TY - JOUR
AU - Halart,, Sophie
AB - Introduction: Mapping Embodied and Territorial Spaces In December 1979, six years into Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship, the Chilean artist Elías Adasme staged a performance outside of the metro station Salvador in the capital Santiago (Fig. 1). The photograph registering the action shows him bare-chested, hanging upside down, his legs strapped to the entry sign of the metro. Also visible in the image is a large paper map of Chile affixed to the other arm of the pole, its size almost matching that of the artist’s body. This image is part of the photographic series A Chile (To Chile,1979) (Fig. 2) reflecting on the formal similarities existing between the human body and the characteristic length of the Chilean territory. The other photographs composing the series are variations on this first picture, taken in the more private context of the artist’s studio. One image shows Adasme and the map hanging in exactly the same position as in the first outdoor shot while, in another, the artist is back on his feet, standing next to the map with the capitalized words MAP OF CHILE running through his chest. In a third image, a fully naked Adasme stands against a dark background, his back turned away from the camera, a map of Chile projected onto his skin. One last photograph completing the series shows the artist taping print-outs of the first four photographs on the walls of Santiago. Fig. 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Elías Adasme, A Chile, 1979, photographic print, 175 x 113 cm each (detail). © 2013. Elías Adasme and Courtesy Art Gallery Isabel Aninat, Santiago, Chile. Fig. 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Elías Adasme, A Chile, 1979, photographic print, 175 x 113 cm each (detail). © 2013. Elías Adasme and Courtesy Art Gallery Isabel Aninat, Santiago, Chile. Fig. 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Elías Adasme, A Chile, 1979, series of five photographic prints, 175 x 113 cm each. © 2013. Elías Adasme and Courtesy Art Gallery Isabel Aninat, Santiago, Chile. Fig. 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Elías Adasme, A Chile, 1979, series of five photographic prints, 175 x 113 cm each. © 2013. Elías Adasme and Courtesy Art Gallery Isabel Aninat, Santiago, Chile. By reading the body as a form of cartographic support, Adasme’s work seeks to challenge traditional conceptions of la Patria – or the Motherland, an embodied, and often gendered, reading of the nation regularly evoked in Latin American populist rhetoric – and the normative role played by maps.1 It is specifically on the surface of the body, the skin, that his photo-series focuses, drawing an evocative parallel between physical and territorial borders. By turning the skin into a supportive screen for the projection of the country’s topographic outlines, the artist sheds light on the typical function filled by the map with regards to the land it represents and codifies, as well as the epidermal resonances that this function might trigger. Like borders on a map, skin plays an important containing role, providing a surface of representation of one’s physical limits that is useful in the construction of identity.2 Skin draws a contour, a defining border between the self and others. In the same way, the cartographic representation of a country encloses and contains a nation in colour-coded systems, defining through bold lines its limits and relations to contiguous provinces. Maps and skin therefore enclose and define; they set an inside and an outside. Both also function according to a metonymic logic. The map stands for the nation just as the skin signifies the body. This reflection on physical and topological contours in this series also ought to be read in light of the local context. At the time of this work, Adasme was involved with the neo-avant-garde movement Escena de Avanzada that emerged a few years after the 1973 military coup. Brought together by the theoretical voice of Nelly Richard, the artists composing the Avanzada staged ephemeral, public and often collaborative performances. While not explicitly in opposition to the Pinochet regime, their works made references to post-structuralism and semiotics to challenge the totalizing narratives of nationhood and identity activated by the junta. Exploring issues pertaining to the body and the land, they sought, as Richard puts it, to ‘“fracture’ … the unifying coherence of the emblems of progressive national thought’.3 Using his body to question territorial forms of belonging through a public and time-based photo-performance, Adasme thus mobilized in his piece some of the founding principles of the movement. Moreover, the violence implied in the photo-performance – the hanging upside down tied, the stamping of messages across bare skin – evokes a body placed under duress, a reference that resonates with both the authoritarian context and the types of works produced by the Avanzada.4 Bearing this in mind, the pairing of map and skin takes on a darker twist in Adasme’s series, addressing the complementary functions of protection and coercion inherent to the containing process. In this, the work also reveals the highly political and normative role played by maps in anchoring national identity inside a territory, making it match the topographic contours of the country. Maps, as the art historian Carla Macchiavello argues, operate a flattening of the country’s relief, striving ‘to create a unified and integral vision of a territory, translating into a flat area what is an otherwise curved, three-dimensional, and disparate surface’.5 In the specific Chilean context, what the conflation of bodily and topographic surfaces also points to is the effort by the military government to turn the country into a zone of constant surveillance and control in which maps, these ‘silent panopticons’, play an actively complicit, if not propagandistic role.6 Historically, this effort on the part of the military to regain control over the country’s geographic narrative manifested itself through two apparently contradictory, yet in some ways complementary impulses. On one hand, as it aimed at establishing invasion-proof borders, the junta carved out an image of the territory as a closed-off organic entity, inward-looking and defined by Christian, patriarchal values stemming from the country’s colonial past.7 At the same time as it was involved in the reformulation of this image of true chilenidad or ‘Chileanness’, the government, with the help of economists trained under Milton Friedman, also implemented an economic agenda aggressively outward-facing: privatizing national companies, opening borders to foreign investment and embracing the mass culture coming from the United States in particular.8 As a living organism, the physical borders of Chile therefore appeared both sealed off and porous. Moreover, at the same time that the junta declared a state of emergency that included curfews and a strict control of public space, the state secret police – or DINA – practiced the forced disappearance of the regime’s political opponents. The consequences of this two-fold phenomenon on Chileans’ embodied sense of reality were particularly painful, leading them to feel both fiercely controlled and potentially subject to unexpected disappearance.9 In this article, I examine the cartographic aspects of the skin from the point of view of this dual unleashing of coercive power and deterritorializing violence, as it manifests itself in a selection of artworks produced in the final years of the Chilean dictatorship and at the start of the country’s so-called transition to democracy. As I refer to ‘territorialization’ and ‘deterritorialization’ to understand the complex impacts of these apparently opposite yet concomitant types of violence on physical and territorial forms of belonging, my use of the terms differs from their original sense in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.10 By appealing to affective rather than symbolic values, my analysis of territorialized and deterritorialized modes of existence in the context of authoritarian Chile draws, rather, from the work carried out by Guattari and Brazilian scholar Suely Rolnik on territorial forms of desire, as will be demonstrated more clearly throughout the text.11 In the first two sections of this article, I look into artistic practices that reflect on the controlling and containing ambitions of the junta with regards to national