The Politics and Aesthetics of Memory

A Survey of Transitions in Latin America and Spain

20, 25, 26 and 27 March 2019 - (check programme)
The Feminist Movement’s first public protest on the steps of the Biblioteca Nacional, Santiago de Chile, 1983. Photograph: Kena Lorenzini
The Feminist Movement’s first public protest on the steps of the Biblioteca Nacional, Santiago de Chile, 1983. Photograph: Kena Lorenzini
Admission

Guided tour of the exhibition: prior registration required by filling out the following form
Seminar: prior registration required by filling out the following form
Round-table discussion: free admission, until full capacity is reached

Education programme developed with the patronage of Banco Santander Foundation

Organized by
Museo Reina Sofía, Study Centre
Inside the framework of the line of force:
The Politics and Aesthetics of Memory

The line of force The Politics and Aesthetics of Memory, coordinated by Chilean theorist Nelly Richard, brings into focus different initiatives of training, research and public activities in the Museo Reina Sofía. The programme’s point of departure is the conception of memory, not as a fixed gaze on a concluded past but as an agent to decipher and re-read fragments and settings, procedures and narratives, rhetoric and politics of the body and image that continue to question the present with their force of performance. To survey these past/present materials entails strengthening multiple senses, in friction at the crossroads between art, subjectivity, social discourse, culture and institutions. 

On this occasion, the programme shines a light on cases in Spain and the Southern Cone of South America, starting, firstly, with the unveiling of the exhibition Incomplete Times. Chile, the First Neoliberal Laboratory, in the Museo’s Library and Documentation Centre (from 21 March to 24 May 2019), and the guided tour by its curator, Nelly Richard. The show brings together different artistic and activist practices which explore the economic ‘shock doctrine’, developed by the Chicago Boys to turn Chile into the first global neoliberal laboratory under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

Secondly, the seminar Chile: The Critical Operations of Memory, conducted by Nelly Richard, seeks to look between certain folds in Chile’s social historicity which mark the passage from dictatorship to transition, considering the relationship between art and critical thought.

The programme concludes with the round-table discussion Bodies and Memories of the Transition in Latin America and Spain: Feminist Re-Readings, featuring the participation of Maite Garbayo, Ana Longoni, Nelly Richard and Clara Serra. Together, through feminist narratives, they analyse conditions of transition in Spain, Chile and Argentina, vying for the subjective footprints that make up identity, sexuality and gender, and the emergence – past and present – of women as a collective subject of political articulation and social transformation to be vectors of commotion in the unstable and essential exercise of these historical re-writings.


Education programme developed with the patronage of    Santander Fundación

Programa

The first group of Chilean students to travel to the University of Chicago in order to study economics under Milton Friedman (1956). Courtesy of Carlos Massad
Actividad pasada Wednesday, 20 and Tuesday, 26 March – 7pm / Nouvel Building, Library and Documentation Centre, Space D
Incomplete Times. Chile, First Laboratory of Neoliberalism
Exhibition opening, and guided tour led by Nelly Richard

Wednesday, 20 March – 7pm
Opening
Admission: free, until full capacity is reached

Tuesday, 26 March – 7pm
Guided tour
Admission: free, with prior registration required by filling out the following form
Capacity: 20 places

The 1973 coup d’état in Chile signalled the break-up of the historical narrative of the Popular Unity alliance and the establishment of a 17-year dictatorship ruled by Augusto Pinochet. The consolidation of such a dictatorship combined state terrorism with the economic ‘shock doctrine’ implemented by the Chicago Boys to turn the country into the first laboratory of neoliberalism on a global scale.

Artists and activists retrieve iconic images from that traumatic event in an overlapping of time – past, present, future – that shook the fabric of neoliberalism in Chile. Thus, the strata of social memory are upheld in a continued variation, enabling the axes of historical temporality (retrospection and prefiguration) to swing surprisingly in unexpected directions. 


  

Lotty Rosenfeld. No, no fui feliz, 2015, video frame
Actividad pasada Monday, 25 and Tuesday, 26 March – 11am / Nouvel Building, Study Centre
Chile: The Critical Operations of Memory
Seminar conducted by Nelly Richard

Admission: free, with prior registration by filling out the following form
Capacity: 35 places

The seminar Chile: The Critical Operations of Memory looks between certain folds of Chile’s social historicity which mark the passage from dictatorship to transition by way of the relationship between art and critical thought. Therefore, creative strategies facilitating experimental artistic practices are explored, venturing, firstly, to bend the authoritarian/repressive framing of the dictatorship, before activating dissent (conflicts of memory, identity and gender) in the falsely inclusive landscape of political and social consensus and the market which unfolded during the transition.

Feminist occupation of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Santiago de Chile, May 2018
Actividad pasada Wednesday, 27 March – 7pm / Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Bodies and Memories from the Transition in Latin and America and Spain: Feminist Re-Readings
Round-table discussion with Maite Garbayo, Ana Longoni, Nelly Richard and María Rosón

Admission: free, until full capacity is reached

Feminisms put forward a critical narrative of the bodies that crossed the threshold between dictatorship and post-dictatorship, from the disputes between morality and sexuality, the conflicts of representation and public visibility in the symbol of the ‘woman’, and the performative force of some of their mise en scènes.