For the first time, the concept for the Pavilion of Chile at la Biennale di Venezia was selected in a public competition. Poetics of Dissent was announced as the winning proposal by the National Council for Culture and the Arts of Chile (CNCA). Artists and creative practitioners to be known and valued beyond borders, especially in a showcase of the importance of the Venice Biennale. The project presents women whose work is essential to understanding our contemporary art scene and the socio-political context of Chile.
Poetics of Dissent brings together two internationally renowned Chilean artists Paz Errázuriz and Lotty Rosenfeld with curator Nelly Richard. The three women and activists, all from a generation that emerged in the 1970s, during Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship, come together to explore the themes of politics, domination and subordination, representation, power, culture and citizenship from the perspective of gender.
A quarter century after the end of Chile’s military dictatorship, the repressive legacy of Augusto Pinochet lingers in Chilean consciousness. For the first time this year, the theme behind the nation’s Venice Biennale pavilion exhibition, titled “Poetics of Dissent,” was selected through public competition. The decision of modern Chileans to send two female artists who came of age during Pinochet’s dictatorship—and who make politically charged work—indicates a continued interest in questions raised by authoritarian rule: those of power, wealth, gender, and freedom.
Lotty Rosenfeld came to prominence as a member of the collective CADA (Colectivo de Acciones de Arte) at the close of the violent 1970s. Seeking to transgress the rigid stagnation of life under the Junta, Rosenfeld staged and filmed direct urban interventions against social restrictions, most famously in the enduring project Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (1979), in which white tape transformed the dividing lines of Santiago’s highways from dashes into crosses.
Photographer Paz Errázuriz navigated 1980s Santiago to capture lives at the margins of Pinochet’s strict society. Her epic photo essay La manzana de Adán (1982–87) presented portraits and biographies of underground transvestite, male prostitutes—a community facing existential pressure from official disregard and state violence.
Poetics of Dissent pairs the creative practices of Paz Errázuriz, a prominent photographer renowned for her honest portrayals of people living on the fringes of the Chilean society, and Lotty Rosenfeld, a performance and video artist whose name is synonymous with political public art in Latin America. Curated by Nelly Richard, one of the most prominent cultural theorists writing in Latin America today, the exhibition offers incisive commentary about the country’s passage from dictatorship to democratic post-transition era.
The works of Páz Errázuriz and Lotty Rosenfeld, two internationally renowned female artists, integrate into their viewpoints the contextual traces of an historical and political journey: from Chile‘s military dictatorship to the democratic post-transition period. The exhibition “Poetics of Dissent” – which includes photography, texts and videos – contrast both ends of an uneven space-time of the Latin American space where coexist on one hand, the visual anachronism of the black and white photographic “ freeze” of abandoned bodies and geographies (Paz Errazuriz) and on another, the vastness of a globalized, technologically-based, overly documented world by means of visual memories, worn out by the repetition of television format, in need of being shaken by works of art (Lotty Rosenfeld).
The introversion of helpless households the circumscribe within the privacy of confinement their needy identities (Paz Errazuriz) and, conversely, the media extroversion of transnational capitalism where economic value translates into the network potency and markets (Lotty Rosenfeld). These poetics separated in time and space define what is “Latin-American” as a composite rather than a simple category; a multi-track phenomenon that comprises the separation and the mixing of heterogeneous materials as a recess to redraw the “South” using its off-centered grids, margins and peripheries.
The exhibition consists in two cubes, one black and the other white, from which Errázuriz and Rosenfeld will expose photographs and a multimedia work, respectively. It is dangerous to create a cliché of Latin American art as political, but this does not impede to recognize that a lot of art in Latin America has been political. It is a response to the situation of the Latin American continent: there’s so much conflict, so many social problems, so much inequality, among other things. So, this has made art to be inclined toward the social and political aspect.
Luckily, they have done it in a non-demagogic, non-literal way, but empowering the tropologic mechanisms that are typical of art in order to approach this topics in a different way, not as political, propagandistic or sociological speech would do it.
