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, especially in Chile, where her work became prominent during the successful fall 2020 campaign 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 production 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 universal 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 interested 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 register 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. I want to spend some time talking about the many, many connotations of the cross, not only in No+ but also in One Mile of Crosses. Diamela notes that Lotty’s work consists of “gestures dangerous, simple, and popular.”1 Such a deceptively simple gesture! Because in

1. Diamela Eltit, “Desacatos,” in Desacato—Sobre la obra de Lotty Rosenfeld (Santiago: Francisco Zegers Editor, 1986), p. 13. 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

Top: Lotty Rosenfeld. One Mile of Crosses on the Pavement (Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento). 1979. Photograph by Sergio Marras. Bottom: Rosenfeld. Presidential Palace: La Moneda (Palacio Presidencial: La Moneda). 1979. Photograph by Gloria Camiruaga. Speaking of Lotty Rosenfeld 117

truth it is laden with meaning. And it has a striking power to occupy space. But you’re right. It’s counter-institutional. I wouldn’t say it’s anti-institutional, because it doesn’t occupy gallery space at all. It doesn’t depend on that or position itself in relation to the art institution; and we’re talking about a moment in Chile when those institutions were not available for

resistant or dissident activity. 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 NB: Yes. For CADA, and for Lotty beyond her work with the collective, art’s political potential is as critique, as a form of questioning, as the undoing and sometimes destruction of what is already there. There’s a distinction between the idea that art would be put in the service of social transforma- tion versus art experimenting within the sphere of what art could be in the institutions that make art possible, visible, consumable. That’s different from saying, “I’m going to take over this space and I’m going to destroy it and redo it.” JBW: Which is a gesture more affiliated with the historical avant-garde. I was just rereading Margins and Institutions by Nelly Richard, one of the key texts about Chilean art during the dictatorship.2 Richard decided—or maybe it was Juan Dávila’s decision, or the translator’s—to keep the word avanzada in the English version. There is a footnote explaining the resistance against translating it as either (literally) “advanced” or as “vanguard” or “avant- garde.” How meaningful, how extremely significant the non-translation of that word becomes for Richard’s argument. It makes the art she discusses specific to a Latin American context and detaches it from the European model of the avant-garde, which can take us toward destruction or the primacy of originality or the rupture model of history. With the retention of the word avanzada, some of the baggage that comes with the avant-garde is released, and the Spanish term remains stubbornly central. NB: It also takes us somewhere that is still not registered as art. Avant-garde is either avant-garde poetry, or avant-garde filmmaking practices, or avant- garde painting, etc. Avanzada, and not vanguardia, also detaches it from any quick political, revolutionary, or military connotations. What, indeed, does avanzada refer to? It refers to an art scene, to a historical moment and its practices of critical resistance, and to movement. Avanzar is often used to mean “move forward,” “move along,” “move ahead.” Seen from today, Lotty’s work is also one of the avanzadas for today’s mobilizations in Chile: Women who today, after forty years of neoliberal rule, are saying, “No más,” no more. Chile is moving on: It refused the imposed violent stasis of a military dictatorship during Lotty’s early years, and it refuses the obedience to neoliberal rule today. JBW: We’ve seen the No+ appear in recent protests, and it echoes again in the Chilean performance collective Las Tesis with their 2019 chant/dance The

2. Nelly Richard, Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile Since 1973 (Melbourne: Art and Text, 1986). 118 OCTOBER

Rapist Is You (El Violador Eres Tú), because their choreography is also an accusatory gesture. It’s a much more legible accusation when large groups of women point to a governmental building, for example, but the cry of negation is related to the refusal of “no more.” “No” is the main utterance. NB: What makes Lotty profoundly relevant today is that first public action that you

mentioned, One Mile of Crosses on the Pavement. She crosses the lines on the 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 street with a team, and she records it on film and in photographs. The simple gesture is archived, to be kept and to be activated in the future. Six months after the action, at night in June 1980, she goes back to the same place and reinscribes the crosses, this time via a nighttime screening where the recording of her December 1979 action is projected in a loop. Who is this for? Is it only a projection—phantasmatic, immaterial—or is it another action, another inscription? She was thinking of the afterlife not as mere documentation but as the emergence of something different. That avanzada use of the moving image echoes with what happens today when protests, marches, rallies, occupations become automatically visible and mutate in their form. I would love to hear Lotty share what it is that she wanted with that projection. No one had done that in Chile. There were no examples of that. The way she began that projection in June 1980, with the words No. No soy feliz (No. I am not happy), must be very significant. JBW: No fui feliz (I was not happy). Happiness was seized on as an essential political affect in this moment of the dictatorship; I think also of Alfredo Jaar’s con- temporaneous Studies on Happiness, in which he posed a question to Chileans on the sidewalk: “¿Es usted feliz?” Are you happy? NB: No fui feliz—yes, you are right. At least three occurrences take place at once on that night in June 1980: a projection, an action, and the return of a previous action. A new beginning is marked by the use of the simple past, which states a clear end to the action and delimits a specific period of time. JBW: One of the things that is said about One Mile is that it scrambles the public and the private by reinserting subjectivity, which has been understood to be “female,” into this landscape. The act of crossing functions like a barrier to the directionality that makes traffic function; in fact, Diamela likens it to a barricade. And there are these doublings, repetitions, and durations. Why a mile, Lotty? I have always been curious why you chose that unit. Four hours: That’s the length of time it took her to physically perform the act of crossing the lines. Temporality is always an issue here. It’s core to the work, the fact that she’s putting her body, alongside a team to document her, into these spaces for that amount of time. And in one of the iterations of the project, she herself becomes the cross. When she moves between Chile and Argentina, her body transgresses the border, and in Germany (before the fall of the Berlin Wall), she moves through a checkpoint and thus acts as a cross- er of charged national boundaries. NB: It’s so funny, I’ve taught this piece so many times and it was only when I heard you say this about the mile that I realized the most obvious answer: It’s Chile! Speaking of Lotty Rosenfeld 119 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

Rosenfeld. One Mile of Crosses on the Pavement. 1979. Installation view, Santiago de Chile, 1980. Photograph by Rony Goldschmith.

