IX. From the document to the monument

I would like to talk about this projected that run from 2006 to 2011 from its composition as a contemporary art archive as well as a critical view work in Chile, and from the questions that it have raised in terms of policies, the archive and the the configuration for the structure of the documents’ body, that from the start was introduced as a platform: open, flexible, and progressive in the way categories are built.

La Moneda Cultural Center works under the eaves of La Moneda, a palace and headquarters of the Presidency of the Republic, which started in 2006. La Moneda, the place chosen to build this new cultural center, is marked by its bombarming on the 11th of September, 1973, and the institutional fragmentation that resulted from this. The context provided by the historical date and the way in which we developed the project seek to create a collective memory.

The space provided for the Documentation Center for the Visual Arts (el Centro de Documentación de las Artes, CEDOC) was empty, so besides creating the first Archive of Chilean Visual Arts, we had to develop a diagram to accompany the project.

Therefore, I started questioning the archive as a visual document, as well as a collective and individual document for memory.

Before incorporating the first documents to the archive collection, I produced a seminar. For it, I invited the artist Rosangela Rennó, among others. She is a Brazilian artist that works by examining the document from its image and archive. This is not mentioned just for its anecdotal value, but as a reference to how we approached and executed the project as a national cadaster of documents. Institutional spaces and alternative independent spaces that were originated after the year ‘73, created this documentary holding that had secondary written sources, but at the same time this made evident the limit between the artwork and the documents, specially due to the intellectual vinculations among artists, philosophers and performers that were part of the history at the time.

There are a lot of things that can be addressed from this experience, and evidently on the archive policies; on the relationship between institution/art/archive, and the difference between the work and the document. But I think it is important to talk about the open archive program which was both a program as well as a methodology to build this documental holdings; a program that questions the archive and the first methodological idea, as well as the relationship with the oral memory as a source for the construction of an imaginary. A collective memory production that accompanies not only the history of the document or the author’s bibliographical history, but also it questions the body of the materials in the collection. It is a first debate on documentary transactions and the origin of the video in Chile. Personally, it was very important to build this controversial video archive in 2006 that thought of the video as a document and a work of art. It was fundamental to work on this project from the idea of memory as an Archive for the Visual Arts, as it reproduced what happened in the end of the ‘70s and the beginning of the ‘80s. Having audiovisual records helped us to create a first cadastre and preserve the pieces that had to do with the documentary work, the art actions, and performances that were imagined at the time.

The TV room

We extended an invitation to people that work on TV, video production, or as cameramen, as well as agents from the journalistic world and artists that were part of the artistic scene at the time, in order to create connections.

In this way, this collection was configured from the disciplinary crosses as well as from affective political collaborations that took place in Chile. Parallel to this seminar, La Moneda Cultural Center invited the curator Paz Aburto and the german artist Meyer Schneider to create a TV room as an intervention to share experience on how TV was watched in Chile. In this room, people would gather and agents from the audiovisual and performative world met, and we recorded the conversations they had not only while watching the TV but also while they worked on the audiovisual archives; we researched on how we collect documentation, how do we guard it and how do we produce audiovisual materials, all questions that were extremely useful in the almost active performance that took place in La Moneda Cultural Center. As days passed, the conversation among artists, curators, even architects, philosophers on the audiovisual archive continued where they would recall things or these first pieces that were aired, as well as the first performances and art actions in the ‘70s which were passed on in the oral tradition.

For example, we all had different stories in regards to the first actions led by Carlos Lepe from CADA. At the time, those archives were not of public access. So, how could this collective memory be trespassed through the story of different teachers that accounted for his great deeds, and how are we able to build an imaginary production in relation to videos we have never seen before? This is an archive that was built from those conversations and as a part of an oral memory archive.

Story of disappearence

From an invitation to participate in an international archive that brought the performative artist Adam Nankervis -who works on the history of performance in EE.UU.-, the project ‘Musulman or Story of a Disappearance’ emerged in 2007 as part of the second “Open Archive”, a curatorial program that sought to build oral archives. This was taken from the Franklin Furnace Archive, an archive to which we didn’t have access in the past and which is available in the present-. It precisely talked about the relationship between institutions and archives. This was profoundly interesting as it allowed as to create a relational and conversational map, not only with the help of this curator, but also with agents from the local cultural area, -our artistic and performance community-, which helped us to connect art and performance, and made us reflect on these categories, how can we name it, which type of categories we have, what is the relationship in regards to the local, and what is the relationship with these international categories of the archive.