space, particularly its cartographic expression. In the photography book El infarto del alma (Stroke of the Soul, 1994) discussed in this article’s first section, Diamela Eltit and Paz Errázuriz examine the ways in which, by laying claim on the territory, the military also created zones of non-droit to which those elements of society deemed deviant were evacuated. The artists also map out constellations of love and desire as they take shape from within these excluded zones, which can be read as forms of poetic insurgence. In the second section, I look at the performance La conquista de América (The Conquest of America, 1989) by the duo Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis. In this work, the artists execute a dance that resonates with the strategies of dissent elaborated by female relatives of the desaparecidos (disappeared) in the country. The map is here depicted as an artificial surface of state control to be ruptured in order to reveal the visceral wounds laying underneath. Considering these works as deterritorializing attempts to rupture the skin of the map as a metaphor of la Patria, I also argue that an excessive undoing of territoriality runs the risk of effectively losing one’s bodily and geographic referents – a risk, which, in the Chilean context, bears sombre parallels with the fate that awaited the desaparecidos as haunting souls deprived of a decent sepulchre. For this reason, the third section of this article turns to a series of collages by Catalina Parra that takes the presence of the wound as its starting point to explore a possibly reparative dimension inherent to these works. After the wound comes a cauterizing process that results in the production of a scar, and while Parra’s Imbunches series (1977) might initially use the motif of the stitch as the graphic expression of a claustrophobic bodily enclosure, her suturing collages also constitute an attempt at weaving back a sense of narrative into a reconciled – if uneven – skin, presenting the scar as both an inerasable stigma and the mark of a new beginning. Blind Maps and Zones of Non-Droit: Diamela Eltit and Paz Errázuriz’ El infarto del alma A writer and active participant in the artists’ collective CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte) in the late 1970s and 1980s, Diamela Eltit’s work explores life as it takes shape inside the zones of social marginality created by economic precariousness and the military government’s control of public space. This interest materializes through an exploration of zones of lawlessness, where vagrant female bodies seek contact with various forms of soiled materiality: a dirty pavement, the light of a neon, or the bodies of anonymous passers-by.12 Similarly, the photographer Paz Errázuriz sheds light on twilight zones excluded from official narratives: self-enclosed spaces standing outside of time and history. Errázuriz is especially interested in registering the undoing of gender as it takes place inside these social margins. Whether she photographs transvestite communities living on the edges of society in La manzana de Adán (Adam’s Apple, 1983) or registers the dances of seduction and desire taking place in the bars and cabarets of Valparaíso (Tangos, 1992), her images seek to suspend the deterministic aspect of affixed gender. In these artists’ works, the skin turns into a canvas or a performative screen upon which one paints, through cosmetics and organic fluids (sweat, blood, semen), physical contours, the structuring principle of which is that of the desire that alternatively opens and closes bodies. Both Eltit and Errázuriz also capture the consequences of such a radical gesture: the physical violence, of course, but also the rejection provoked by these unbound existences and their ensuing expulsion from the Chilean ‘paradise’ constructed by the military.13 At the same time, the places of extreme precariousness and social exclusion visible in their works also become brittle shelters where notions of bodily, sexual, and racial individuality dissolve, giving way to a sense of flux running uninterrupted between people, objects and space. In their attempts to map out these zones of exclusion, the artists use the surfaces of their protagonists’ bodies as topographic supports to trace the outlines of alternative corporealities. Returning them to the field of visibility, their portrayal of life on the margins refuses to present them as exotic vignettes and exposes them, rather, as the inassimilable truth of the different and the hidden wounds of Chile’s recent past. In 1992, Eltit and Errázuriz embarked on a collaborative project together, the subject of which was another zone of social exclusion: a psychiatric yard located in the Chilean countryside. Their documentation of the spatial marginality and material paucity of the place exposes the existence of this institution as the veritable pharmakon of Chilean society: a bodily and emotional excess of humanity that needs to be packaged, shipped away and fiercely contained in order to guarantee the illusion of social harmony inside the polis. El infarto del alma (Stroke of the Soul, 1994) (Figs 3–5) is the result of this joined project. A captivating photography book, it registers life inside the mental hospital of Putaendo, a rural town located outside of Santiago. Complementing Errázuriz’ black and white portraits of the institutionalized patients, Eltit produces a text split into two separate voices. While the core of the writing consists of the description of the yard and its inhabitants, as well as Eltit’s response to them, a secondary narrative thread frames the first story. More opaque and emotionally charged, it functions as a desperate love letter that the narrator addresses to a lost lover. Fig. 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Paz Errázuriz, Untitled, 1992–1994, photographic print, from the El infarto del alma series. Courtesy Paz Errázuriz. Fig. 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Paz Errázuriz, Untitled, 1992–1994, photographic print, from the El infarto del alma series. Courtesy Paz Errázuriz. Fig. 4 Open in new tabDownload slide Paz Errázuriz, Untitled, 1992–1994, photographic print, from the El infarto del alma series. Courtesy Paz Errázuriz. Fig. 4 Open in new tabDownload slide Paz Errázuriz, Untitled, 1992–1994, photographic print, from the El infarto del alma series. Courtesy Paz Errázuriz. Fig. 5 Open in new tabDownload slide Paz Errázuriz, Untitled, 1992–1994, photographic print, from the El infarto del alma series. Courtesy Paz Errázuriz. Fig. 5 Open in new tabDownload slide Paz Errázuriz, Untitled, 1992–1994, photographic print, from the El infarto del alma series. Courtesy Paz Errázuriz. While the photographs of Errázuriz focus on recording the faces and bodies of the inmates as they go on about their lives inside the yard, Eltit’s description of their journey to the hospital lays the ground for the image of a historically, geographically, and mentally secluded place. As she writes, ‘[t]wo hours away from Santiago, the building seems excessively urban to me, as if a piece of the city had escaped – like a psychotic getaway – to form a surprising scene of its own’.14 In her description, the writer gives the hospital an agency of its own, escaping the throngs of the city. Her mention of the different thresholds, fences, and control posts that she and Errázuriz have to cross in order to access the building’s interior alter this reading, however. This layering of buffer zones separating the ‘normal’ world from that of the ‘mad’ evokes a carceral universe born out of a much more violent gesture: as a fragment of the city pulled out and expelled from the urban body and grafted haphazardly on this remote locality. If the territory reads as a map, then the extractive actions performed by official power turns it into a jigsaw whose pieces are shuffled and reconfigured at will to fit more comfortable narratives. What happens inside the walls of the Putaendo hospital reaches us both visually and textually. Exploring the building’s corridors, Errázuriz’ camera registers its extreme paucity: the fissuring and graffiti-laden walls, the exposed pipes, the iron bunks, the stained sheets, and rough woollen blankets. This derelict materiality echoes and underlines the damaged corporality of its inhabitants as the scaling coats of paint on the walls turn into foils for the stained, wrinkled, and crevassed skins of the inmates. (Fig. 3). The photographs and