In Chile, people use kilometers. But this is Chile in 1979, a moment when the Chilean and US economic systems are effectively merging. Different forms of measurement that under the name of freedom—free trade—will become one. The measurement of universal imperialism! Of the single con- solidated market! JBW: Right, a mile is less of a meaningful unit of measurement there in terms of marking official distances. NB: A mile means nothing except a relationship to the US. Something is being crossed in the opening of a very specific form of free trade between the US and Chile that will alter the most basic structure of language and communication. That, of course, then trickles down and affects people’s material life. I had never thought of it. JBW: It’s the same for people who grew up in the US; we don’t really understand what a kilometer is. In Chile, the mile can be used in some vernacular contexts and is also understood in relation to non-metric calculations. NB: Then, under the Pinochet rule and the economic model of deregulation imported from the US and imposed by the “Chicago Boys,” in a way, everything becomes a mile. Everything becomes a dollar. 120 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

Rosenfeld. An American Wound (Una herida americana). 1982. Installation view, Santiago Stock Exchange, 1982.

JBW: Because that becomes the standard against which to calibrate. It matters that the first instance of One Mile occurred in Santiago on Avenida Manquehue between two streets whose names directly connect the military and the US: Los Militares and Avenida Kennedy.3 Lotty very precisely mapped and spa- tialized these territories. NB: I remember one of the last times that I was in Chile, maybe three or four years ago, I went to give a seminar. I turned on the TV in my hotel room one night and I was shocked to realize that Chile has its own version of CNN, called CNN Chile. There is no country in Latin America that has, or had at that time, its own CNN. CNN Chile’s function was to protect and reproduce a certain image. It wasn’t just another news channel. This speaks to what we’re saying, to what One Mile of Crosses also says: Chile is being profoundly altered. Fundamentally the forms of circulation, exchange, and value have changed. The new neoliberal economic model would alter the circuits of circulation, and Lotty in turn alters the signs of circulation. That becomes a recurrent obsession in her work. The question of the market, literally. JBW: Documentation of her actions appeared on a monitor in the Santiago Stock Exchange in 1982, which raises questions about permissions and how she navigated that non-art context. How did her allusive gesture read within the literal space of economics? And how did she get access to that space? She is making those transactions visible—those proliferating plus signs, implying an insatiable greed for more—by recoding what had been hidden, or maybe un- coding it. NB: Given the new language that has been imposed, she is writing what wants to be kept silent. By making the crosses or plus signs, she is literally writing on the street. She first travels to the Atacama desert. This beautiful, beautiful place is, I only learned recently through Patricio Guzmán’s documentary Nostalgia

3. With gratitude to Cristóbal Lehyt for emphasizing this geography. Speaking of Lotty Rosenfeld 121

for the Light (Nostalgia de la luz), the only place on the planet that has absolutely no humidity. When you see the Atacama desert from outer space, it is the only part of the entire planet that appears brown. I didn’t know that. Because of this, the Atacama desert has been a disputed space in the race for knowing and mapping outer space, but it is also a space of collaboration

between physicists, archaeologists, and astronomers. There’s something 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 about our place in the world, as a human species, that can be understood there in a way that can’t be understood anywhere else. Nothing ever deterio- rates there. So, Lotty goes to the Atacama desert, crosses the pavement there, then goes to the White House, makes a cross there, and then takes both of those into the stock exchange in Santiago in 1982. She’s telling a story that brings together extractivism, the market, and US imperialism. I mean, she’s always telling a story. Narrative is so important in her work. JBW: Exactly. In a way you could say she stitched these places together, suturing them with the gesture of the cross, with tape or paint or the textile of bandages, which is related to sewing and to the decisive action of puncturing. The Atacama as a site of exploited resources and extractive promise is also visible in Eugenio Dittborn’s 1982 performance History of Physics, when he spills burnt oil in the desert. This reminds me that One Mile also belongs to expansive histories of Land art; as does No+, which was etched on the side of a mountain in the Andes. NB: Much of Lotty’s work is a critique of extraction, and An American Wound (Una herida americana) and Point of Order (Moción de orden). But it was already there when she changed kilometers for miles in an action that rewrote the signs for demarcating circulation and territory. JBW: The documentation of One Mile, in photographic form, in 16-millimeter film, and in video, was created by an expansive network of significant Chilean artists; some of them are her collaborators in CADA and others include the photographer Paz Errázuriz. And, going back to the quasi-anonymity of Lotty’s marking, it seems significant that her face is rarely shown. The photos often depict her from behind or crouching down or with her hair shielding her face. Obviously, those are all specific and thoughtful choices about how to stage the pictures and which photographs to circulate. For instance, the image that’s the centerpiece of Richard’s book, with Lotty in front of La Moneda—Salvador Allende’s presidential palace that was bombed and destroyed during the original 9/11, that is, September 11, 1973—is taken with her back to the camera. NB: Yes, that’s true, the images show her back or side. JBW: In the most frequently reproduced images of One Mile, we barely get a glimpse of what she looks like. The piece is not about her face, and I think that’s crucial, especially when compared to some of the body-based practices of others in the Chilean avanzada, say, Carlos Leppe, at that same moment. His work was interested in marking on the body, and she’s not doing that. 122 OCTOBER