Where do we locate our cultural production? This discussion allowed us also to reflect on the categories and the limits between the piece, the document and the performance. It also helped us build an exhibition open to the public based on this profoundly interesting archive on the performance at an international level. In here, conversations with Francisco Casas from Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis and other people related to the performance in the world took place.

CYBERSYN: >Litany for a computer and for a child yet to be born

The child that comes to the world only trusts its mother, as the bird that flies with its wings in the air. The people also trusts, when conducted in a clean and pure way, like the water, warm and clear as the sun. There is something for that who doesn’t want, let the People win this fight, we need to gather science, before losing our patience. As the sun that burns, the back of the 9-to-5 worker, that took off the tie, volunteering in Melipilla. We all must come in, in this ground march, unweaving webs of ignorance and dependence. Demanding the benefits that science gives us. We have to stop the one that doesn’t want to stop, let the People win this fight. We need to gather the science, before losing our patience.”

The previous quote is from a song composed and sung by Ángel Parra in 1971-1972. Ángel Parra (1943-2017) was the son of Violeta Parra and one of the most important singers and lyricists in Chile for his contribution to Folk Music. According to the author, “this song was inspired by long conversations we held with Stad (Stafford Beer) in la Peña de los Parra, between 1970 and 1972”. The child yet to be born, alludes to the computer of the Cybersyn project and the polarized environment that was lived in Chile during the government of president Salvador Allende.[^1]

On one hand, this was held due to people and adherent groups of the ‘Socialist Project in Chile’, who regardless of the precarious situation given by the economic downturn, kept participating in street protests, through the arts, the culture and social commitment, a loyal and trusty stance. This adherence will also give ground to initiatives like the Solidarity Museum, which consisted in the creation of a network of international artists, gathered to create a free museum for the People; or the construction of the UNCTAD III building, which would held the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development for Third World Countries, in April of 1972. A building that was built in a record time of 272 days.

This “Open Archive” program in 2007 was also connected to the construction of an archive; a project led by the audiovisual artist and curator of New Media, Enrique Rivera and Catalina Osaa, which was developed in co-production with ZKM (Center for the Art and Technological Media from Karlsruhe).

This project focuses its reflection on New Media and the first steps of the internet in the creation of a mythical project in Chile on cyber Archives, which was composed by a multidisciplinary team that built the path for the use of the internet in the first years of president Salvador Allende’s government.

The reconstruction project was found inside the Documentation Center where there were available documents, interviews of authors from the ZKM project, which eventually led to a reactivation of an archive that had the goal of providing testimonies. The previous, gave room to access to the Cybersyn materials: you could sit and navigate these materials, and at the same time leave a new testimony. There are some testimonies that were built in the collective memory. Things like “ok, I’ve seen that this chair is in this place… (or) “I knew the engineer that worked on this…”, among other traces. A collective construction of testimonies that were left on this device was created with the aim of going through the material and creating, at the same time, an oral memory device.

Mimesis, camouflage and resistance

In 2018, the Sao Paulo Biennial took place and the curators were Ivo Mezquita and Ana Paula Cohen. They invited me to this open archive program with two specific purposes. First, to talk with Suely Rolnik, a theoretical who, besides being a psychoanalyst, has worked on the Archive; we named that table ‘History as a flexible matter’. There, we talked about the relationship between collective memory, individual memory, objective memories and the construction of history in regards to the archives and the imagination. In that same program, I participated as a curator and I titled the presentation based on all the videos we could rescue as part of this exercise for an Open Archive.

This is why, I always say this is an exhibit methodology, but at the same time is a work methodology; of retrieval and archive construction. A question is exposed on the archive and that is when a connection starts to be built as a holding or a documentary line. In this case, we were able to build a whole line of videos from the artist that led to a debate in the TV Room on the oral myths.