accompanying texts thus point to an infra-reality, hidden from view, shamefully concealed behind barred windows and buried in the country’s backwater: a world inhabited by bodies paying the price of their inability or unwillingness to conform. This world, ‘which could be comical but is inexcusably dramatic’ represents the underbelly of acceptable Chilean society: both inherent to and excluded from it.15 As a microcosm, it suggests the ‘bare life’ characterised by Giorgo Agamben.16 In El infarto del alma, this utter debasement takes on a particularly epidermal expression as the artists converse with two patients who show them the scars that run through their bodies. The female patient’s scar cuts right above her navel. This mark, Eltit understands, results from a sterilization procedure most certainly performed without the woman’s knowledge as part of eugenic state policies aimed at stripping those perceived as deviants of their reproductive rights. In Putaendo, bare life takes both a spatial and a physical expression, confining the non-conforming bodies of the mad inside a space of geographic and social exclusion, while carving itself upon their very skin. The punitive machine of Franz Kafka’s The Penal Colony (1919) comes to mind here as a torture device that writes on the skin of inmates the nature of their crime while enacting punishment for such crime. Similarly, the mark of the scar in El infarto del alma points to a dual function of identification and expiation. Yet, the scar is also what provides the artists with a clue in their topographic exploration of the patients’ past stories, guiding them in their attempt to draw an epidermal cartography of these bodies. In her text, Eltit argues that the madness diagnosed in these patients is that of an excess of love: a desire to blend in the body of the other that is so strong it annihilates their own physical boundaries. ‘The inmates are materially another, opened to camouflage (and shelter) themselves inside any other body, inside any other mind, to inhabit the other at any cost’.17 Trapped by their urge to find shelter in the other, the ‘mad’ patients lose their status in outside civil society, their individual existence effectively wiped off the map. At the same time, it is through this irresistible desire to love that the inmates of Putaendo begin to weave new bounds between themselves, drawing stories that run beyond the established diagrams of family and desirability (Fig. 4). In El infarto del alma, the handsome pair up with the ugly, the young with the old, and the old look like androgynous children in a fluid corporal dynamic with which the two artists also find themselves entangled. Upon their arrival at the asylum, the patients address Errázuriz as ‘Tía Paz’ (Aunt Paz). Meanwhile, as soon as she enters the precinct, Eltit is hugged and kissed by an older woman who greets her with ‘Mamita’ (Mummy). As these new bonds of love transgress and reverse generations and blood ties, they write themselves on the containing walls of the hospital, a crisscross of names, hearts and arrows that grants a scarified validity to the existence of these romances (Fig. 5). As she observes the couples formed by the patients, Eltit is reminded of André Breton’s Mad Love (1937), leading her to wonder whether the love of the mad as it occurs in Putaendo is really that different from the one that seizes respectable citizens living on the outside. The co-presence in her text of the secondary, epistolary voice addressing her lost lover would seem to suggest that both manifestations stem from the same root. ‘After all, human beings fall in love like mad. Like mad’.18 The patients’ reluctance to let go of this maddening power of love might then turn them into the true core of resistance against the rationalizing and individuating demands made by society. Seen in this light, the wretched space of the psychiatric hospital also stands as the secluded shelter for a community whose fluid conception of bodies and affects allows it to escape the cartographic frenzy that seized their country’s government. In their book Molecular Revolution in Brazil, Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik describe a treatment of desire that consists precisely in reducing the feeling of love to this kind of appropriation of the other, an appropriation of the body of the other, the becoming of the other, the feeling of the other. And through this mechanism of appropriation, there is the constitution of closed, opaque territories that are inaccessible precisely to the processes of singularization…19 In El infarto del alma, what Eltit and Errázuriz document is a resistance from within the asylum to this appropriative nature of love, and the shaping of alternative territories where love operates as a transversal force dissolving bodies, identities and established bounds of kinship. In this, the patients of Putaendo map the outlines of what Rolnik calls ‘new coefficients of transversality’ that manifest themselves through a radical becoming-other.20 There is, however, as Rolnik and Guattari remind us, a danger in such an excessive deteritorializing gesture. The fascination that deterritorialization exercises on us may now be fatal; instead of experiencing it as an element in the creation of territories, without which we weaken to the point of sometimes definitive dissolution; we take it as an end in itself.21 By mapping the infra-world of the mental asylum of Putaendo, the artists also point out the ways in which the achievement of such a physical dissolution contains, at its core, the risk of an utterly disorientating deterritorialization. When the skin as a dividing limit between individual bodies gives way, the surface upon which the love for the other traditionally holds its ground also defaults, leaving no place for the other’s alterity to manifest itself. If this mutual co-habitation of mad love opens bodies to one another, it also denies the existence of skin as a separating surface upon which exchange can occur. In its devouring hunger for the other, the love of the mad negates the very existence of the other as other. Due to her interest in depicting subjects often deemed deviant or freakish, Errázuriz has often been likened to the North American photographers Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin. While this comparison is understandable in thematic as well as formal terms – the choice of outcast subjects, their frontal and at times provocative poses – it is important to note the different approach that Errázuriz maintains in relation to her own medium. If for Arbus the camera filled a protective function, as an apparatus that she could raise and aim, gun-like, on her subjects, Errázuriz acts upon a very different impulse which, rather than re-affirming a distance, strives to annihilate it, coming as close as possible to her subjects – close enough to touch. As Georgina Gutiérrez notes, ‘this portrait of social margins in Errázuriz is not … a criticism of human miseries but, rather a penetration of the contradictory and normal lives of beings who inhabit the other side of known stories’.22 At the same time, by coming close and touching her subjects, both literally and symbolically, Errázuriz also reinstates the necessity for a threshold, however porous, to maintain itself, allowing for the exchange – rather than the co-absorption – of one and other to take place. In this, she also distances herself from Goldin’s photographic ethics for whom the act of taking pictures constitutes an extension of the caress, qualifying the realm of her photographs as a universe of physical union between artist and sitter.23 By contrast, Errázuriz attempts to situate her subjects, tracing the contours of a disappeared cartography and providing the blind gaze of the mad with a reflective support that grants confirmation to their own existence, however precarious. ‘When [Errázuriz] captures [the patients’] poses, she confirms the relevance of their figures, when she smiles to them, she acknowledges the godly in their bodily conducts’.24 Enwrapping themselves in the maze of love and desire of the mental yard, Eltit and Errázuriz posit their cartographic gesture as the introduction of the right distance, standing neither too far nor too close to the community that they depict. Out of this distance comes the analytical and, even pedagogic, dimension of their work, providing their subjects with a roadmap to navigate, however blindly, the flux of their own out-of-bound