OF: There are writers who operate according to their imagination, and what they propose as narrative producers. In my case I do not have complete command of the text, I wish I did. I can’t start with an idea because it usually fails me. Years ago, when I thought about writing about a couple, I sat down to write and some twins came out; Later I realized that they are the quintessential couple because they are united from the first minute. I didn’t realize that until it appeared. I never thought I would write about an owl, it was not in my imagination, and I was only able to organize the novel when the owl flew to the computer screen, and was installed from the first page, and began to tell me about the problems of a lot of people. people.
Q: Is that narrative freedom what has marked your style?
OF: What it took me to write was the uncertainty of what I’m going to do when I haven’t seen any owls yet or the twins weren’t there. White times don’t affect me. I sit down to write and that something unexpected, expected, appears. And it seems good to me. It was the formula from my first book until now. For me, novels have their time crossed by an invasive uncertainty. The feeling of what not. We writers know that literary production is a flight to another time, work and enjoyment. The central thing for me is to establish a poetics.
Q: Where did the owl take her?
OF: The owl has the ability to see at night, like cats. She sees what we can’t or don’t want to see. She anticipates the eviction of families. Something common when she has reevaluated herself, she has revalued an area. And if someone is not there to be there, they are evicted by the forces or the real estate agencies. Wealth displaces and occupies areas that it considers belong to it. There is a human failure in this.
Q: Did that lead you to talk about the problems of a block in a neighborhood that could be from different countries?
OF: There are inequalities everywhere, especially in Latin American cities. I always work with circumscribed, limited spaces. The block allowed me to talk about inequality, discrimination, and the injustice of evictions.
Q.: You came to accompany the artist Lotty Rosenfeld’s exhibition “Entrecruces de ña memoria”. Why were many of the works made by the CADA group in which you participated?
OF: The CADA, Collective of Art Actions, was a proposal by Lotty to do something through art in the face of the dictatorial city. She had been of exception, what Agamben calls “sovereign power.” The Chilean night closed in insurmountable darkness. It was very suffocating. We had to learn to circulate, to think twice about what was said. As teachers I had to be careful because there were many whistleblowing students. In the group, where I was the writer, Lotty proposed going out into the street and doing something small, painting on the walls NO MORE. Two words without the company of signs of any kind. Perhaps with signs it would have been somewhat easier to understand, but we hope that citizens would complete the sentence with their demands: no more deaths, no more dictatorship, no more abuses. It was a bet thrown into the air under curfew. Part of CADA’s works, mainly those of Lotty, were shown at the Matta Cultural Center of the Chilean embassy and in the Parque de la Memoria.
Q.: Was that open slogan of NO MORE repeated after the dictatorship?
OF: Citizens and politics appropriated NO MORE. He evicted CADA as the author, and that seemed like a highly accomplished job to us. The CADA thing was left for the museums, and our proposal takes to the streets again from time to time. For example, in the NO MORE AFP; private retirements. A drama because workers are forced to put our money in financial associations with catastrophic results. We retire with thirty percent of our salary, and it is worse for women because they earn less. Well, you already experienced that.
Q: How is Chilean literature?
OF Well, perhaps the most dramatic thing is the lack of reception spaces. There is only one newspaper, El Mercurio, which comes out in print on the weekend, and the space for literature is brief. That is very disastrous for the circulation of information and criticism. There are about four hundred independent publishers, and there is no reading mass for that. There are literary magazines, but they are for literary people. There are very good writers like Nona Fernández and Matías Celedón, who are already established in their space. And there are those that are emerging. It is an exciting panorama. Art is tremendously resistant, we know that there is no regime that does not have a crack through which it slips.
Q: What are you writing now?
OF: The publisher released my essay “Writings on Literature, Art and Politics” a long time ago, now they have a new one that will come out in August and is about time. I’m going to continue fine-tuning it while I visit the Czech Republic for literary reasons.