We were able to retrieve them directly from the artists, Carlos Leppe and the collective of Art Actions (CADA) and make them public for the audience. We were able to assemble the Juan Downey Collection, and place these questions in relation to the mythic and heroic pieces. Once this was open for us; people that were from that generation and have heard about certain tales from teachers and people that lived in that historical time, a very interesting opportunity opened in relation to the connection between the artists’ videos and the television that resulted in connecting actors, artists and philosophers who made documentary pieces and artistic audiovisual pieces. All of this, also helped us to connect with Sao Paulo which has a very interesting performance collection and we could discuss the relationships between the street, the television and the artistic activism, something that configures and widens the possible categories of the archive.

For those who didn’t live in the ‘70s and ’80s, and who studied Art or History, having access to these videos was much needed to find the original source. The artists from my generation in the ‘90s, used to talk about the myth of such registers, on the dimension of the heroic pieces for us. We were raised with that formation, without access to the original sources, with a historical void and under a myth that was orally transmitted. (…)

To approach the artists audiovisual productions in Chile in the ‘90s, it would be interesting to observe the journey of the video from its beginnings in Chile, at the end of the ‘70s and its development during the ‘80s during the dictatorship and the national exit plebiscite from the dictator in 1988. For this, we will refer to the history of the videos made by artists in their contexts considering the circulation spaces, the encounter between them and the local dissemination as in that moment the audiovisual production was responsive to the social and political context. We can question the categories that can organize the retrospective view of history and the production of ‘Video Vintage’, a medium created by international artists in the George Pompidou Center (cover book picture) or on the mythical exhibit organized by Berta Sichel in the Reina Sofia National Museum of Art called “Video Pioneers”. During the ‘90s, Sichel was in charge of organizing an open program on Cinema and Video in the Reina Sofia Museum (Madrid) with an equally important programming of artists’ videos and movies that were exhibited in a monthly program themeing the artworks that were being added to the audiovisual collection. The program received work through the post office in Paris by the artist Joan Rabascall, who would sacredly send it back to me each month, after we bonded and became friends in Paris while I was living there in 1994. During that time, he became a sort of tutor with whom I shared the audiovisual archive in Chile of artists and filmmakers.

In its trajectory, the audiovisual world shared common spaces with production houses as well as publicity agencies that were key agents in the return of democracy; and from this, a new encounter with television artists arose. This will give room for other spaces, such as the videoclip linked to publicity agencies, -which later on would transform in the first experiment for an audiovisual department in the museum that had as a reference the Cinema and Video Program of the Reina Sofia Museum-, that resulted in a television program that could give visibility to the emerging art scene in the first years of the democratic transition. During this time, an agreement was signed between the director and publicist Juan Enrique Forch, leading agent of the project, and the Director of the Museum of Fine Arts at that moment, the art theoretical, Milan Ivelic. This agreement considered a recording space for a television show and the editing of any audiovisual material with Betacam equipment, that for years was without any use in the undergrounds of the museum, in a settlement between Channel 2, Rock & Pop, and the National Museum of Fine Arts.

The equipment was used by a group of young people in a space where I worked as a producer in the show. It was aired daily in the open broadcast Programa Parque Forestal Sin Número (The Parque Forestal Without Numeration Show), that announced the address of this public building and, at the same time, the commitment to start an Archive of interviews and the exhibition of displays within the museum. The programming started on the 16th of August, 1995.

Notably, Milan Ivelic hand in hand with the artist Gaspar Galaz, during the dictatorship did the show Demoliendo el Muro (Demolishing the Wall), a TV series broadcasted by UCTV Television, which had two seasons (one in 1983 and one in 1994). On the show, the two would have conversations in the museum about Chilean Art, which had as a goal to disseminate Chilean art and the work of artists during the dictatorship.

In the conference, titled ‘The subjective, the collective and the autobiographical. The audiovisual in Chile during the dictatorship”, I observed the video’s trajectory from its beginning in Chile up to the first productions from artists at the end of the ‘70s. It will be mentioned as part of its history the circulation and encounter spaces, as well as the dissemination of these pieces like the French-Chilean Art Video Festivals (the construction of a work relation between local production and international referents). In the cultural context, -fragmented by repression and censorship of Pinochet’s military dictatorship since 1973-, the video camera in its double condition as an audiovisual record and as a document and audiovisual piece started to become key for the circulation in different networks as an official speech for art. For example, in the case of CADA, one of the main fundamental operation aspects that happened between 1979 to 1984, was the concern of being backed by artist friends and documentalists that would collaborate in the recording of later video productions.

