Speaking of Lotty Rosenfeld: “Gestures Dangerous, Simple, And

Speaking of Lotty Rosenfeld: “Gestures Dangerous, Simple, and Popular”* Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00429/1927411/octo_a_00429.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 NATALIA BRIZUELA AND JULIA BRYAN-WILSON This conversation took place in April 2020, a few months before Lotty Rosenfeld died on July 24, 2020. In the wake of her death, tributes poured forth across Latin America, espe- cially in Chile, where her work became prominent during the successful fall 2020 cam- paign to rewrite the Pinochet-era constitution. Perhaps the most widely seen of these tributes was spearheaded by the collaborative duo DelightLab, who projected Rosenfeld’s graphic slogans on a skyscraper in downtown Santiago (home of the mass-communications corpo- ration Telefónica), highlighting the ongoing relevance of the artist’s influential feminist politics of refusal. As we go to press in early 2021, a number of younger women and Indigenous people are being considered as candidates to be delegates to the Convención Constituyente, which is charged with rewriting the Chilean constitution. The changes that will be imagined through this collective effort are the result of the work of numerous women, among them Rosenfeld, and in our dialogue below we discuss Rosenfeld’s commit- ment to invent new, gendered languages in order to occupy foreclosed public spaces. We recall Rosenfeld and Diamela Eltit’s Chronicle of Women’s Suffrage in Chile (Crónica del sufragio femenino en Chile) from 1994, written as Pinochet’s dictatorship came to an end, a hybrid research and design project about women’s political represen- tation that is an example of this new language. Julia Bryan-Wilson: We are returning to the Chilean artist Lotty Rosenfeld now for a number of different reasons. First, her work has been central for both of us within many of the spheres we research—visual art, poetry, film/media, Latin American studies, and feminist theory. Second, we want to underscore that Lotty has been a touchstone for the anti-patriarchal, anti-neoliberal, and anti- capitalist demonstrations that surged forward in October 2019 in Chile. These protests thrust Lotty’s precedent from the 1970s and ’80s—namely, the public inscription of the phrase No+ that she produced as a core member of the influential Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA), a group active during the Pinochet dictatorship—into a new level of global visibility. Yet she has not been given a * Above all, we thank Lotty Rosenfeld. We are also grateful to Mel Y. Chen, Diamela Eltit, Cristóbal Lehyt, Blanca Missé, and Alejandra Coz Rosenfeld. OCTOBER 176 Spring 2021, pp. 111–137. © 2021 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00429 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00429/1927411/octo_a_00429.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 DelightLab projection on Telefónica building, Santiago de Chile, July 24, 2020. Speaking of Lotty Rosenfeld 113 lot of credit for her interventions in Euro-American art contexts. Natalia Brizuela: Starting in 1979, Lotty spearheaded the construction of public space under dictatorship. The public sphere is never a given. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00429/1927411/octo_a_00429.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 It is a site of dispute, foreclosed during the Pinochet years and in these neoliberal times. She occu- pied space to turn it into public space, and she did this by rewriting its signs; this was a political gesture in relationship to the art world. In the current feminist protests in Chile, we see something similar: In the international marches on March 8 and more explicitly in the performance A Rapist in Your Path (Un violador en tu camino), the political occupation of space is key. Many of the organizers of these recent women’s marches began their activism in the university, fighting to keep it public. It was women who took over the histori- cally patriarchal sign system to rewrite the sites of knowledge pro- duction to build a new public sphere. Lotty’s work and today’s struggles are part of a genealogy. JBW: It is critical that women were doing that organizing. NB: Even if there were some men—as usual, young men ended up most visible—it was women. They were fighting for a reorganization of the commons as one aspect of the public sphere that had to be differently Top: Protests in Plaza de la Dignidad, gendered and rethought in every Santiago de Chile, October 25, 2019. possible way. For me it’s through Photograph by Susana Hidalgo. the struggle over public space that Bottom: Protesters celebrating the results of we can understand Lotty’s rele- the Pinochet plebiscite in Plaza de la Dignidad, Santiago de Chile, vance today. Her 1979 cross and its October 5, 1988. many afterlives and mutations— Photograph by Jorge Brantmayer. 114 OCTOBER Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00429/1927411/octo_a_00429.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 CADA. No+ art action, Santiago de Chile. 1983. Photograph by Jorge Brantmayer. into, for example, the viral 1983 No+ slogan, where the people of Santiago were invited to complete the slogan with their own demands—complicated the separation between art and politics, art and life and, once again, taking over space, took it public through a collective language. No+ became univer- sal for many struggles and demands in Chile from that moment to today. In the midst of a brutal military regime that was building neoliberal rule cen- tered on the individual, Lotty and CADA stressed the commons. I am interest- ed in the question of the collective and the public that is there from day one in her work. We all assumed Chile had been permanently marked by indi- vidualism. Then all of a sudden we saw the public and the collective reemerge in the past few years, becoming a role model for other Latin American countries. JBW: Lotty’s work was often made in collaboration. Not only was she a founding member of CADA, but throughout her career she worked closely with her friend Diamela Eltit, an artist and writer who was also in CADA. And let me acknowledge that you and I are friends, friends who share ideas as well as personal intimacies that are both political and sustaining. It feels important that we decided to theorize her work as a live conversation, with all its Speaking of Lotty Rosenfeld 115 swerves and meandering. We wanted this text to reflect the idea that Lotty’s work is consistently dialogic, and to emphasize feminism as a collective practice. So you had the idea that we could reflect better on her legacy by talking together rather than writing separately; in this format, we can ask questions of each other, and our utterances might get answered in unexpected direc- tions. We really wanted to include Lotty in this conversation—and she want- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00429/1927411/octo_a_00429.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 ed to participate—but she is currently too ill. But let’s still invoke some of the questions we hoped to ask her and attempt to speculate about answers. Because that open-endedness—letting someone else complete a thought or fill in a blank—is one of her primary conceptual maneuvers. NB: Yes. Before she co-founded CADA, Lotty was a young aspiring artist who had done well in the field of printing, and she could have had a solo career in that vein. Something happens for her in the 1970s. Of course, there is the political context, which gives a sense of a limitation in the art languages and artistic practices available. But a career as a solo artist was not going to give her the possibility of pushing the limits of that practice. The practice could reach other horizons if she worked collectively. So she leaves the enclosed identity of the subject and the artist and the artistic language and goes out there, literally going into unknown territory. JBW: Even in some of her solo work, most famously One Mile of Crosses on the Pavement (Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento)—a conceptual, site-specific piece that she started in 1979 in which she crossed the dashed lane markings of a road with perpendicular lines—you can see that she signed the street with chalk, so her name is there, but the piece is not about an assertive signa- ture or an insertion of her individuality. In a way, it’s quasi-anonymous in that most people who see that gesture have no idea who did it or even that it registers as art. The cross—or plus, or X—is so unstable as a sign; it flickers in and out of legibility. Those illegibilities are hugely important because that project was never about authorial marking. NB: And it’s also impossible to think of that cross at that time in 1979, or in any of its afterlives in the 1980s, making its way into a gallery. It just does not regis- ter within the closed-off spaces of the art world nor the speculative invest- ments of the art market. Who does that cross belong to? And also, as you say, what exactly is this cross? JBW: Her formation was as a printmaker and also a graphic designer, and we see that in the very iconic quality of the grapheme of the cross. So much of the power of her art derives from the idea of inscription, drawing, and the spa- tial distribution of written signs.

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