existences. Moreover, by turning the skins of her protagonists into maps of desire, Errázuriz suggests tactility as an alternative to the vertical logic of the visual. If in their collaborative work, Diamela Eltit and Paz Errázuriz attempt to map out the poetic and critical possibilities nestled in marginal spaces concealed from official representations of the country, the photo-performance by the duo Las Yeguas del Apocalípsis (The Mares of the Apocalypse) examined in this next section turns, on the contrary, to the conquering and normative ambitions of the official map. Bleeding Maps: Las Yeguas del Apocalípsis’ La conquista de América On 12 October 1989, the duo Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, formed by the writers and performance artists Pedro Lemebel and Francisco Casas, intervened in the Chilean Commission for Human Rights in Santiago with a performance entitled La conquista de América (The Conquest of America). After unrolling a drawn map of South America littered with broken debris of Coca-Cola glass bottles on the floor, the two artists, bare-feet and bare-chested launched themselves into a cueca, Chile’s traditional folkloric dance (Fig. 6). Fig. 6 Open in new tabDownload slide Paz Errázuriz, La conquista de América, 1989, photographic print, register of a performance by Las Yeguas del Apocalípsis. Courtesy Paz Errázuriz. Fig. 6 Open in new tabDownload slide Paz Errázuriz, La conquista de América, 1989, photographic print, register of a performance by Las Yeguas del Apocalípsis. Courtesy Paz Errázuriz. Performed by a man and a woman, the cueca sees the two participants revolve in circular movements around one another. The cueca is profoundly anchored in Chilean traditions, thus explaining its appearance in a performance that critically reflects corporeality and territoriality. The artists’ decision to adopt it also refers to a specific precedent. On 8 March 1978, an association of relatives of Chilean disappeared staged an event in Santiago coinciding with the celebration of International Women's Day. On this occasion, a female member of the group performed what would become known as a cueca sola, or lone cueca, drawing attention to the absence of her male partner and providing a vivid expression to the political phenomenon of disappearance (Fig. 7). Fig. 7 Open in new tabDownload slide Marcelo Montecino, La cueca sola, 1979, photographic print. Courtesy Marcelo Montecino. Fig. 7 Open in new tabDownload slide Marcelo Montecino, La cueca sola, 1979, photographic print. Courtesy Marcelo Montecino. While the performance of Las Yeguas del Apocalípsis constitutes a tribute to the lone cueca dancers, it is also a transgression of both the original dance and its activist version. Indeed, the staging of a cueca performed by two homosexual male artists corresponds, in itself, to a queering of its traditional hetero-normative structure of seduction and conquest via the articulation of a cueca rara or queer cueca. Moreover, while the presence of a map underneath their feet initially comes across as an attempt to topographically situate their dance, it soon appears that, more than an effort to territorialize, Las Yeguas’ performance in fact materializes a desire to rupture the surface of the map as an object of control and disciplining of bodies. As the two men dance on the map, the fragments of broken bottles break the skin of their feet, drawing rivulets of blood that run through the cartographic surface. There is a cathartic aspect to this opening of skin, and the staining of paper. Indeed, if the map functions as a ‘silent arbiter of power’ as John Harley writes, it is, in the Chilean case at least, also guilty of supporting the distorted visions of the all-controlling eye of official power, passively reflecting the expectations articulated by military normative discourses with regard to bodies and genders.25 In their performance, Las Yeguas not only relocate the women’s loss, they also re-incorporate it into the living, moving, bleeding body of the queer performer. While the outflow of blood might provide momentary solace and remind its audience of the carnal nature of the disappeared body, the performance also constitutes a warning about the perils entailed by a rupture of the skin and an excessive opening of borders to outside intervention. This threat represents an intrinsic aspect of the performance, as La Conquista de América intertextually refers to the 1973 work Anaconda, Map of Chile by Chilean artist Juan Downey, itself a cartographic critique of the opening of Chilean borders to North American economic interests during the dictatorship. In Downey’s work, the insertion of a live anaconda snake onto a glass-protected map of Chile referred to the financial support provided by the North American Anaconda Copper Mining Company to the overthrow of President Salvador Allende, in probable exchange for the advantageous exploitation of Chilean national resources. Moreover, in their performance, as Las Yeguas dance on the shattered glass of the Coca-Cola bottles, their spilling and mixing blood refers to both the liquefaction of Chilean identity in the face of a mass culture imported from the United States as the spread of HIV-AIDS in Chile during these years, an epidemic that the artists perceived as one more colonizing plague coming from the global-North.26 There is an ethnic and social undertone to such a criticism too. If Chilean identity is the product of a racial, cultural, and sexual mix (the mestizaje that Sonia Montecino describes in her research on the nation’s foundational myths), Las Yeguas strive to re-territorialize this identity into a map of practices that profoundly differs from the official narrative.27 As Jean Franco has shown, while the Chilean elite often refers to its European ‘white’ blood and professional ties with the United States as proof of its social superiority, the Chile that Lemebel and Casas map out in their performance is the one excluded from this narrative ‘as a body, differenced, morbidly sexed, and lumpen’.28 In their performance, Las Yeguas thus also strive to queer the map as a cartographic support that validates conservative power’s attempt to empty Chilean identity from its subversive, heterogeneous elements. In this, they echo the strategies articulated by Lemebel in his literary practice. As Diana Palaversich writes, ‘Lemebel’s texts dispute and dispense with these privileged cartographies which, not only erase Latin American differences but represent Santiago as part of a prosperous, postmodern global village’.29 In Las Yeguas’ performance, the outflow of blood on the map corresponds to such a gesture of undoing neoliberal geographies. However, if it points to a desire to stain the official map, the presence of the blood also strives to re-materialize and re-embody an alternative configuration as a zone of locally anchored strategies of resistance. In their performance, Las Yeguas underline the toxic obsoleteness of maps. At the same time, through the ruptures taking place on the surface of their bodies, they also point to the necessity of drawing alternative maps as a way to both account for the past and care for the future. In their aforementioned text, Guattari and Rolnik write that ‘the result of having sought to free ourselves from symbiosis is that in the end we lose the very possibility of assembling territories’.30 What Las Yeguas’ haemorrhagic performance and their opening of skin as both a protective and smothering interface therefore points to is the ambivalence inherent to the concomitant enclosing and opening ambitions of the military junta concerning its national territory. In the first two sections of this article, I have examined artistic practices that question the motif of the map as a topographic support subject to political manipulation. Looking into modes of life and practices that refuse or are unable to fit inside the rigid borders erected by military power, I have argued that the works of Errázuriz-Eltit and Las Yeguas del Apocalípsis also reveal how the deterritorializing strategies devised from inside these zones of marginality and resistance could constitute doubled-edged, possibly dangerous solutions. Indeed, while exploding and rupturing boundaries, be they physical or spatial, leads to catharsis and the carving out of an emancipatory escape, it also, as we have seen, might entail a disempowering loss of anchoring referents. In La conquista de América, it is the cut made on the skin