As part of the activities commemorating 50th anniversary of the U.S.-backed coup against the socialist government of Salvador Allende that marked the beginning of the Pinochet’s 17-year-long dictatorship in Chile, our doctoral student Samuel Espíndola and Prof. Javier Uriarte organized a visit to the exhibition Chile: Dignidad, 1973-2023, by the New York-based artist María Verónica San Martín (Santiago, 1981) at Fordham University’s Lipani Gallery. A group of PhD students from the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature had the privilege of walking through the exhibition guided by the curator, Prof. Carl Fischer (Fordham University), and the artist herself.
Photo 1: Artist María Verónica San Martín in Lipani Gallery, Fordham University.
Fischer introduced the group to the logic behind organizing an art exhibition such as this one, where recent events seem to be filled with echoes of past violences, charging the words used to described them, sometimes in opposite directions. For example, during the 2019 social uprising (also known as Estallido or Revuelta) against the authoritarian government of Sebastián Piñera (2018-2022), “Dignidad” (dignity) was one of the emblematic words used in chants and famously in the unofficial renaming of the Baquedano Squarehere demonstrators used to gather. However, this word appears also in the name of Colonia Dignidad, “an insular, autarchic, fundamentalist, totalitarian compound in southern Chile”[1], an enclave populated by Germans since 1961 whose leader was the former Nazi Paul Schäfer and where systematic sexual abuse was committed. During the dictatorship, the Colonia was engaged in intimate collaboration with the military regime. In 1991, once the dictatorship ended, the name was changed to Villa Baviera; its residents were free to go but the place remained a controversial site due to numerous national and international judicial cases.
San Martín discussed in detail her creative process (including some learning and discoveries made during her formative years that led her to the U.S.), the assembling of pieces in the exhibition, spanning years of work and different materials, from book art, drawings, engravings, sculpture, to performance. Since direct interaction with the materials is an essential part of her work, the artist manipulated them, allowing us to see different ways to fold and unfold the books. Thus, the group could learn about the documentary and artistic research behind the exhibition and, ultimately, how it is shaped by San Martín’s own experience as a Chilean artist working in the aftermath of the dictatorship (not being a firsthand witness) and living in the USA during the flagrant Human Rights violations that occurred between 2019 and 2020, which inevitably brings reminiscence of the country’s turbulent past.
The visit ended with San Martín’s demonstration of how one the sculptures was used in an art and sound installation with a performance, also titled “Dignidad,” based on secret telephone documents about Colonia Dignidad found in 2012 by the ex-settler and activist Winfried Hempel and now kept in the National Archives of Chile. The piece is a modular metal structure that can be assembled as a box, a cross, a tunnel, a square, and has been presented in several venues by the artist and different performers in Chile, Netherlands, Canada, the US, and Germany.
Photo 2: Prof. Fischer (right, with hat) and HLL Stony Brook University graduate students and Prof. Uriarte (front).
[1] Fischer, “Feminist Re-Mappings of Colonia Dignidad as Antifascist Praxis”, Dismantling the nation: Contemporary art in Chile, ed. Florencia San Martín, Carla Macchiavello Cornejo, and Paula Solimano. Amherst College Press, 2023.
Blog post by by Samuel Espíndola