The 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup against President Salvador Allende’s elected government is an opportune time to refl ect on the dissident work of Chilean artists – there weren’t many of them. Among these, the work of Lotty Rosenfeld stands out, both individually and through CADA (Colectivo de Acciones de Arte [Art Actions Collective]), whose members also included artist Juan Castillo, sociologist Fernando Balcells, writer Diamela Eltit and poet Raúl Zurita. A few months before she died, Rosenfeld and I reflected on the meaning of dissident art: “The relationship between art and politics does not mean that art thematizes politics. Works of art require us to rethink politics.” Her artistic practice, which began almost half a century ago, is refreshed every time it is shown, thought about and studied. “My work continues to question the social order, from the Chilean dictatorship to the immediate present.”

During the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, Rosenfeld’s participation in the artistic actions of CADA gave strength and meaning to her individual works, Leading her to rethink her role as an artist and to reflect on time and impermanence. Philosopher Hannah Arendt says that the most important skill a human being has is to create the future. I dare to say that, always attentive to what would come after, Rosenfeld had first to abandon the past through subversion – for example, through her interventions with the iconic symbol of the cross she used to mark the ground in front of places of power and symbols of economic concentration.

The past is present in most of her works, through photographic references to previous works on old news stories, which are mixed to images from TV and the internet, and even medical images. These images jump from one work to another, a procedure that in some texts I have called “vocabulary-archive” and which relates to temporality. These photographic flashbacks lead us through a journey in space and time that always points to an uncertain future. Rosenfeld’s work that best portrays this is undoubtedly Moción de Orden [Motion of Order, 2002], which the artist always considered her masterpiece.

Moción de Orden began in 2001, and was shown the following year in Santiago, Chile. The work consists of several interventions for an expanded video installation, with multiple projections of photographs and videos in various public and institutional spaces: the National Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Gabriela Mistral Gallery, the Civic Center, the subway, all in Santiago, as well as trucks, walls and even the Strait of Magellan. These locations were subjected to interventions using 10 multimedia projectors, 10 DVD players and 16 sound sources.

A mile of crosses

In order for us to reflect on the place of vídeo in Moción de Orden, I believe it’s importante to first consider the career of the artist. At least two aspects of the work deserve to be highlighted: one of them concerns its hybrid nature, as the right place to raise questions about the relationship between the audiovisual medium and site-specific interventions; the other is linked to memory, to the meaning that Rosenfeld’s work acquires in historical terms.

It all derives from Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento [A Mile of Crosses on the Pavement, 1979], a work that has become legendar in the history of urban intervention in dictatorial Chile and crucial to the understanding of contemporary Latin American art, by carrying in itself the memory of forms of cultural resistance in the context of state violence that characterized South America countries between the 1960s and 1980s. The direct link between this first intervention and Rosenfeld’s participation in CADA is important. The paradigm inaugurated by the urban actions of the interdisciplinar collective is a key chapter in the works of the Chilean neo-avant-garde, which the culture theorist Nelly Richard called the “Escena de Avanzada” [“Scene of Advance”].

Una milla de cruces represents a kind of transgression, a dialog between the visual and the spatial that takes shape through intervention, and gave rise to several Other works, Moción de Orden being the atypical unfolding. Unlike all her other works, Moción de Orden represents a paradigm in Rosenfeld’s career, expanding her “vocabulary-archive” by the way the work makes use of diff erent artistic means. To read this work in the appropriate key, however, we need first to understand its connection with the crosses, a work that demands a kind of embodiment, moving from visual to spatial and imposing one format on the other.

2019 marks 40 years from Rosenfeld’s first intervention, the guiding thread of her artistic journey, whose development over the years has consolidated its importance in the context of Latin American production. This seemingly simple action kept on gaining symbolic density as it was reiterated in different moments and contexts. Today we can analyze them retrospectively and think about the structural operation of the cross as a spinal column in the universe of Rosenfeld’s work. A brief description of the work is required: Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento corresponds to an intervention on the broken line on Manquehue Avenue, in the eastern part of Santiago. The artist glued white perpendicular lines on the asphalt, one aft er another, forming the “+” sign, over the course of a mile [1.6 kilometers], as the title says. A month later, Rosenfeld positioned two screens posing as road signs at the same avenue, projecting a video whose content is the recording of the intervention on both video and 35 mm slides. This act of “disobedience”, in which she appropriated public signage, is related to the very nature of the symbol “+”, which is open to reinterpretations (the mark used on a ballot paper, symbol of death, and so on). The one-mile intervention was carried out in three other sites: Kassel, Germany (2007), Cali, Colombia (2008) and New York, USA (2008), and reenacted with a single cross in different countries over these four decades.

Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento is present, directly or indirectly, in all the artist’s later works, the first being Moción de Orden, in which the image and materiality of the cross are substituted – an exception, perhaps, being Proposición para (entre) Cruzar Espacios Límites [ Proposition to (inter) Cross Border Spaces, 1983], performed at the frontier between East and West Germany, forming the cross with her own body.

Motion of order

Moción de Orden is a complex work which involves photographic record and video, intervention using the record of her own intervention and video projection as a gallery installation. In its two versions – one done in Santiago (2002) and the other in Seville (2013) – the work consists of a video which shows the video projection of a column of ants onto the helicopter deck of an oil rig situated in open sea, in the Strait of Magellan.

The camera films from a helicopter, hung from a crane. In the video, the path followed by the ants, forming the sign of a “+”, is interrupted by a finger and then quickly falls apart. The interrupting gesture alludes to transgression in the form of discipline exercised by power, revisiting the idea of non-violent resistance that appears in different ways in Rosenfeld’s work.

The video’s audio track consists of diferente sounds, mixing radio noises with the sound of crickets and the sea, over which we hear the female voice of Diamela Eltit performing Molly Bloom’s monologue from James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The images of the ants are mixed with others, such as TV news items and historical documentaries. Images of Guantanamo Bay, Mohammad Ali, George W. Bush, the snipers of Bosnia and images of members of the Mapuche people used in a previous work – La Guerra de Arauco [The Arauco War, 2001] – are merged together. We hear a phrase repeated in the background: “This country has no memory: it really has no memory.”

This work represents an important step in the career of the artist – perhaps even a deviation – in relation to the use of media, standing out from the rest of her body of work.

We can identify two distinct approaches developed during her career. The first one corresponds to the audiovisual aspect of the work per se. In general, it is formed by a set of images built from fragments of images from different sources – photographs and videos from the internet, the television and produced by herself –, articulated through some assembly strategies. In this approach, there is a reflection on some issues: the image-fragment; the composition and the assembly; and, perhaps the most important, the notion of archive (which I will return to later). It is in this sense that the video principally explores its expressive, poetic, narrative and aesthetic possibilities.

Rosenfeld explores the idea that the power of images is articulated not on the basis of themselves, but on the assembly of several images, as if they were activated through their forced bond, generating dialectical exercises. Faced with the accumulation of files and even more files, these incessant encounters end up producing a new dialectical relationship, an ever-dynamic interpretation. Filmmaker Hito Steyerl, in Los condenados de la pantalla [The Wretched of the Screen, 2014], writes: “It is a complete mystification to think of the digital image as a shiny imortal clone of itself. On the contrary, not even the digital image is outside history. It bears the bruises of its crashes with politics and violence […] The bruises of images are its glitches and artifacts, the traces of its rips and transfers. Images are violated, ripped apart, subjected to interrogation and probing. They are stolen, cropped, edited, and reappropriated. They are bought, sold, leased. Manipulated and adulated. Outraged and revered. To participate in the image means to take part in all of this.” Hence the concept of “poor image” – a poor-quality image that travels over the internet. This widely available “poor” materiality, from which Rosenfeld’s work is nourished, has a relationship not only with the content of her works, but with the condition of production, with the constant loss of their aura, in their transitory nature and constant availability for appropriation.

The second approach, not entirely unrelated to the first, refers to her interventions of the cross in public spaces, which she registered on photographic and audiovisual media. Her use of supporting media, then, brings the work closer to documentation of the interventions, which are always ephemeral as, without the record, they could not survive in time. In these actions in public spaces, the use of the media remains, but is subordinate to the rescue of the presence, of the “here and now”, which is at the heart of public interventions. In this context, the sign of the cross is the protagonist, as it erupts into the public space, profaning and denying its order through signaling. These actions, like every site-specific work, are reflected on the place itself in accordance with the context. The relationships between the sign and the space encompass the historical and political dimensions of the places, and the specific points subject to the intervention. The site-specific condition occurs in this contextual dialectic generated by the sign: a “+” here signifies one thing, while over there it has another significance.