that interrupts the course of this floating, liquid identity, re-territorializing the body – be it individual or national – into a material, embodied reality. In these two cases however, the cut does not only correspond to a relief of bodily pressure as it sometimes appears in some self-harm narratives.31 Rather, it signals the existence of wounds that the smoothening and flattening aspects of the map render invisible. In this last section, I start from this wound to offer a possibly redeeming reading of the map: not so much as an object of optical control and physical coercion but as the surface inhabited by artworks that attempt to heal the injuries made on the national body during the dictatorial years. The renewed cartographies do not, however, attempt to return to the map its ambition to reduce the nation to a visual pleasing, coherent whole. Rather, what they lead to is a conception of the scar as a stubborn presence, contributing to the drawing of more fluid borders and the first instatement toward the articulation of an embodied memory. The Ambivalence of Stitching: Catalina Parra’s Imbunches If the 1989 national referendum that took place in Chile marked the end of sixteen years of life under a dictatorial military regime, the narrow margin by which the ‘No’ vote won (51% – 49%) also revealed a profoundly divided society. Moreover, although the 1990 Presidential election saw Pinochet having to hand over his presidential scarf to Patricio Aylwin, the former would remain Commander-in-Chief of the army until 1998 and Senator for Life until 2002, continuing to fulfil his self-appointed role of military vigilante. Furthermore, the junta had long been preparing for the dictatorship’s aftermath, voting as early as 1978 an Amnesty Law that would preclude judicial charges from being filed for crimes committed during the country’s State of Emergency (11 September 1973 – 10 March 1978). In these circumstances, any genuine attempt at transitional justice and reconciliation would reap cosmetic results, at best. At the level of civil society, a general sense of exhaustion pervaded and expressed itself in a collective desire to embrace more joyful and affirmative, if somewhat artificial, narratives. In NO (2012), film director Pablo Larraín captures how the success of the ‘No’ campaign to the 1989 referendum promoted a visual strategy that packaged the option of a return to democracy into a seductive image of carefree happiness.32 While certainly understandable, this aspiration to move away from a painful time, also masked a desire to throw the country’s traumatic, unresolved past into oblivion: applying a concealing bandage upon the wound in lieu of a genuine reparative process. In the visual arts, the parallel and contradictory concerns to acknowledge the wounds left by the dictatorship on the country and to develop visual strategies contributing toward a collective healing process come together particularly potently in the collage works of Catalina Parra. In 1977, Parra presented her exhibition Imbunches at Santiago’s Galería Época. Including twenty-four collage works produced between 1971 and 1977, the show took its name from an Aracaunian folktale about a small, distorted being, dwelling in the caves of sorcerers. As the legend goes, the imbunche was initially a male child, abducted by the sorcerer who turned him into his creature, twisting his legs, forking his tongue, giving him a monstrous appearance, and impeding him from communicating with the world. In his 1970 novel El obsceno pájaro de la noche (The Obscene Bird of Night), Chilean writer José Donoso paints a vivid portrayal of the imbunche as a figure of physical and pre-verbal incarceration, a human bag whose every orifice has been sewn up, literally shut off inside his own body. The imbunche. All sewn up, the eyes, the mouth, the sex, the arse, the nose, the ears, the hands, the legs … . All sewn up, all the body’s orifices obstructed.33 The description which figures in Parra’s exhibition catalogue turns her collage works – her ‘reconstructions’ as she liked to call them – into metaphors for the inescapable materiality of a self-enclosed body, a shut-off skin.34 In Donoso’s novel, the imbunche is placed in the care of las viejas, a group of old female servants who passionately watch over this monstrous infant, protecting his physical impenetrability, turning him into a santito, a little saint. In the context of the dictatorship, these tales of monstrous enclosure also make of the imbunche a symbol of the abduction performed on the Chilean body in general, capturing and shutting it up from the outside world, infantilizing it, wounding it for the proclaimed sake of its own protection. At the same time, the flesh contained inside the sutured surface of the imbunche also corresponds to the excess of society, that which cannot be processed, tamed, controlled by the re-organizing frenzy of the military. As Ana María Dopico writes, the imbunche constitutes ‘a record and a form that could not be packaged, “empaquetado” by the state and made to disappear’.35 In this sense, the figure represents both the attempted evacuation of the repressed and the simultaneous actualization of its return. The catalogue of Parra’s Imbunche exhibition includes a text by the artist Eugenio Dittborn that places emphasis on the negativity of the sewing gesture, which, by closing-off the wound also draws attention to the violence that led to its existence in the first place. As Dittborn writes, [R]eparatory processes like to wrap, suture, stick, cauterise, graft, sew, bandage, patch, mend, to signal on the surface of the erogenous carnal body, the reiteration of blows and encounters with cutting instruments, falls and prolonged immersions, shocks, contact with incandescent utensils, plugs provoked by digital pressure, gas inhalations, convulsive shakings.36 This reduction of the body to the wound finds a particularly potent expression in the figure of the sewn-up imbunche as nothing more than a – barely – living injury. In the catalogue, Parra illustrates Dittborn’s text with images of precarious bodies, covered by blankets, plastic sheets, or surgery masks. In one untitled image in particular, Parra includes the printed photograph of a person dressed in plastic overalls and shoes (Fig. 8). The head is covered by a hood, while the face barely peers out over a large load, also wrapped in plastic, that seems to rest on her chest. Dressed in an outfit that recalls the protection suits worn by workers in zones of high toxicity, the figure reclines on the floor of what looks like an earth pit. While the wrapping of the human figure in layers of plastic conveys a sense of bodily enclosure characteristic of the imbunche, the effect is further underlined by the presence of irregular stitches of red thread that intervene to bridge together the two parts of the partly torn image. Sharply contrasting with the black-and-white low-resolution image, the red thread brings little comfort to the claustrophobic feeling triggered by the underlying photograph. Rather, this erratic attempt at mending the photograph recalls the gesture of a deranged hand, while the colour red brings to mind the image of a fresh wound. Moreover, as the figure’s mouth is concealed under the mass of the plastic load, the cut in the paper that runs perpendicular to the face is suggestive of a distorted grin that could be interpreted as an attempt at communication that has been abruptly interrupted by the sewing of the orifice. In this sense, the suturing of the tear by the red thread becomes an implied act of censorship, short-circuiting the figure’s attempt to speak out and, instead, locking her further inside. Fig. 8 Open in new tabDownload slide Catalina Parra, untitled image included on p. 14 of Parra’s 1977 exhibition catalogue Imbunches. Image Isabel Soler Parra. Courtesy Catalina Parra. Fig. 8 Open in new tabDownload slide Catalina Parra, untitled image included on p. 14 of Parra’s 1977 exhibition catalogue Imbunches. Image Isabel Soler Parra. Courtesy Catalina Parra. These negative aspects of the sewing gesture are further explored in one of the collage works exhibited by Parra in the exhibition at Galería Época. In D.i.a.r.i.a.m.e.n.t.e. (Daily, 1977) (Fig. 9), Parra stitches together pages of Chile’s main newspaper El Mercurio, reconstituting them into a fictitious, patchworked front page. In the upper part of the image, a triangle-shaped fragment is sewn up, adhering to the main support