Curatorial Statement
By Natalia Brizuela
In Lotty Rosenfeld's first public art action, the artist crossed a mile of broken white lines on a street in the suburbs of Santiago de Chile with white tape, transforming the lines into crosses. In doing this, she altered the sign system, interrupting regulated and regimented flows. The move from broken white lines to crosses transformed them from singular into plural lines, from negative into positive signs, from masculine into feminine forms. In Rosenfeld's words, “by altering a section of daily circulation I intend to call attention to the relationship between communications systems, techniques of reproduction of the social order, and the formation of docile subjects.” Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento laid claim to public space in the midst of one of the most repressive dictatorships in Latin America, in the context of the early years of the neoliberal program. The privatization of all aspects of life was imposed in Chile under the Pinochet regime through an infrastructure of fear that emptied out the commons, through censorship and curfew. Rosenfeld's was an interruption of political, social, economic, and symbolic flows. This seemingly minor alteration of a traffic sign became the core of her artistic language for the decades to come, as the “+” sign migrated spatially and symbolically to other actions performed by Rosenfeld during the course of the next forty years—in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, in front of the presidential palace La Moneda in Santiago de Chile, in front of the White House in Washington, DC, and at Documenta in Kassel, to name just a few. In each place, the transformation of line into cross critically addressed a different set of power dynamics.
As the “+” sign migrated, it also mutated and made its way into collective actions in Chile at the time. In 1979, Rosenfeld founded CADA (Colectivo de Acciones de Arte, or Collective of Art Actions), an interdisciplinary art collective with writers Diamela Eltit, Raúl Zurita, artist Juan Castillo, and sociologist Fernando Balcells. Between 1979 and 1985, CADA staged actions that challenged the divisions between art and life, between public and private domains, between the urban grid and the human body. Rosenfeld's and CADA's art actions have rethought the relationship between art and politics. CADA engaged in a radical form of institutional critique, as its actions questioned the social and institutional spaces constructed for art as well as the relationship between these spaces and forms of subjectivity and citizenship at risk under the military dictatorship. CADA understood art as a social project, and their interventions were inserted into the practice of everyday life. In 1983, to mark the tenth anniversary of Pinochet's military coup, CADA invited Chilean artists to complete the demand “No +” (“No More”) by naming social and political needs in murals and graffiti throughout Santiago. CADA added to their initial sign an image of a gun pointed at the spectator, and they printed the new sign on large white paper banners that they hung on the edges of the pedestrian promenade of the Mapocho River in downtown Santiago. All over Santiago on September 11, 1983, artists wrote on walls with demands of “No + dictadura” (“No more dictatorship”), “No + represión” (“No more repression”), “No + torturas” (“No more torture”). In 1988, the opposition used the “No +” sign in the referendum against Pinochet. Almost 56% of the voters chose “No +,” ending Pinochet's sixteen-year dictatorship. In the mass insurrection that has been taking place in Chile in October and November 2019, the slogan has organically reemerged, in the streets, on social media, in alternative news outlets. “No +.”