NB: Lotty places herself in the frame, but it’s not about her image. She appears very much as a worker. JBW: It’s true. In a Euro-American feminist art-historical context, the year 1979 is pivotal. It’s the year that Judy Chicago finishes The Dinner Party; it’s the year that Mary Kelly finishes Post-Partum Document. Those two different feminist

practices both have a relationship to writing, and both attempt to imagine a 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 collective kind of identification around womanness. But they are so very different from what Lotty is doing with marking, and with the marked female body, and under such different circumstances. NB: Yeah. And the action’s return in June 1980 in the form of a projection not only speaks to the work but also to news and advertising. Why do I say this? Just as 1979 is an important year for feminist practices in the US, 1977 is crucial for Chilean Conceptualism, particularly for practices that worked with a critical appropriation of mass media. In 1977, Dittborn repurposes all kinds of news images for Finish Line (Final de pista) at Galería Época; Catalina Parra has her Imbunches exhibition, in which she shows Diary of Life (Diario de vida) for the first time. How can we suture the social fabric that is broken, one that had in part been held together by the news and the public sphere constituted by it? These shows asked, How can we suture the torn body of the social fabric? Three years later, Lotty too takes over what the news should be doing. Her beautiful feminist gesture makes public something that happened earlier. JBW: She’s making her own signal, one that migrates easily between forms because it is so deceptively, dangerously simple. Can we spend some more time on Lotty’s cross? It can mean más or more, and also a mathematical plus sign. It bears saying that Lotty is a secular Jew in the context of Chile, a deeply Catholic country like most of Latin America. Catholicism pervades much of Chile’s social, political, and moral fabric; it was the last country in Latin America to make divorce legal (in 2004). There is an overwhelming level of Catholic moralism around the policing of women’s bodies in particular—the regulation of sex and gender is often how religion ramifies. The cross is not an innocent sign, by any means. It carries all this discursive weight. And one of the main readings of One Mile is that it acts like an oblique memorial to the disappeared, a memorial for the thousands of disappeared in a time when such memorials were impossible because of the censorious regime of the Pinochet dictatorship. You talked about how an avant-garde gesture might be to burn something down or to call for an entirely new regime, but that was in many regards impossible in Chile around 1979. Lotty’s codedness is not only strate- gic from an aesthetic perspective; it’s also demanded by the circumstances of the moment. Lotty is encoding the violences of the Pinochet regime in public without that gesture being totally readable; it flies under the radar of the state’s censorious gaze. Because there is real risk there. She makes crosses that I do think read as crosses, but hers is also a confusing gesture. The lines in the road are supposed to direct traffic, and suddenly her cross cancels that or scrambles that. It generates static around meaning. Speaking of Lotty Rosenfeld 123

NB: I like that idea of static and the scramble. She is also scrambling ideology: In 1979, Chileans are under the false impression that through this new regime governed and led by Pinochet the market has grown exponentially, yet that happened through debt. Three years later, in 1982, when Lotty does the intervention into the stock exchange, Chile gets hit by what would be the

most dramatic economic recession during Pinochet’s seventeen years in 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 power. But in 1979, the fiction of market happiness is at its peak. The market’s use of advertisement, through billboards and printed matter, was to ensure that the population became subservient to this regime. Happiness was the possibility of spending, of growth, of entering the “developed world.” In Lotty’s action, we can read how the notion of value has also been scrambled. JBW: Más más más, more more more: but she’s also saying, “No, I was not happy.” NB: Exactly. It’s accumulation through more debt. We know that story very well here. Another way of thinking of the question of static and scramble is that under the logic of neoliberal ideology the signs have been scrambled, turn- ing the entire sign system into a market-driven one, and Lotty is generating static into that scrambled sign. I like this reading because between 1980 and 1983 or ’85 she engages in what she calls inestables investigaciones—unstable investigations—urban forms of embodied research that she did with Diamela Eltit. She and Diamela would go out to research and record the ways in which this massive scramble of value into accumulation of debt broke the social fabric, the individual and collective psyche, the value of life. JBW: They made a documentary in 1986 called In Cold, in Rain, in Heat (Con frío, con lluvia, con calor), of a woman who sorts trash— NB: A gem of a book comes out of these investigaciones. Father, Mine (El padre mío) is a tiny little book, only a little larger than an iPhone, published in 1985 by the same editor who compiled Soul’s Infarct (El infarto del alma), the beautiful experimental book of photographs by Paz Errázuriz and texts of Diamela Eltit. The book lives as Diamela’s book, but it is the transcription of recordings Lotty did with her video camera during their urban fieldwork. She recorded the same homeless man three years in a row. Diamela dedicates it to Lotty . . . JBW: And there are books by Lotty dedicated to Diamela. NB: Yes! The book’s presentation reads, “This work gathers recordings. The photographs correspond to videos made by Lotty . . . the visual artist accompa- nied me in an unstable investigation around the city and its margins [Este tra- bajo recoge grabaciones. Las fotografías corresponden a videos tomados por Lotty . . . la artista visual me acompañaba en una inestable investigación en torno a la ciudad y sus márgenes].” Nelly Richard will pick up this language for her book on margins and institutions. JBW: In a way there is an elliptical relationship to the Situationists, but it also departs from the idea of the dérive, drifting without a plan. For these feminist artists under dictatorship there is a wandering, but it is not that of a flâneur. It is not in service of one’s personal awakening, nor is it in service of chance 124 OCTOBER