through the inclusion of large, transversal black stitches. The clipping includes the partial reproduction of the daily’s masthead in its characteristic font along with a publication date. Directly beneath the date one might detect the photograph of an unidentified couple, its view obscured by the application of a layer of Kodalith film. The clipping cuts through a dark square including the printed words ‘diariamente…’ (daily…) and the reproduction of a loaf of bread. The bread itself is adorned with pasted images and articles taken from other copies of El Mercurio. Underneath the main picture, the artist includes torn up fragments taken from the newspaper’s announcement and obituary pages. In several places of the collage, black thread sews the different parts together and grants to the image the aspect of a clumsily performed skin graft. Fig. 9 Open in new tabDownload slide Catalina Parra, D.i.a.r.i.a.m.e.n.t.e., 1977, mixed technique work, 71 x 56 cm. Image Isabel Soler Parra. Courtesy Catalina Parra. Fig. 9 Open in new tabDownload slide Catalina Parra, D.i.a.r.i.a.m.e.n.t.e., 1977, mixed technique work, 71 x 56 cm. Image Isabel Soler Parra. Courtesy Catalina Parra. Through this overlapping of images, Parra interrupts the neat layout of the newspaper’s visual logic, bringing an element of semantic chaos to the work. In this sense, the incomplete, veiled or superimposed photographs, as well as the cut out, barely legible words, seem to provide a visual illustration of what the Chilean sociologist Rodrigo Cánovas defines as the ‘aphasic’ nature of semantic exchanges as they took place during the years of the dictatorship. ‘At the level of culture’, he writes, ‘aphasia implies speech that says nothing, an amorphous weave of signifiers that is the equivalent of what linguists call, simply, “noise”’.37 By giving to her work such a segmented appearance, Parra therefore seems to point to the ways in which military power, through its official press organ El Mercurio, filled the homes of Chileans with the production of undecipherable and meaningless noise on a daily basis, in order to distract from other, more problematic topics.38 The idea of the newspaper as a misleading press organ is further emphasized in Parra’s image by the layer of Kodalith placed on the photograph of the couple, blurring its view. As their dishevelled appearance corresponds to the typical demeanour associated with leftist ‘subversives’, their concealed inclusion in Parra’s collage might, as Julia Herzberg argues, constitute ‘an oblique reference to the many who disappeared daily (diariamente)’.39 Furthermore, the inclusion of the photograph is not only veiled by the film; its existence is also denied by the presence of the black thread which, while tying it to the rest of the collage, also transversally detaches the photograph from the background. The black thread stands, in this sense, for the double transgression performed by El Mercurio in regard to the imperative of journalistic integrity: concealing the truth under layers of fictional narratives and inserting these narratives into the self-enclosed body of the press.40 El Mercurio’s editorial line was generally aligned with the views defended by the military regime, to the point, as I have mentioned, of the paper being reasonably accused of shameless complicity. Contributing to the crafting of specious narratives, the newspaper fulfilled a crucial auxiliary function for the regime, disseminating their propagandistic exercise of ideological mapping of the country to its most distant provinces and, in the same process, re-affirming the government’s hegemony over the production of national narratives. The parallel between the map and the newspaper may be extended to the tasks fulfilled by printed media in general. By projecting a synthetic view of events that allows readers to inform themselves – that is, to define and situate their thoughts and opinions – a newspaper performs a cartographic exercise. It also introduces hierarchical codes of legibility, organizing events according to their national relevance and establishing the front page as its North. In the case of El Mercurio, however, the pretence of providing objective information reflecting reality was promptly abandoned in the face of the newspaper’s allegiance to the military regime’s political line. In this sense, if the metaphor of the newspaper as a map holds sway, it is through the analysis that Thongchai Winichakul has made, in another context, about the prescriptive – rather than descriptive - power of imperial maps. In terms of most communication theories and common sense, a map is a scientific abstraction of reality. A map merely represents something which already exists objectively ‘there’. In the history [of imperial maps] I have described, this relationship was reversed. A map anticipated spatial reality, not vice versa. In other words, a map was a model for, rather than a model of, what it purported to represent…. It had become a real instrument to concretise projections on the earth’s surface. … The discourse of mapping was the paradigm which both administrative and military operations worked within and served.41 While Thongchai’s perceptive examination of the auxiliary role occupied by maps in relation to imperial power focuses on South-East Asia, a similar diagnosis may be applied to examine the relation that El Mercurio maintained with the Chilean military government. By playing an active role in manufacturing stories that twisted a much darker reality, El Mercurio contributed to mapping the narrative of a triumphalist, strong and self-contained country that the government seemed intent on promoting both inside and outside its national borders. In the light of this, the sewing of the newspaper in D.i.a.r.i.a.m.e.n.t.e. acquires an indexical dimension, pointing to the specious nature of the stories contained therein as constructions that needed to be undone and ‘re-constructed’ – as per the word preferred by Parra. If the manufacturing of stories to cover up the morbid truth of state violence represents one of the many wounds brought on the national body, the rough and apparent stitches with which Parra adorns her collages also take on the aspect of a diagnostic tool: the acknowledgment of the wound as the first step toward reparation. In 1980, Parra secured a Guggenheim grant and moved to New York where she lived for the next twenty years. Although the political content of her works during these years reflects a growing interest in international affairs (the reference to the Gulf War in her series American Blues (1990) for instance), she maintained a vivid interest in the political situation in her home country. While the return to democracy certainly marked a turning point, it was the arrest and indictment of Pinochet in London in 1998 that led Parra to produce the series Run Away! Run Away! (1999) (Fig. 10). The work, resorting to Parra’s typical collage techniques, contains two photographs of half the face of a man. Both representing Pinochet at two different stages of his life – the man on the left of the picture is noticeably younger than the wrinkled, moustached character of the right – the two pictures are separated by the inclusion of a typed text taken from Parra’s email correspondence with the group of intellectuals and artists Referente, the purpose of which was to reflect on the consequences of Pinochet’s arrest and Chile’s political future. The text, obstructed in some parts by the application of an opaque tape, is also sutured together on its edges with black thread. Meanwhile, in the upper half of the collage, Parra includes part of an advertisement for a runaway sale that featured in The New York Times. The alarmist reiteration of ‘Run Away!’ confers to the work a sense of urgency that frames the viewer’s reception of the images below. In the face of such an injunction, it is indeed Pinochet who appears as a Janus-faced monster, an imbunche, his frontal gaze suggesting the persistence of an ongoing menace. The written text between the two images introduces an analytical interruption to this threatening view while stitching the two images together. In this work though, the black thread that unites the three fragments together, is not synonymous with the erratic aphasia that we encountered in D.i.a.r.i.a.m.e.n.t.e. Rather, it intervenes as a cohesive thread that bridges the gap between the past and the future of politics in Chile. It is to this gesture that Parra refers when she