The first full day I spent at Galeria Metropolitana, Luis Alarcón took me for an extended walk. We walked through Pedro Aguirre Cerda (PAC), a working class area on the outskirts of Santiago. Luis grew up in this part of the city. In fact, he lives in the house he grew up in, with his wife and gallery co-director, Ana Maria Saavedra and their daughter Antonia. In 1998 they built over their back yard, creating a gallery space bound by the back wall of the house (and the door into the kitchen), two long green tin walls, slightly corrugated, much like the walls of a back shed, and a huge tin sliding door, which, when opened, gives a full view of the gallery from the street, but also a full view of the street from the gallery. I had seen pictures of the gallery, but when I arrived I was immediately struck by what might be called the specific co-ordinates of the gallery. The space itself draws you into a set of relationships specific to its place, and to the economy of that place.
That morning we visited two sites. Luis and I were accompanied by Santiago (who generously interpreted when my Italian and Luis’ Spanish could not make sense of each other, a not infrequent occurrence). The first site was only fifty metres away: a vast fenced-in wasteland, with various animals grazing on it, at the end of the street, an empty space that lingered at the periphery of vision on every subsequent visit I made to the gallery. Luis explained that it had been a quarry. Under Augusto Pinochet’s dicatorship it had been turned into a huge rubbish dump, a pointed rebuke to the leftish tendencies of the area. After Pinochet’s demise it had been promised as a park, but nothing had materialized.
The three of us walked on, towards what appeared to be a massive concrete mausoleum, dominating the entire suburb. Luis explained that this was to have been the largest public hospital in South America. It was started under the Christian Democratic government of Eduardo Frei in the late 1960s. It continued towards completion under Salvador Allende’s Marxist government. When Pinochet seized power, he immediately stopped work on the building. He removed elevators and other fittings that had already been installed and had them transferred to a military hospital. The building has remained untouched ever since, its strange presence – reminiscent of the great unfinished Doric temple at Segesta in Sicily – a function of both incompleteness, an orientation towards a future, and its ageing surface, accumulations of the past. It was a fifteen-minute walk just to circle the building. Its immense weight was striking, partly for also being bound up in the structure’s absences – what was never put in and what time has slowly removed through weathering – and it was these absences, as we moved around the building, which seemed to be the structure’s presence, its force as a continuous interruption to the space it occupied.
That afternoon, Luis, Santiago and I walked to the neighboring suburb, La Victoria, about fifteen minutes away by foot. Luis had explained to me something of the history of La Victoria when we first met. Hearing about the banner marches I had been working on in Australia, and their relationships to dates and boundaries, Luis described how La Victoria had originally been squatted by landless people in 1957. Every 30 October the community marches around the neighboring suburbs to commemorate the day of that original occupation. We walked into La Victoria through the main street, which, like many streets in Santiago, bears the name of a date, “30 DE OCTUBRE”. We headed towards the building of Señal 3 de la Victoria, a self-organised quasi-illegal television station which broadcasts to its immediate community (about a 3km radius from the building itself). On the way, we passed an extraordinary array of murals, usually overtly political narratives, but also palimpsests of political posters, most notably the “papelógrafo”, six metre long hand-painted scrolls, used to advertise up-coming political marches. When we reached Señal 3, we were greeted by Cristian, one of the people who runs the station, who showed us around the building, a small converted house, and talked about the philosophy of the station and what it broadcasts. We presented an idea to him which I had described to Luis earlier in the day: a work in the form of a transmission on Señal 3, to be broadcast on the night of the opening of the exhibition at Galeria Metropolitana.
During the three weeks in Santiago I was fortunate to meet with a wide range of people. The richness of these dialogues in large part reflected on the connections and trust which Luis and Ana Maria have developed in their immediate community over many years. Every encounter in that community was preceded by a predisposition to conviviality and generosity. Outside the context of PAC and La Victoria, I met up with the director of Amnesty International in Chile, workers at Fundacion de Ayuda Social de las Iglesias Christianas (FASIC), an ecumenical social justice group that was deeply involved in the resistance to Pinochet’s dictatorship, and with Viviana Diaz at Agrupacion de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos de Chile (AFDD), an organization which fought for justice for Chileans “disappeared” under the Pinochet regime. In these meetings I was struck by the generosity of these people. I was also struck by a consistent strain on the process of representation. The extreme experiences of the Pinochet years and their aftermath make great demands on the means of representing as a way of truth-telling and remembering. In FASIC’s work collecting testimonies from thousands of victims of political violence, and in AFDD’s repeated public use of portraits of victims in their public actions, both words and images bear a huge weight. Part of that weight is to draw attention to the different – and often conflicting – claims to truth with which words and images articulate experiences and aspirations.
A week after we first visited Señal 3, we were back recording the work which would be transmitted. A staff member at Santiago’s Museum of Contemporary Art had generously translated into Spanish my list of instances of the creation of national boundaries, a vast list of boundaries from the twentieth century, ordered chronologically, which had been the basis of several works during the previous 12 months. Señal 3 had reacted positively to the proposal that a reading of the list be the basis of a transmission. In a discussion with Luis, they suggested that the person to read the list should be Gloria, whom I later found out was Gloria Rodriguez, born in La Victoria a few days after it was first squatted, and the longstanding president of the local self-organised council. Her continuous reading of the list over 110 minutes became the basis of the video work broadcast on two consecutive nights on Señal 3. In this work, each line Gloria read from the list was accompanied by a new text appearing on the screen: the date (but not the year) of the new boundary she was describing. Ana Maria and I created four large papelógrafo posters advertising the work’s transmission, and these were plastered around PAC the night before the transmission took place.
On the night of the opening at Galeria Metropolitana, Aotearoa/New Zealand artist Daniel Malone undertook a hangi in the space immediately outside the gallery. Visitors were invited to enjoy the sweet potatoes from the hangi, and through his action he also activated his collection of ceramic sweet potato forms inside the space. Inside the gallery, I exhibited three videos of banner marches undertaken in Australia, played on three monitors which had been sourced from within the community (one was generously lent by Antonia, Luis and Ana Maria’s daughter). In the middle of the evening, Luis approached a neighbor who has reception to Señal 3 and who lives around the corner. This neighbor invited people into his cramped bedroom to watch the transmission. The work appeared, on his old hissing TV set, with a new texture, bearing the rudimentary character of its transmission, through which Gloria’s voice relentlessly proceeded through the list of dates and years, boundaries and places.
afterthought
These kinds of short residencies – like the one which Daniel and I experienced around Galeria Metropolitana – present difficult questions about the relationship between a site and the art work, between the community and the visiting artist. To me Daniel’s hangi that night was emblematic of a complex response to those questions. He used a part of the footpath outside the gallery where the grass was worn down, one of those short-cut routes indexical, in a minute way, to the critical gap between the formal architecture of the city and the way people actually inhabit it. Locating the hangi in this space to me presented the work both as the excavation of this critical gap within the immediate environment of the gallery (building an entire social action out from that small section of earth), but also an interruption to that environment (that short-cut was not available that night). This seemed very much in line with the logic of the gallery itself. Luis and Ana Maria both work closely with their local community, but remain committed to experimental work which disrupts normative modes of looking and reading. The relationship between the gallery and the community is not one of straight-forward mutual affirmation. The art work is posited as an act of disruption, but one that occasions gatherings of a social and convivial nature. The art work is alien to its environment. That is its potential, and also its mode of activating spaces in the sphere of social relations.
TN April 2007
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