encounters. It is about a minoritarian reframing of the city, about sociologi- cal remapping. NB: Yes. Diamela writes that what they were attempting was to capture what she calls the negative, as a photographic metaphor, signaling both the invisible side of neoliberalism’s shiny consumption model of a free-market economy

and its matrix. It’s what we see here in Oakland every day under our high- 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 ways, in the aftermath of the 2008 real-estate-market crash. Diamela and Lotty were interested in how that negative appeared as the underside of the positive, additive, debt-ridden “happiness.” JBW: Plus, plus, plus. More, more, more. NB: She says they wanted to “delimitar y delinear”—delimit and delineate—the question of the line, of drawing lines for “una arista estética,” an aesthetic edge. JBW: Margins and Institutions has been rightly influential, but Richard’s is a very narrow take. The negative, and the question of transgression, all of these things were being put to use by Lotty and Diamela explicitly to think about class and economics. Richard is thinking about institutions—that word is in the title—and she’s thinking about politics. But let’s just say it: In Richard, the Marxist face of their art falls out a little. NB: What are the consequences of an economic form? Theirs is an early critique of the financial structure that was being set up in Chile, one that we all now live under. JBW: In CADA, which was a multi-gendered group that included Lotty and Diamela as well as Fernando Balcells, Juan Castillo, and Raúl Zurita, they used what I think of as gendered metaphors, such as giving away powdered milk in 1979’s So as Not to Die of Hunger in Art (Para no morir de hambre en el arte). Obviously, it refers to an Allende socialist campaign promise to give every child a liter of milk every day, and it is also a very maternal symbol. They also

CADA. So as Not to Die of Hunger in Art (Para no morir de hambre en el arte). 1979. Speaking of Lotty Rosenfeld 125

sometimes deployed textiles, and in general I consider CADA part of a wider feminist project even if it was not named as such. How does this discussion of gender impact our reading of Lotty’s cross? Because it also works like the crosshairs of a tracking device or of a rifle. It pinpoints; it marks location. She is so specific, as we have said, about where

she performs this action. The sites are targeted, not just random stretches of 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 road—in front of the White House, in front of La Moneda. There is a sense of exactness. Crosshairs make me think of technologies used in the moon landing, and in fact she did a version of One Mile near the La Serena astro- nomical observatory. But it also suggests that you might be in firing range; there is something weaponized about it, a weaponization of space. NB: And perhaps linked to that, I have always felt that it was linked to the emerg- ing language of computer coding. JBW: Yes. It’s a binary system—one line meets another line. NB: It is. The images of early computers in the 1970s, the black screen with white or green text, that’s what they are. What’s interesting is that, in the case of Chile, it was under Allende that they were trying to institute a revolutionary way of incorporating the new computer device into socialist politics. That was interrupted with the coup in 1973, but it reentered Chilean life through the financial market. It’s interesting. Like you said, the language of computer coding is bound up with warfare and tracking and this fear of the deregulat- ed financial market. JBW: And the growth of surveillance. Pamela Lee’s book Think Tank Aesthetics also delves into the history of computing in Chile and how coding was a major part of financial reorganization and state efforts to track and disci- pline its citizens.4 NB: We see that today, and we’re all talking about it in this current COVID-19 moment around the fear of surveillance. Lotty insists on the obstruction of the body. Maybe that’s why it’s also important that she’s there and that her body is action—not as an individual but as a body that can always potentially interrupt the code’s abstraction. JBW: Related to what you’re saying, the cross is almost a primal scene of represen- tation or mark-making—it can be thought of as the erect, upright figure of the human against the horizon line, a shorthand for “the body” in the landscape. It goes back to the assertion of the upright against the earth. A lot of how we organize ourselves depends on the relationship between the horizontal and the perpendicular, or the matrix. It is also the basic character of the cloth weave, and it is fundamental to many forms of writing. And in many traditions of Indigenous art of the Americas, the four-directional cross is an integral design element: It shows up on blankets, on ceramics, and in the paintings of artists like Kay WalkingStick.

4. Pamela M. Lee, Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020). 126 OCTOBER

NB: Yes! And that’s how so much of the more classical histories of art have been articulated. As you say, it’s the Anthropocene. JBW: Because it’s been universalized, the cross is often understood as masculine. But Lotty is not making her crosses on a wall. She’s making them on the ground. She’s retaining the horizontality, which is also the register of the