explains: ‘[s]ewing is for me what repairs, what unites, what bandages. It grounds realities that are incoherent, but that become coherent through the gesture of sewing them together’.42 The suturing here also allows for events to be placed in an intelligible historical context, drawing what Francine Masiello defines as ‘connections between local and global powers, between present and past times’.43 In fact, it seems that it is through the interjection of external voices provided by both The New York Times and the email correspondence of Chilean exiles that the trauma of the Pinochet years is accounted for and begins to be processed in the collage.44 Fig. 10 Open in new tabDownload slide Catalina Parra, Run Away! Run Away!, 1999, mixed technique work, 61 x 45.7 cm. Image Isabel Soler Parra. Courtesy Catalina Parra. Fig. 10 Open in new tabDownload slide Catalina Parra, Run Away! Run Away!, 1999, mixed technique work, 61 x 45.7 cm. Image Isabel Soler Parra. Courtesy Catalina Parra. If in Parra’s work, the two partial views of Pinochet’s split face also correspond to the internal division at play in post-dictatorial Chilean society, stitching them back together by way of the analytical text constitutes a first step in the direction of renewed discussion and the possibility of collective healing. In this sense, stitching starts to take on a reparative function. It identifies the wound and sets upon mending it, activating what Nelly Richard poetically defines as an ‘artisanship of repairing manufacture’.45 As noble as Parra’s reparative exercise might be, it is, however, important to note how the process of mending never quite erases the existence of the past wound. In the skin, the tissues that have been harmed eventually suture but they never quite regain the elasticity of their original state. The crisscrossed arrangement of collagen gives form to the scar: a re-unified, yet hardened skin, less sensitive to external stimuli: touch, heat, as well as the application of renewed blows. Similarly, in Parra’s collage works, the stitches give way to a scar, which, while less disfiguring, continues to contain within itself the memory of its injury. As Diamela Eltit writes, ‘Catalina Parra sutures and mends the wound to show the permanence of the wound, that is the equidistant relation between inside and outside as [the sign of] an extreme indifferentiation’.46 In her later work Monumento de los españoles (Monument of the Spaniards, 2008) (Fig. 11), Parra expands upon this stubborn persistence of the scar to function as the mark of past traumas. In this work, part of the artist’s Estampas argentinas (Argentine prints) series, Parra incorporates motifs that all pertain to territorial issues at play in Argentina. The inclusion of a photograph of the Monument to the Carta Magna and the Four Provinces of Argentina refers to a commemorative sculpture in Buenos Aires celebrating the country’s 100 years since its independence. Meanwhile, the upside down map of South America inserted underneath is as much a witty reference to Joaquín Torres García’s seminal gesture of subversion as a more serious comment on the contemporary state of a continent which internal social and economic inequalities continue to define as territorially uprooted – or off its axis – ‘an intermediate territory in which one can find both misery and opulence and that continues to live out of the faith in “developing processes”’.47 More crucially, the way the different layers of Parra’s montage hold together in this work is via the inclusion of two red-knotted threads located on either side of the image. While in earlier works, the stitches provided an effective, yet disfiguring point of union, in this later work, they turn into binding – yet discrete – scars. While the scar provides points of territorial junction, Parra seems to suggest, it might recede but never vanish. Moreover, in this work, it acquires an active property in re-activating the lost connectors of community. In botanical terms, a scar also refers to a former point of attachment: the point where the leaf used to join the stem. Pointing to previously existing bonds, the scar thus prefigures the possibility of re-growth and a re-configuration of new associations. Fig. 11 Open in new tabDownload slide Catalina Parra, Monumento de los españoles, 2008, mixed technique work 70 x 100 cm. Image Isabel Soler Parra. Courtesy Catalina Parra. Fig. 11 Open in new tabDownload slide Catalina Parra, Monumento de los españoles, 2008, mixed technique work 70 x 100 cm. Image Isabel Soler Parra. Courtesy Catalina Parra. Conclusion: Domestic and Embodied Maps In its etymological lineage, the scar comes from the Greek eskhára, relating to the scab provoked by a burn. In José Donoso’s novel, the imbunche is tended to by women whose domestic responsibilities entail looking after the hearth. As this association of the scar and the fire situates our discussion of epidermal cartographies in a domestic economy of the home, it also reveals it as a territorializing force that combines both coercive and reparatory properties. The home actually functions as an underlying force in all of the works discussed here, standing as the intimate anti-thesis to the pompous rhetoric of the land activated by the junta. Moreover, the domestic territories mapped by the artworks studied throughout this article are as political as they are embodied. In Infarto del alma, Diamela Eltit defines the utopic world of the demented as an intrauterine realm of undifferentiation with the maternal body. Meanwhile, by appealing to a gesture associated with the female relatives of the Chilean disappeared, the duo Casas-Lemebel also appeal to an incarnated form of memory. As for the weaving gestures mobilized by Parra, they are firmly situated within a lineage of craftsmanship that is as intimate as it is critical. Mapping gestures of belonging onto the body is not without its traps however, running the risk, among other things, of turning subjects into petrified allegories of the nation. In their book, Guattari and Rolnik write of a ‘new smoothness’ as an equidistant point, a way out of the dualism of appropriative/unbound forms of love and desire. As it strives to strike an equilibrium between these two poles, this new smoothness carries the marks of injuries of the past in order to advocate for less appropriative and bellicose forms of desire. In this sense, this new smoothness also carries asperities of the past for, as Rolnik writes, it takes ‘the discontinuity of outlines’ as part of its texture.48 In an effort to both embody and surpass the wound, the balancing of territorializing and deterritorializing forces in these works finds in the to and fro movement of the mending gesture an eloquent image, the expression – to recall Roszika Parker – of a ‘subversive stitch’.49 Acknowledgments This article was completed thanks to the support of a FONDECYT Postdoctoral Research Grant (Folio 3180056). The author would like to thank Professor Briony Fer, Professor Rosemary Betterton, and Professor Valerie Fraser for their comments on an earlier version of the text, as well as the article’s anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions for improvement. Many thanks to Oxford Art Journal’s editor Wenny Teo for her feedback and to the artists who generously agreed to have their works reproduced in this article. Footnotes 1 For more on the conflation of body and nation, see Sonia Montecino, Madres y Huachos. Alegorías del mestizaje chileno (Santiago: Ediciones Sudamericana, 1996). 2 Didier Anzieu examined at length the role played by the body’s surface in the individuating process. See The Skin-Ego (London: Karnac Press, [1989] 2016). Anzieu also importantly identifies the skin as the ground for the emergence of ‘consensuality’ as an experience of sensorial intermingling partaking in the emergence of the self. See Naomi Segal, Consensuality. Didier Anzieu, Gender and the Sense of Touch (Amsterdam & New York: Editions Podopi, 2009). Beyond psychoanalysis, skin has also been identified as the ground allowing for a tactile relation to the world to take place. See Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), and the writings of Michel Serres, inspired by the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (London and Oxford: Bloomsbury Press, 2016). Steven Connor offers a richly documented cultural history of skin in The Book of Skin (London and Ithaca: Reaktion and Cornell University Press, 2004), while Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey problematize the smoothness of skin as an uninterrupted surface via feminist and affect theory in their edited volume Thinking through the Skin (London: Routledge, 2001). 