Vocabulary-archive

What makes Moción de Orden so special? Both approaches adopted by Rosenfeld to her work – the one connected to audiovisual creation and the register of the intervention – meet in a very peculiar way in this work. It is a video intervention while, at the same time, is also a self-referencing visual archive. It is important to emphasize this “usage layer” – that layer of records registering the work that she self-appropriates for future versions of the video, in which the images produced are mixed with the found images. This is how the artist makes the archive to feed upon itself and grow exponentially, expanding what I have previously named a “vocabulary- archive”.

This is a cross-sectional issue in Rosenfeld’s work, which allows her work to be read as a single large archive in constant expansion and development, including incorporating records of the works themselves. But, in the case of Moción de Orden, this recurring practice has an audiovisual origin, a conceptual-like video projected in a real and isolated space – that of the oil rig – which is amplified as the work develops. It is a doubly expanded self-referencing work: the intervention that happens in the public space is included in the video that, in turn, is projected in the public space, which then reappears in the video projected in the gallery.

Now we come to a fundamental question, which relates to the universe of installations that is opened up every time the work is mounted in a gallery, in which the video is also prepared to consider the sensory space of the “white cube”. Many readings are possible, and this is related to both the nature of the work and that which the artist plans. Thus, future mountings of a work such as Moción de Orden are subject to the paradox of “open mountings”: The work grows in its archive but is always susceptible to being enlarged or reduced within the exhibition space.

After the video interventions were performed and their respective registers were obtained, the first mounting of Moción de Orden in a gallery consisted of the following: in the first room, there are five screens showing lines of ants; to the right, another five screens show the other images. In another room, we see the video correspondente to the intervention on the oil rig. In the next mounting, the artist also included images of the interventions.

The solution Rosenfeld planned for a third mounting, just before she died, is highly suggestive: her concept was to add a slide carousel that showed the interventions with ants in different locations. This possible mounting helps us to understand a little better the importance of post-production installations when it comes to experiencing the work, and its character, which is not just cumulative but also self-poetic.

Is a mounting of a work, which incorporates other elements in the installation such as new images, still the same work? What, then, is Moción de Orden, when one thinks of the artistic media used, their functions and results? Rosenfeld’s response is definitive: “All in its entirety, a set that always seeks to grow.”

The factor or re-incorporating the documentation of the work then acquires an artistic dimension in its presentation. That is, although Moción de Orden should certainly be thought of through the notion of an expanded video, the work should also be considered in relation to the formal or even technical decisions that result in this work being shown in the exhibition space. The experience of a viewer in one place or another, with certain elements rather than others, modifi es not only the meaning of the work in a visual-sensory aspect (the space), but also the relationships that visual content (image) establishes. Both are necessarily interconnected by the experience of situated practice – site-specific interventions – which is the origin of everything.

The necessary dialog between intervention and registration keeps opening up possibilities of interpretation, providing physical and sensory experiences that lead us to question our relationship with the spaces of power and with history. This is, after all, the value of works such as Moción de Orden and Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento, by highlighting the relationship between the interventions, photography and video, and the subversive legacy of Lotty Rosenfeld. ///

Images: courtesy by Alexia Tala. © Fundación Lotty Rosenfeld.

CAPTIONS: p. 149: Lotty Rosenfeld installing Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento [A Mile of Crosses on the Pavement], Santiago, Chile, 1979. pp. 154-5: Moción de Orden [Motion of Order, 2002]: on the previous page, projections at the entrance to a metro station, a post office and the Palace of La Moneda, in the center of Santiago; above, in the Gabriela Mistral Gallery; in the following pages, projections on the heliport of an oil rig in the Strait of Magellan, images of the installation in the gallery and video frames of the work.

Lotty Rosenfeld (Santiago, Chile, 1943-2020) was an artist and participated in the neo-avantgarde movement of artists and writers Escena de Avanzada, Documenta 12, in Kassel, the 3rd Cali Biennial and the 5th Shanghai Biennial, among others.

Alexia Tala (Santiago, Chile) was chief curator of the 22nd Paiz Art Biennial in Guatemala, artistic director of Plataforma Atacama and curator of the 8th Mercosul Biennial, among others. She was a guest researcher at the Solidarity Museum of Chile.

Tags: Audiovisual chileno, Ditadura chilena, Fotografia e performance