base, the register of the low, of the animal, the abject, the womanly. She puts 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 her body on the line, literally. In the Catholic sense, when you make the gesture of crossing yourself, it is an embodied action. And One Mile is emphatically bodily, but, as we’ve discussed, it is emphatically not her body alone. Raúl Zurita says her crossed line is “como un corte,, como un tajo [like a cut, like a gash].”5 It’s interesting to think about the cut, not a stitch but a wound, and the work in the Atacama is in fact entitled “American Wound.” As if her act of making a line is akin to slicing with a knife, an incision as well as an inscription. As I mentioned, Lotty is Jewish, and Zurita recounts having a dream about a Jew in a concentration camp with numbers on his arms, which is intense! And odd. It makes me think, too, that the cross has become a tattoo, one that gets de-Christianized in a way. If the earth is like skin, the mark becomes like a tattoo. Or a network of veins. NB: Raúl Zurita. He’s an extraordinary poet, but he talks a lot about himself. JBW: Yeah, talk about re-centering the individual! He quotes Lotty saying, somewhat enigmatically, “The crosses are my kisses.”6 Which brings me to questions of desire and sexuality. Maybe you can help me understand the phrase “art is homosexual” that appears a couple of times— NB: Where does it appear? JBW: It’s in the title of a Juan Dávila piece from 1983 as well as in work by Carlos Leppe. In News from Nowhere, by Catalina Parra, a kind of manifesto about anti-poetry in the important anthology from Chile in 1975, Manuscritos, she says, “la poesía ha muerto / viva la poesía / el arte es homosexual [poetry has died / long live poetry / art is homosexual].”7 And Dávila writes, “Art is homosexual,” but homosexual is crossed out with a strike-through that returns me to Lotty’s line of cancellation. I actually think that one of the things that Lotty does is queer space. It’s not just a redirection of space, it’s a misdirec- tion. Because nothing is by itself queer. Queerness happens in relationship to a set of norms or standards. And that is what she is doing, scrambling norms and standards. Clearly queerness is of interest to this cohort of artists, as is the figure of the trans person—like Errázuriz and her photographic series Adam’s Apple (La Manzana de Adán), which depicts transwomen living on the outskirts of Santiago. That series was undertaken in 1983, when Chile was still in the grip

5. Raúl Zurita, “El final de los caminos,” inDesacato , p. 38. 6. Ibid. 7. Catalina Parra, “News from Nowhere,” in Manuscritos, ed. Ronald Kay (Santiago: Universidad de Chile, 1975), p. 89. Speaking of Lotty Rosenfeld 127

of the dictatorship with all its brutal enforcing of gender conventions; Nelly Richard discusses Leppe, Dávila, and Errázuriz in a chapter about “the trans- vestite” in her book Masculine/Feminine.8 And she mentions the duo Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, which formed in 1987 during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, with anti-dictatorship performances that directly incorporat-

ed queer sexuality—but no mention is made of CADA or of Lotty. Why is mar- 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 ginalization or dissidence so persistently routed through alternative sexualities and identities? NB: One classic way to think of the connection between margins and non-heteronormative sexualities would be through Foucault, right? Modern bio-power delimits the zones of inclusion and exclusion from the social body through the control and surveillance of sexuality. Foucault was very important for Diamela and other Chilean Conceptualists of her generation. Most of the gestures in CADA’s actions are both feminized and queer, and even though Foucault might help answer the larger structural question, remembering the Cuban writer Severo Sarduy’s influence on queer Latin American cultural production of the 1970s and ’80s is central. I know that for all of them Sarduy was very important; he wrote a text in 1968 called Written on the Body (Escrito sobre un cuerpo). At that point he was living in Paris. He was very close to Roland Barthes. Everyone thinks he was probably one of Barthes’s lovers. It’s another instance of a certain French aesthetic fascination with Cuba; let’s remember Picasso’s relationship with Wilfredo Lam. JBW: Totally. The deviant and racialized Other that becomes the locus of disobedi- ence, and of a reinvigorated aesthetic. NB: Barthes is pursuing his writing degree zero, or writing with a de-alienated language, as he states at the end of that powerful book. Barthes meets Sarduy, and there’s something about that Cubanness, that queerness, that baroque use of language, which strikes Barthes as a version of degree zero. There’s a certain relationship to opacity and the changing of the signs that is crucial in Sarduy. It becomes crucial for all of these Chilean practitioners. On the one hand, there’s this strange Chilean relationship to homosexuality through the Cuban neo-baroque. On the other hand, we see the emergence of early performance art in Chile in the 1970s, and that is a very queer scene; among the performance artists Carlos Leppe stands out in all the histories for his queer use of the body. Nelly Richard is closer to that performance-art scene than to CADA at that time. She’s not close to CADA at all. Lotty and CADA’s work engages the body differently than performance art does. That is partly the reason why they are less readable as queer. JBW: What you just said about opacity makes me think about the immense impor- tance of blankness for CADA and Lotty. Actually, I should say the fullness of blankness, starting with No+, when the public begins to fill in the remainder

8. Richard, Masculine/Feminine: Practices of Difference(s) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 128 OCTOBER

of the phrase. No+ Fear. No+ Torture. It becomes even more of an insurgent gesture because it is open-ended. It’s not a complete sentence, and people take the blankness of the end as an implicit invitation. Blankness is also replete in projects like CADA’s 1979 action Scene Inversion, where an empty banner is hung in front of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, nominally as a way to close the institution. But it also 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 becomes a screen of projection that is profoundly public and unscripted. What do you want to imagine in this space? As part of So as Not to Die of Hunger in Art, CADA also purchased a page in the magazine Hoy with text that began: “Imagine this page blank.” Blankness becomes a motor or a generator for imagining something else. I think of that as a kind of queerness. NB: But we could call it a conceptual form of queerness or conceptual queering. JBW: Yes, one not tethered to strict identifications. One that obliterates the sharp primacy of the “I” to embrace the feminist and queer potentials of a blurry collective. NB: CADA’s entire production of those few years in the early 1980s rejects the individual. Anything that has to do with identity becomes very problematic, and my sense is that they completely reject it. They don’t reject the idea of the singular appropriation and activation of creativity—but that can’t become equatable to the individual. I think that we tend to associate queerness, especially in the early ’80s, with questions of identity. At least that is the case in