3 Nelly Richard, ‘Art in Chile since 1973’, Third Text, vol. 1, no. 2 (1987), p. 18. 4 While this discussion runs beyond the scope of this article, one may refer to numerous works from the Avanzada appealing to an aesthetics of physical pain and torture, like the installation El perchero (The Coat Rack, 1975) by Carlos Leppe or the performance El fulgor de la huelga (The Splendor of the Strike, 1981) by CADA. 5 Carla Machiavello, Marking the Territory: Performance, Video, and Conceptual Graphics in Chilean art, 1975–1985 (Unpublished doctoral thesis, 2010), pp. 275–6. 6 John Harley, ‘Deconstructing the Map’, Cartographica, vol. 26, no. 2, (Spring 1989), pp. 1–20, p.13. The 11 September 1973 military coup ousted the Socialist president Salvador Allende from power and decreed a state of emergency that included arbitrary raids, arrests, detentions and, in some cases, the forced disappearances of citizens deemed subversive. See Macarena Gómez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells. Culture and State Violence in Chile (Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2009). 7 For more on the conservative values of the Chilean military, especially regarding gender roles, see Verónica Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, ‘¿Las "Mamitas de Chile"? Las mujeres y el sexo bajo la dictadura pinochetista’, in Julio Pinto Vallejos (ed.), Mujeres. Historias chilenas del siglo XX (Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones, 2010), pp. 87–116. 8 For a study on the influence of Friedman’s ideas on the Chilean economy during the Pinochet dictatorship, see Francisco Vergara Perucich, ‘The neoliberal urban utopia of Milton Friedman: Santiago as its realisation’, in Camilo Boano and Francisco Vergara Perucich (eds), Neoliberalism and Urban Development in Latin America: The Case of Santiago (Oxford: Routledge, 2018), pp. 21–38. 9 For more on the psychological consequences of disappearance in Chile, see Federico Galende, ‘El desaparecido, la desdicha del testigo’, Revista de Critica Cultural, vol. 22 (June 2001), pp. 32–5. 10 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schyzophrenia (London: Viking Penguin, 1977). 11 Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil, translated by Karel Clapshow and Brian Holmes (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008). 12 See Eltit's novel Lumpérica (Santiago: Ediciones del Ornitorrinco, 1983), as well as her video performances Zona de dolor I (Zone of Pain I, 1980) and Zona de dolor II (Zone of Pain II, 1980). 13 The Chilean national anthem, which was reactivated as a central part of Chilean public life during the Pinochet years, describes the country as ‘the faithful copy of Eden’. 14 Diamela Eltit & Paz Errázuriz , El infarto del alma (Santiago: Ocho libros [1994] 2010), p. 9. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Spanish are by the author. 15 Eltit & Errázuriz, El infarto, p. 10. 16 Neither bio nor zoë, Agamben reminds us, bare life constitutes the condition of existence for those who have ‘the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusions found the city of men’. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Palo Alto, CA: Standford University Press, 1998), p. 7. 17 Eltit & Errázuriz, El infarto, p. 43. 18 Eltit & Errázuriz, El infarto, p. 16. 19 Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik, Molecular Revolution, p. 413 (Emphasis in original). 20 Guattari & Rolnik, Molecular Revolution, p. 417. 21 Guattari & Rolnik, Molecular Revolution, pp. 417–8. 22 Georgina Gutiérrez, ‘Aproximación a Paz Errázuriz’, in Fotografías de Paz Errázuriz 1981–1991 Chile. (Mexico City: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Alvar y Carmen T. de Carrillo Gil, 1992), pp. 7–9, p. 8. 23 For more on Arbus and Goldin’s differing approaches to photography, see Nan Goldin, I’ll be your Mirror (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1997). 24 Eltit & Errázuriz, El infarto, p. 22. 25 John Harley, ‘Deconstructing the Map’, p. 13. 26 See Diana Palaversich, ‘The wounded body of proletarian homosexuality in Pedro Lemebel's “Loca Afán”’, Latin American Perspectives, vol. 29, no. 2, (March 2002), pp. 99–118. 27 See Montecino, Madres y Huachos. 28 Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City. Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 229. 29 Palaversich, ‘The wounded body of proletarian homosexuality’, p. 102. 30 Guattari & Rolnik, Molecular Revolution, p. 423. 31 See Alessandra Lemma, Under the Skin: A Psychoanalytic Study of Body Modification (London: Routledge, 2010). 32 The slogan of the NO campaign was ‘Chile, la alegría ya viene’ (‘Chile, happiness is coming now’). 33 José Donoso in Catalina Parra, Imbunches (Santiago: Galería Época, 1977), p. 16. 34 Julia Herzberg, ‘Catalina Parra. Reconstrucciones’, in Paulina Varas (ed.), Catalina Parra: el fantasma político del arte (Santiago: Metales Pesados: 2011), pp. 27–48. 35 Ana María Dópico, ‘Imbunches and Other Monsters: Enemy Legends and Underground Histories in José Donoso and Catalina Parra’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia, vol.10, no.3 (2001), pp. 325–351, p. 325. 36 Eugenio Dittborn in Catalina Parra, Imbunches, p. 4. 37 Rodrigo Cánovas, Lihn, Zurita, Radrigán: Literatura chilena y experiencia autoritaria (Santiago FLACSO, 1986), p. 131. Translation into English taken from Amy K. Kaminsky, After Exile. Writing the Latin American Diaspora (Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. xxii. 38 For more on the complicit relation between El Mercurio and Pinochet’s regime, see Ignacio Agüero’s documentary El diario de Agustín (Agustín's Newspaper, 2008) 39 Herzberg, ‘Catalina Parra’, p. 39. 40 During the dictatorship, national newspapers were used to spread stories manufactured by the junta. Agüero’s documentary reports on a 1976 episode when the corpse of a 42 years old teacher washed up on a beach in central Chile. As the story surfaced, newspapers like El Mercurio were instrumental in crafting the story of a crime of passion, depicting the victim as a 23 years old beauty who had been killed by her lover, thus quieting any reference to the regime’s practice of disappearance of leftist activists. 41 Winichakul Thongchai, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), p. 130. 42 Coco Fusco, ‘Los American Blues de Catalina Parra”, in Paulina Varas (ed.), Catalina Parra: el fantasma político del arte (Santiago: Metales Pesados, 2011), pp. 63–70, p. 52. 43 Francine Masiello, The Art of the Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 219. 44 This three-band conversation is reminiscent of the model of triangular justice introduced by the arrest of Pinochet in London on the orders of the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón. See Olivier Compagnon, ‘L’affaire Pinochet. La justification à l’épreuve des changements d’échelle’, in Luc Boltanski, et al. (eds), Affaires, scandales et grandes causes. De Socrate à Pinochet Paris: Stock, 2007), pp. 347–364. 45 Nelly Richard, ‘Hilvanar el sentido, rasgar la noticia, fisurar el poder, alterar la mirada’, in Catalina Parra. El fantasma politico del arte, ed. by Paulina Varas (Santiago: Metales Pesados, 2011), p. 111–116, p. 119. 46 Diamela Eltit, ‘La transparencia de la mirada’ in Paulina Varas (ed.), Catalina Parra. El fantasma politico del arte (Santiago: Metales Pesados, 2011), pp. 105–108, p. 107. 47 Coco Fusco, Catalina Parra, p. 55. The press clipping included in the lower part of the image is taken from an article published by the newspaper Clarín in February 2007 that reported on a border conflict between Argentina and Uruguay. 48 Suely Rolnik, ‘A New Smoothness?’, in Guattari and Rolnik, Molecular Revolution, p. 417. 49 Roszika Parker, The Subversive Stitch. Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. (London: IB Tauris, 2010). © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Epidermal Cartographies: Skin as Map in Chilean Art (1979-1994)
JF - Oxford Art Journal
DO - 10.1093/oxartj/kcz017
DA - 2019-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/epidermal-cartographies-skin-as-map-in-chilean-art-1979-1994-M3u9pm7Kep
SP - 283
VL - 42
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
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