The Brooklyn Rail

On July 23, 1982, nine years into Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, Chilean artist Lotty Rosenfeld (b. 1943, d. 2020) entered Santiago’s stock exchange and installed two monitors on a central wraparound desk. She was given permission to show artwork under the ruse that it would be stylistically similar to Pop art. Amongst the screens of constantly updating exchange rates, surrounded only by the men working the floor, she presented images of her art action Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento [A mile of crosses on the pavement](1979), where she created crucifixes by crossing white tape and fabric over traffic lines in Santiago and in front of the White House in Washington, DC. The work’s title uses the word (and distance) “mile” (rather than Chile’s metric units) as a reminder of the economic and political ties between the US and Chile, specifically the former’s involvement in the 1973 coup that brought Pinochet to power. She called her installation of these images on the stock exchange floor, this puncture, Una herida Americana (1982). 

In Disobedient Spaces, at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery, Rosenfeld’s “+s” repeat throughout the show. In the wall text, curators Julia Bryan-Wilson and Natalia Brizuela write that Rosenfeld acted as a “disruptor of everyday sign systems.” Her actions—whether alone or with the collective she co-founded, Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA)—often took place in the contested, militarized space of the street. Under Pinochet, civilians weren’t permitted to gather, and the dictatorship was encoded into public space, such as through the changing of street signs (today’s Avenida Nueva Providencia, a main thoroughfare in Santiago, was named Avenida 11 de Septiembre by Pinochet, in reference to the date of his coup). Rosenfeld responded to these actions with her own disruptions, her +s alternately signifying grave markers or memorials or crucifixes or plus signs, but always acting as tangible signs of defiance.

Disobedient Spaces is the first US retrospective of Rosenfeld’s work. She is widely regarded in Latin America as one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century, and the exhibition foregrounds her practice within its specific political context, displaying documentation of her and CADA’s actions alongside archival ephemera and reprinted takeaways, amongst early lithographs, sculptures, and videos. Foregrounded in the show are her collaborations with her close friend, the Palestinian-Chilean writer and artist Diamela Eltit, who she worked with on films such as ¿Quien Viene con Nelson Torres? (2001), which uses Peter Handke’s 1968 play Kaspar to inspect the place that language holds within an authoritarian regime. The film alternates between following a man struggling with addiction, his concerned family, a sex worker, and sepia-toned shots of riots and lootings within Santiago, with a voiceover of a deaf woman reading lines from Kaspar. Through close-up shots of her reading within a sound booth, we become focused on her speech. The microphone is so close that we can hear the noises between her words: the clicking of saliva as she over-enunciates, the sharp intake of breath between sentences. Eltit and Rosenfeld repeatedly take up the question of who was able to speak during Pinochet’s rule and the active suppression of women’s voices. Handke’s Kaspar follows a young man who was raised without language, who knows only a single sentence. Over the course of the play, he is forced to speak and made to participate in a linguistic system, a violent process that is portrayed as akin to torture. The work explores the authoritative potential of language, and the forced acclimation of Kaspar parallels the ways that one is forced to participate in a dictatorship and regime that they oppose and did not consent to.

CADA was active during the years of Pinochet’s rule, from 1979–85, and its members included Eltit and Rosenfeld, as well as the poet Raúl Zurita, artist Juan Castillo, and sociologist Fernando Balcells. Displays feature their work from Para no morir de hambre en el arte (1979), where they distributed bags of powdered milk throughout Santiago, a direct response to Allende’s distinguished promise that every child in Chile would receive milk daily. One of their most impressive feats was a performance titled ¡Ay Sudamérica! (1981), for which they convinced six civilian pilots to distribute 400,000 leaflets over Santiago which proclaimed that materially improving life is the greatest artwork one could participate in. 

The +s of Rosenfeld’s early interventions were incorporated into CADA’s viral slogan of “No+” (no más). Photographs of the phrase being written by civilians across Santiago, calling for “No more fascism,” “No more dictatorship,” “No more suppression” highlight the ubiquity of the message. The slogan’s success lay in its simplicity and ongoing applicability. Writing on CADA, Chilean critic Nelly Richard describes how the collective’s art actions did not impose clear, direct politics onto public space (the pamphlets delivered by airplane called for increased imagination, rather than direct political action) but instead created openings for other’s politics and frustrations and emotions to rush in. Throughout Disobedient Spaces, the curators emphasize the language of puncture, suture, wound—instances where Rosenfeld’s work cuts through the fabric of daily life to create an opening, exposing potential ways through.

Rosenfeld’s 1986 video Palabra de Mujer, knits together clips of women filmed during an International Women’s Day demonstration, protesting their treatment under Pinochet and inability to vote. The editing is minimally invasive, interspersing long sequences of women staging a fake election with ballot boxes and being sprayed with fire hoses and tear gas. At one point, the camera tracks a woman as she tries to run away, rubbing at her eyes, bent over in pain from the gas. With similar videos populating our screens today, watching the film is perhaps most painful in the experience of feeling nearly numb to it.

The morning after Renee Nicole Good was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis, I took the subway to the Wallach Gallery from an anti-ICE rally at Foley Square, called in protest of the shooting. At the gathering of maybe two hundred people, there were three drones and one helicopter trained on the crowd, which was ringed by dozens of police officers. As I revisited the exhibition, I thought of how Chile, only weeks before, elected José Antonio Kast to the presidency, the most far-right politician Chile has had since Pinochet. The obvious backdrop to Disobedient Spaces is the current creeping fascism across the Americas and globally, and it is impossible to think about Rosenfeld’s responses to authority without mapping them onto our own times.