CADA. Scene Inversion (Inversión de escena). 1979. Speaking of Lotty Rosenfeld 129

the Americas. It’s only more recently that we have come to mobilize queerness as a tool for a conceptual practice of critique. JBW: Of critique and also of imagination. I would say it is an anti-capitalist, anti- heteronormative, anti-conventional-family projection into a different future. And I think that CADA is doing that. Not only with So as Not to Die of Hunger in

Art but also with No+ and Scene Inversion. And Oh, South America! (¡Ay 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 Sudamerica!), which is precisely about expanding the mind or being free— about what liberation might look like even in distinctly unfree contexts. It proposes that if you have the capacity for imagining otherwise, regardless of the circumstances, you are not only an artist but you can be free. NB: That freedom is a radical utopian gesture. As I was hearing you talk about queerness, I of course could hear the echoes of José Esteban Muñoz. In the midst of one of the most terrible and oppressive military dictatorships in Latin America, CADA gave the Chilean people the possibility of imagining otherwise. That is a utopian gesture, or a gift of utopia as something that can become real. JBW: But the blankness can be difficult. In some respects, it can seem like fairly unpopulist art, in that it is quite allusive and encoded. I teach this work frequently, and I struggle because students find it pretty flat. You can never answer the question of why something isn’t as famous as it should be or why it hasn’t gotten its due. And of course, many people have written about Lotty and CADA. They are not unknown figures; they have not suffered grotesque neglect. But outside of Chile they are not widely considered central to Conceptualism or to the realm of “political art,” which is not a phrase I love. But for me they are essential. These gestures that are so redolent of meaning, so textured, so urgent: They have many lessons to offer, but they have not gotten the volume of critical attention that I feel they deserve. NB: Why do you think that is? JBW: The works aren’t easy. They’re not particularly beautiful in a highly accessi- ble way. The documents are dense; the projects are complicated. And I think their turn away from the body has consequences for their seeming obdurate and wordy. I frequently compare CADA to the Argentinian experiment Tucumán Is Burning (Tucumán Arde), organized by the sprawling collective Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia, sometimes known as the Rosario group, from 1968, which is also very hard to teach. NB: Yes. Because the work is steeped in its context. JBW: You have to know so many things to grasp the enormity of that endeavor. For me, Tucumán Is Burning is a major touchstone that brings together questions about union labor, economic policy, alternative journalism, coalition building, disillusionment, and failure. It raises questions about solidarity, about the efficacy of communication, and is another potent case study about art during Latin American dictatorships. But to describe it takes many steps, which is true with CADA as well. And when you put that next to Hélio Oiticica, 130 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

Ballot from national Pinochet plebiscite, 1988.

for instance, which by contrast can feel really bodily and colorful, his work seems to offer a more pleasurable model of resistance. There’s something consumable about it—not that Oiticica’s is simple work at all, of course not, it is multidimensional and challenging in its own right—but do you know what I mean? I see what students connect to, what’s digestible. Lotty’s work, and CADA’s, is hard. NB: I see what you mean. JBW: The Lygia Papes and the Lygia Clarks and the Oiticicas, it’s like there’s something about the Brazilian work that fits into what they think art should look like. There are colored drops that stain tongues. There are people swirling in parangolé capes. NB: To say it more specifically, what art from the South should look like. The demand for an imposed colonial and neocolonial ethnographic “authenticity.” Speaking of Lotty Rosenfeld 131 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. Oh, South America! (¡Ay Sudamérica!). 1981.

JBW: True. When we talk about Chile after we have talked about Brazil—the Pinochet coup of 1973 comes after the first wave of military dictatorship in Brazil, imposed in 1964—students ask, “But where is the dancing?” Lotty Rosenfeld making crosses on the pavement is really not about dancing. NB: There’s a refusal of expectation in the dryness you refer to. JBW: In fact, there is a bureaucratic aesthetic in One Mile that connects it to real structures of power and the law. Because how you vote in Chile at this moment is that you cross a horizontal line with a perpendicular mark. You make a cross; you can see the ballot from the plebiscite about Pinochet’s reign in 1988, it says “No” and “Sí” under two straight lines. There is footage of Lotty doing the project again on the day of this vote, as if to cast her ballot in the streets. So her entire performance since 1979 is a kind of unofficial registration of political agency. NB: I want to return to the question of dryness. Art can lead to voting, as in the appropriation of Lotty’s cross by the plebiscite, and art can lead to carnival. This is a very unfair rendition of Oiticica, just to make a point. JBW: Of course. In my class, I show footage of CADA’s Oh, South America! with its leaflets raining down from six planes with the Andes in the background. To me that is the height of spectacle! I sometimes almost tear up a little when I 132 OCTOBER

show it, because I am so struck by the simultaneous aesthetic, mili- taristic, and propagandistic glory of it. It’s quite bombastic and tremen- dously powerful. But when I read