In the middle of the ‘70s in Santiago, Chile, video as a medium would allow artists to reference international aesthetic artistic practices, -though contorted-, in line with the new aesthetic, poetic and political articulations of the time. It is necessary to highlight that the first video-essays in Chile, picked up autobiographical and experimental elements created from the collective memory. In these collaborations, videos have vestiges of the oral tradition that, in the beginning, were associated to conversations among friends, who could provide audiovisual narratives that presented themselves as decentralized spaces of circulation.

It should be noted, that these new audiovisual productions are disseminated in domestic spaces, as well as alternative TV shows, which were concerned in finding alternative cultural proposals to face the official productions that were marked by censorship and, mainly, they were developed with the idea of installing a discussion related to the audiovisual and its aesthetic and narrative possibilities; in encounters between the artistic Chilean community, organized with the French Embassy in Chile. In this last instance, it is fundamental to understand the development of the video in Chile and of course, determine the link between the artists that work with the video in that process, like the development of these type of festivals which allowed us to gather social documents and experimental videos that lived and created tensions between the artistic circles in Santiago. This gave relevance to audiovisual support as a means for circulation, experimentation and reflection during the ‘80s in Chile.

Meeting once and again socially in Festivals during that time allowed artists, filmmakers, photographers and documentalists to organize audiovisual and artistic projects, which switch the roles of those who did the work and those who recorded the event. An example of this type of collaborative practices, is CADA’s Actions, Inversión de escena (Scene Inversion, 1979) and Ay Sudamérica (1981), which had different type of technical supports in terms of photographic and audiovisual records, which allowed members of the Collective to document both events in a sensitive and rigorous manner through videos. It was also reinforced in other actions the collaborative practices between renowned artists. The documentary images of aligned airplanes in the sky in the Ay Sudamérica (1981) video, as well as the pavement marks in an open scenery with the Cordillera as a background curtain in the video Una milla sobre el pavimento (A mile from the pavement, 1979) from Lotty Rosenfel, were recorded in 16 mm tapes by the documentalist Ignacio Agüero, author of Cien niños esperando un tren (Hundred children waiting for a train, 1988) and Aquí se construye (Here, we build, 2008).

All of this helped us to connect videos and the history between art and TV in Chile in a larger exhibit developed by MACBA, where I collaborated with a video curated by Chus Martínez titled ¿Está usted preparado para la televisión? (Are you prepared for TV?). It was very interesting to show those quirks, where we can state that the memories are not the same and depend on the place, how they are told and what is a videotape, both in Chile as in the experimental TV in Europe, and how can we connect and create those particular categories and how these places interstices somehow.

On how we are configuring the archive we could see an approach to the video by Carlos Flores, which was tremendously important as an explorative show on video-art that was transmitted in Televisa. It was also an archive of different voices and authors. It was an interview show that explored the work of the artists which was directed by Carlos Leppe. It was a great display case to show the audiovisual work on the dictatorship and also, to present the secondary sources related to the video production, the catalogs, and the critical and theoretical discussion of the time. Currently, the video work of Carlos Flores which showed him experimenting on the concept of the video and teaching technical productions and the creation of possible television utopias, is open and accessible. These were internationally shared but they were pretty connected to a very specific local and precarious condition that could be seen all over Chile in terms of cultural and filmmaking production.

How to actively spread the comprehension of these local terms in an international context that has homogenized the concepts such as “TV utopia”, “circulation” and “resistance”? Is it possible to relate definitions and globalized names in different geographical contexts, forcing them to converge in a common lexical regarding the international videoart?

