenfeld herself went from the public intervention to the interior space of the gallery, the traditional art space, and constructed that ambivalence with the presence of the camera that no longer only offered a mere record of the artistic act, but turned that record into a possible new work that would sustain the memory of what had been done.
“What was called ‘advanced scene’ brought together heterogeneous practices, with several common features that have to do first with a transdisciplinary character. Are practices that mix photography, video, cinema, the use of the body, the intervention of the city. There was a reformulation of the supports and techniques of what was previously called fine arts. It was a markedly experimental scene, with a sharp reflection on languages but at the same time committed to a moment in Chile of a very severe dictatorship,” says Richard. “This movement transgressed the tradition of fine arts, it innovated with support, with format, with technology and with media, it worked on language in a very self-reflexive way; So, Lotty’s work was inserted into that field, not an isolated practice.”
“CADA was dissolved in 1983, but its great moment and its great works had to do with appropriating public space, working with the collective, reinserting a historical memory that had been truncated with the military coup,” highlights the curator. of the sample.
“Lotty simultaneously developed an individual work with two dimensions. One is that urban intervention and the alteration of public circulation through its intersections, but there is a work that is less known and from my point of view is decisive, which is the video recording and then its video installations”Richard poses. “In those times, for more than obvious reasons, art actions or the very gesture of intervening in traffic on the street were completely ephemeral actions; Then, video recording became key, because not only was the image recorded, but it was done in a way that could be reedited, recombine these memory fragments. So she, throughout all of her work in video installations, put into practice the idea of a memory being republished. At that time we were living in Chile, a country of disappeared people, and therefore the idea of preserving a temporality, of giving the fleeting intervention of the city a permanence in time, was a gesture also against oblivion, against the disappearance of traces”.
“I would like to insist on something that seems particularly strategic to me about Lotty’s work and that is that, unlike more activist works or those that are more committed to dissolving in social praxis, hers always works on the border between inside and outside” , reflects the curator. If Rosenfeld set foot on the street, that does not mean he abandoned the biennials, and if he helped establish the “no+” sign in Chile against the military dictatorship, he also resignified the crosses later by remaking them in front of the White House, in Washington, or in front of a checkpoint of the Berlin Wall. “She did not allow herself to be reduced, let’s say, by the dichotomy of having to choose between inside and outside. “She worked with the inside and outside of the institutions, and that differentiated her from a certain type of art that only understands the political as directed to the street.”
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