the actual leaflet and it’s all this 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 long text, words rather than images—the entire proposition is that images in your mind are formed as you read—well, students are sometimes a little bored. NB: I wonder if those same students, as they study art of the Americas, think of Bruce Nauman as difficult and dry? JBW: I think you’re right that it’s about an expectation about Latin Americanness. NB: South of the US-Mexico border, everyone is simpático and art should be colorful and fun. There’s the expectation that entertainment and a certain relaxation comes from and with the raw material of the South. JBW: And from the body, which is always Cover of Replies (Réplicas) by Diamela Eltit, with cover image racialized, always gendered, maybe by Lotty Rosenfeld. 2016. a little queer. NB: A body that must have a certain movement, a certain gesture and rhythm in it. Of course Lotty’s would be a “dry” conceptual practice. I want to show you this book cover. The book is the most recent collection of Diamela’s critical writings on art. It’s titled Replies (Réplicas). Its cover is a work by Lotty made specially for Diamela. JBW: I love that so much. A black-and-white photo of a woman braiding long, gray hair, and cutting across the picture are three angled lines, three colored strands, like Lotty’s lines on the street or the beginning of a different alphabet. NB: What does it mean, especially for Latin American women artists, to engage in this hard, dry, conceptual practice? One could say the same thing of Diamela. Diamela is a larger-than-life figure for writers throughout Latin America, and yet—she’s known in the US, but as a difficult writer. No one complains of the difficulty of any French writer. No one complains of the dif- Speaking of Lotty Rosenfeld 133

ficulty of an American writer. But if it comes from south of the border, it is a disappointment if they explore a new language, to go back to the cross. JBW: It’s true. For a Latin American woman to engage this way makes it even more of a defiance of expectations. Because it is generating its own very complex theorizations of space and meaning.

NB: The fact is we were able to spend hours just unpacking the infinite number of 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 possible meanings that one seemingly simple gesture has. The condensation that conceptual practices have is not expected from certain places. At most it becomes a footnote. JBW: The sensuality of touch in this photograph brings me back to the queerness of Lotty’s work. We were talking about a utopian urge, but I’m not sure that’s the proposition necessarily. I don’t think it’s so clear or so uncontaminated. Lotty articulates an active negation, but her work isn’t necessarily a proposition of a replacement. We’re not always getting a vision of what could be in its place. It’s a powerful renunciation, and that rejection is part of the queerness. Saying no. Just no. NB: Yes. JBW: With Tucumán Is Burning, artists and journalists wanted to launch a critique about the circulation of information, and they pursued investigations around fact-finding and the re-presentation of counterfacts. That is not exactly what’S happening with Lotty’s work or CADA’s. Instead, there are elements of abstraction and elements of the absurd—like empty milk trucks parading

CADA. Scene Inversion (Inversión de escena). 1979. 134 OCTOBER

through Santiago and parking in front of the museum. The excess of a mile of crosses on the pavement . . . the irrational is maybe a useful concept, and it too is a queer concept. NB: An interruption of the rational and an interruption of language and grammar as it has been used so far. Reason, language, and grammar are forms of patri-

archy, in their normative power. In a place like Chile, that means heteronor- 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 mativity. I do think that in the negation, Lotty is also always offering a potential reorganization of the elements of the sign. The sign constitutes communication. Whether it’s the crossing of the lines on a road or the ants in Point of Order that walk in a line projected from museum to museum wall, Lotty is concerned with a kind of interruption of the pure abstraction of the sign system with the drawing of another sign that is gesture and body. I want to return to the fact that, as we have been saying, this form of rewriting, of negation, of conceptual practice always happens in collaboration in Lotty’s work. I do want to insist on the place of Diamela in and for Lotty’s work. Lotty is Diamela’s shadow for Diamela’s work, and I think that Diamela is Lotty’s shadow for her work. They are present in each other’s work, throughout all these decades. There’s this pact between them. Of course, one could call it a feminist friendship, but I also think we could call it a queer friendship. JBW: For sure. NB: Regardless of the sexual orientation of either one of them. JBW: Yes, it’s a queering of authorship. NB: Yes! It’s a queering of language. The language we have cannot speak through the framework of colonialism, of capitalism, of patriarchy that orders and structures it. Lotty and Diamela’s and CADA’s work is a constant negation of that language. JBW: The swarming ants that appear and reappear throughout Lotty’s epic video installation, Point of Order, from 2002, are so excessive, they almost become a camp element. Outsized and verging on ludicrous. They also carry the chill of the uncanny. When something that should be outside comes inside, it is matter out of place. In these projections, ants are sneaking in and out in unauthorized ways to connect all the institutions that showed the piece, including Galería Gabriela Mistral and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, and are privileged in very different ways. Ants are a pestilence. But here they do the job of pointing out these overlooked infrastructures. They’re coming in and out of air-conditioning ducts. For me, there is something socialist about it. Ants signify workers—does that sound really basic? NB: No, that is not basic. A recurrent figure of many socialists is the ant carrying the weight of the world. No ant lives on its own. Of course, this would be true of so many species on this planet. In Point of Order they appear as a mass in movement, working and moving together. Slowly but surely plotting away. There’s always a queen figure! Speaking of Lotty Rosenfeld 135