Therefore, Lotty’s presentation of a work focusing on these topics is something negative, as they are also a global problem. These things are in a wider context, not reduced to Chile. Lotty is an eminently political artist, while Paz follows a different line, she’s an artist who develops more human topics, more existential to put it someway.
The Cuban curator was in charge of leading the jury that selected the artists that will represent Chile in the Venice Biennale, 2015. In this occasion –and for the first time– the retinue is composed by an entirely female team: Nelly Richard as curator, Paz Errázuris and Lotty Rosenfeld as artists.
Born in Santiago, Chile, Paz Errázuriz studied education at the Cambridge Institute of Education, in England, and at Universidad Católica de Chile. In 1972 she began her education as a self-taught photographer, and continued perfecting her craft in 1993 at the International Center of Photography in New York. She began her professional and artistic career in the 1980s.
Born in Santiago, Chile, Lotty Rosenfeld studied at the Escuela de Artes Aplicadas, the School for Applied Arts, at the Universidad de Chile from 1967 to 1969. While her early artistic activity revolved around printmaking, in 1979 she joined the Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA), the art actions collective, and began working on interventions in public spaces. Along with CADA her work is associated with what is known as the Escena de Avanzada. Her work has consisted primarily of interventions in urban spaces in different parts of Chile and abroad. Since then she has used art actions and video as her preferred formats and techniques of expression.
Born in France, Nelly Richard studied Modern Literature at the Sorbonne (Paris III), and has lived in Chile since 1970. Her book Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile since 1970 (1986), which gave shape to the Escena de Avanzada(a 1980’s collective avant-garde art movement protesting social and political matters) in Chile, is considered a key reference in the field of Latin American art and critical theory. She was the curator of the unofficial selection of the Paris Biennale (1982) and since then has undertaken a number of curatorial initiatives, both in and out of Chile, revolving around aesthetics, politics, memory and gender. In 1987 she was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was the founder and editor of Revista de Crítica Cultural from 1990 to 2008, and was the director of the Master’s Program in Cultural Studies at Universidad ARCIS, in Chile, from 2004 to 2010
Venice Biennale 2015
The 2015 Art Biennale closes a sort of trilogy that began with the exhibition curated by Bice Curiger in 2011, Illuminations, and continued with the Encyclopedic Palace of Massimiliano Gioni (2013). With All The World’s Futures, La Biennale continues its research on useful references for making aesthetic judgments on contemporary art, a “critical” issue after the end of the avant-garde and “non-art” art.
Through the exhibition curated by Okwui Enwezor, La Biennale returns to observe the relationship between art and the development of human, social and political reality, in the pressing of external forces and phenomena: the ways in which, that is, the tensions of the external world solicit the sensitivities, the vital and expressive energies of the artists, their desires, the motions of the soul (their inner song ).
La Biennale di Venezia was founded in 1895. Paolo Baratta has been its President since 2008, and before that from 1998 to 2001. La Biennale, who stands at the forefront of research and promotion of new contemporary art trends, organizes exhibitions, festivals and researches in all its specific sectors: Arts (1895), Architecture (1980), Cinema (1932), Dance (1999), Music (1930), and Theatre (1934). Its activities are documented at the Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts (ASAC) that recently has been completely renovated.
The relationship with the local community has been strengthened through Educational activities and guided visits, with the participation of a growing number of schools from the Veneto region and beyond. This spreads the creativity on the new generation (3,000 teachers and 30,000 pupils involved in 2014). These activities have been supported by the Venice Chamber of Commerce. A cooperation with Universities and research institutes making special tours and stays at the exhibitions has also been established. In the three years from 2012-2014, 227 universities (79 Italian and 148 international) have joined the Biennale Sessions project.
In all sectors there have been more research and production opportunities addressed to the younger generation of artists, directly in contact with renowned teachers; this has become more systematic and continuous through the international project Biennale College, now running in the Dance, Theatre, Music, and Cinema sections.