The value of an archive lies in the definition that the collection groups and the decision on how to name the existing one without blocking it. So, what could be a more accurate glossary of terms and in which way could we flexibilize the names of mobiles in Art History? How can we comprehend the videotape circulation ideas in the ‘80s in Europe, in contrast to the ideas in Latinamerica in the same period? Linking archives from the ‘70s and the ‘80s, from different origins in the history of video-art, taking into account the recording in video of the performance and the experimentation in TV seems more plausible. Could we tell the story of a common history of this medium? And evenmore, could a history of the Latinamerican video be plotted taking into consideration the experiences of the happenings and concrete poetry in Brazil or the Argentinian exhibitions or the different uses for political art actions in Chile?

The role of the archive would focus on the effort of including new words that could include the implicit ambiguity of the changes of the terms; closing the gap between interpretations for the construction of possible imaginaries that consider contradicting elements, such as humor and political resistance, as well as subtle camouflage exercises in the language- could help in the construction of a visuality of the mimesis, the adoption and comprehension of conceptual contents that are currently circulating abroad.

The discussion on the classification of the categories of the video production in the ‘80s tries to catalog the audiovisual productions and its specifics like the ‘video-art’, ‘auteur cinema’, ‘documentary’ and the ‘political report’. In this case, the mapping of the archive should include certain words that could contain the autobiographical experiences as well as the everyday arguments of the social context, including short stories or emotional documents from the political art.

The insumed space

In 2009, I was invited as curator of another ‘Open Archive’, for the Chilean Triennal. Invited by the curator Ticio Escobar, I decided to work on configuring and creating a collection of documents related to the letter-image in Chile after the year ‘73.

I invited a theoretical of the time, Ronald Kay, and I worked from the configuration of the archive as a space of networks, and from the feedback of artists and writers of the time, and from that point a very important documentary exhibit took place, which we still praise due to its theoretical and artistic proposal. Catalina Parra, Carlos Leppe, Nelly Richard, Eugenio Dittborn and Ronald Kay are extremely important cultural figures in the critical art of the ‘70s and ‘80s.

As a result from the exhibit and the work methodology applied, a diagram on writing and visuality in Chile after the coup d’etat in 1973 up to 1979 was created, which takes into account the record from the year ‘74 in the magazine Manuscrito. Those nucleus and nodes were built in order to observe the archives, keeping a museography related to the space as a documentation center, which allowed the observation of a physical archive and a sound layer, where a rescued audio of a story of the time could be listened to, and which is connected to the materials contemplated. I felt it was interesting to work with the oral tradition as a testimony and also as a fiction.

In the word art of the magazine there is no longer the osprey that seemed as if it was rescued. Recordings were done on all the possible spaces this manuscript could’ve been done. Different voices recreated and imagined these possibilities.

UNCTAD III

I currently direct the Archive of Originals in the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urban Studies. It is an archive where different disciplines converge and it seemed important to me, besides acting consistent to La Moneda’s Cultural Center institutional mission, to preserve, ask and make asequible these materials. Today, it is a conformed archive which started in 1994 but keeps growing. Now, how can we face this called “archive activation”? How is the relationship between a deposit and a composed archive?

One of the archives to which I’ve been linked to in the past few years has been the UNCTAD III Archive. We have been working for 4 years with the architect Hugo Gaggero, who donated original archives related to this building. In regards to architecture, we have had permanent oral interviews with him, as well as encounters. But this all in relation to the current times, a moment where the UNCTAD III is turning 50 years. Due to this, the Archive of Originals will have an exhibit, in the institutional context of the University, that is to say with the Faculty, where students will have the chance to discuss the archive.

On one hand, we put together the conversation between authors, the production of audiovisual interviews and conversations with scholars. In this case, we also worked with designers that participated in the UNCTAD III project, and whose work is part of a holding donated by Pepa Foncea, a member of the designer’s team in the Catholic University of Chile, in charge of the UNCTAD III signage.

Therefore, a work based on the rescue of this material has been going on as well as conversations with her and her students who question each of these pieces. Thus, the curatorial work and the open archive, which will be exhibit in GAM and it is currently showcased in UNCTAD III, has to do with the connection between the women’s memories that work in UNCTAD III, while being students and after that when they became members of the governments of the Unidad Popular with Gui Bonsiepe. There, they worked on the functional design for a very important project at a national and international level, which today is being commemorated by being included in the history and by the visualization of the archive, in order to become a part of that memory that is being openly displayed in the shape of an archive.