JBW: Very feminist. NB: There is something of the common good of an ant population; no matter how much you crush an anthill, it returns, never giving up. You crush it, it dispers- es and returns. It has its own life, and in a certain way it’s indestructible. Ants collect refuse and residues, leftovers. There’s a critique of capitalist produc-

tion in Point of Order in the use of the marching ants, and in the way the ants 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 are projected onto videos made by Lotty of offshore oil-drilling sites and news footage. JBW: Found footage, itself seemingly scavenged and discarded. NB: The montage of these video recordings and found footage is itself a critique of surveillance and extractivist capitalism. JBW: There is almost a surrealist element when suddenly there are these ants in the middle of the ocean crossing an oil-drilling platform. They signify disor- der in the face of order, but maybe it goes back to the idea of the irrational as an interruption. Or revealing the irrational as such. There’s also a stun- ning moment when the ants cross the same road where she did One Mile, so the ants are connected back to the fabric bandages and impart some kind of sense of transgression, the violation of order by some unruly force. NB: I wonder if we could also ponder the fact that the ants continue regardless of what we humans are doing to each other and to the world. They’re there, they continue. Much in the way that under this pandemic we have come to realize the obvious: We have damaged the planet, we have damaged other life forms, yet many remain, no matter how much we destroy them. They have a force of their own, and they have a way and a path of their own. In the stoppage that the pandemic has brought, all those other life forms suddenly have more room. JBW: In this pandemic, popular memes and viral videos focus on pumas in Santiago or parades of capybaras in Argentina. Not ants. People want to watch mammals that we relate to, that become somewhat astonishing when they appear in urban areas. The ant is so lowly and hated, a despised thing. Have you seen the pumas in Santiago? NB: Yes. On April Fool’s Day there was this piece circulating about mountain bears inside of Dia in upstate New York. Did you see that? JBW: No. NB: Given that Dia was empty, the bears had made their way in. There were these bear cubs and they were interacting with all the large sculptures. I was so happy when I read the article and saw the pictures until someone reminded me it was April Fool’s Day. I was so ecstatic at the fact that we might be shar- ing all these things we call art with other species, and that they might be interested in those objects, for their own reasons. JBW: Ha! COVID clickbait. NB: Returning to the ants, what is incredible is the ants have absolutely no interest in what is happening. 136 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

Rosenfeld. Point of Order (Moción de órden). 2002.

JBW: Yeah. It’s almost an indifference to the road, an indifference to the oil- drilling platform, an indifference to which institution they march in and out of, Gabriela Mistral or the Bellas Artes. NB: In that sense one could say that’s a perfect analogy or figure for capitalism. JBW: There is also a video projection of them crawling up the facade of La Moneda. This is before its doors were thrown open in the post-Pinochet years, before the Centro Cultural was established in its basement as an extraordinary statement about transparency and national reckoning. Lotty’s piece is from a moment when that presidential palace was still shuttered and intim- idating and interested in consolidating its architecture of force: There are police standing guard with weapons. Again, we come back to the question of logistics and permissions and Lotty’s navigation of bureaucracy . . . some more things we wish we could ask her directly. NB: Issues of legal risk are present all the way back with CADA. Everyone knew who the members of the collective were. Of course, in 1981, ’82, Zurita, Diamela, and Lotty were not well known, but still everyone knew who they were and what they were doing. JBW: I’ve read the letter where CADA writes to seek permission for ¡Ay Sudamerica!; it was written and signed by Lotty, and she does say it’s a work of art.9 That’s

9. Letter from Lotty Rosenfeld to Director de la Dirección de Aeronáutica, June 18, 1981; Archivos en Uso, Red Conceptualismos del Sur. Speaking of Lotty Rosenfeld 137

the alibi. Well, it’s not an alibi, because it was actually the truth of the matter, but saying “this is a sculpture” and calling the action “an aesthetic proposition” was also a way to make it seem less threatening. To me, it’s a brilliant strategy. It’s a very straightforward letter requesting permission from the authorities to fly over the airspace of a militarized zone—and permission was

granted. Of course, the power of the leaflet and the power of the whole pro- 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 ject is that it doesn’t mention Pinochet or use the words politics or dictatorship. It gets back to the question of utopia because the leaflet isn’t saying, “Let’s imagine life without Pinochet.” What it does say is that if you can imagine extra space in your own mind, you are an artist. NB: We could say that if you choose to engage with public space otherwise, you are already an artist. Whether the engagement is about passing around a piece of paper or relating to others and to objects differently from how we are being conditioned and controlled to do, this engagement transforms the subject into an artist. Being an artist is an interruption of the codes of nor- mativity. Art is then an emancipatory practice. JBW: Exactly. It’s distributing authorship by nominating all people who use their minds as artists. It’s not interested in the Euro-American authorial model of what an artist is, as a singular or genius or exceptional or original or creden- tialed figure. NB: And it moves from the ideas of creativity and originality that, as we know all too well, are linked to the elitism of the art world. The long tradition of what in English would be called either popular forms of art or folklore are not about creativity in the sense of originality. JBW: No. What CADA insists on again and again is the imagination, which is different, perhaps, from talent or skill or cultivated artistry because everyone has an imagination. A child has imagination. “Imagine this page blank.” It’s about imagining instead of inventing. NB: Work like Lotty’s and CADA’s is a reminder that no matter how much anyone might feel that their entire imaginary is colonized and run by a system that controls one’s body, one’s gestures, one’s forms of life, whether it’s through macropolitics or micropolitics, imagination is so profound and so intense that there’s always more in that endless resource. You just have to find it. JBW: You will never be fully captive. You can never be fully controlled. NB: No. Not under dictatorship, not under colonialism, not under patriarchy. JBW: Or capitalism. NB: Or capitalism. Imagination is powerful and, in a way, infinite.