Lotty Rosenfeld. ‘By Pass’

Para no morir de hambre en el arte

On October 3, 1979, C.A.D.A. carried out its first action in Santiago. The idea of using milk as a central reference had a dual purpose: it pointed to the extreme deprivation experienced by the Chilean population and also referenced Salvador Allende’s anti-poverty measures, such as the social assistance program “Half a Liter of Milk,” initiated in 1971 and interrupted by the coup d’état. The action unfolded through multiple simultaneous interventions in significant areas of the city and its periphery: distributing milk bags labeled “1/2 liter of milk” in La Granja, a severely impoverished neighborhood; broadcasting an audio recording of a speech titled “It Is Not a Village” in front of the headquarters of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC); inserting a text in Hoy magazine; and exhibiting the empty, artist-intervened milk bags at the Centro Imagen gallery, where videos documenting the entire action were also screened for a month.

Inversión de escena

On October 17, 1979, eight milk delivery trucks followed a scheduled route through Santiago, starting at the dairy plant and ending in front of the National Museum of Fine Arts, where a 100 m² white canvas was draped over the entrance, blocking access. Aligned like tanks in a military operation, the trucks were parked in front of the art center, and one of them featured a monitor playing a video of the journey. With this action, the collective exposed the violence of scarcity in a country under threat and surveillance, while reiterating the message that art belonged in the streets.

¡Ay Sudamérica!

On July 12, 1981, six civilian planes flew in perfect formation over Santiago, dropping 400,000 leaflets over the city’s most marginalized neighborhoods. The text, signed by the collective, advocated for the dignity of the individual through art. The scene evoked the 1973 bombing of the La Moneda Presidential Palace, proposing a new flight marked by political assertion. The collective’s extraordinary organizational capacity, along with the solidarity of many, enabled six civilian pilots—led by a woman—to participate. They secured permits to fly over the city and successfully passed a text whose rhetorical strategy allowed it to circumvent censorship.

El fulgor de la huelga

In 1981, C.A.D.A. staged a hunger strike inside a small metalworking factory that had shut down due to Chile’s severe economic crisis, leaving its workers unemployed. A later version of the action was performed in the Atacama Desert. By situating the piece in one of the world’s most arid and barren landscapes, the action underscored the dire situation facing the working class and reclaimed the hunger strike as a political weapon of resistance.

No +

Starting in 1983, marking ten years under military dictatorship, C.A.D.A. conceived the slogan NO + (“NO MORE”) as an open text for citizens to complete with their own demands. It was designed from the beginning as an ongoing action, encouraging anonymous, collective participation through graffiti. The slogan quickly spread throughout Chile, powerfully making visible the resistance and discontent of civil society. Adopted by anti-dictatorship movements and a clear forerunner of the 1988 plebiscite, NO + became the collective’s most ambitious and effective action, expanding the artistic sphere of citizen participation and helping to repair the social fabric torn by the dictatorship.

Viuda 

This action, organized in September 1985, was the collective’s final work. In collaboration with photographer Paz Errázuriz, it consisted of the widespread circulation of a portrait of a woman whose husband had been killed during a civilian protest against the dictatorship. Through editorial insertions in national publications such as Análisis, Cauce, Hoy, and Fortín Mapocho, C.A.D.A. denounced the deaths caused by the repression of peaceful and legitimate demonstrations, while also making space for women as social subjects in a male-dominated context.

Mujeres por la Vida

Lotty Rosenfeld and Diamela Eltit’s participation in the Women for Life movement was especially pivotal in the design of posters that combined imagery and text-based slogans. In this case, they used a photographic still from a televised broadcast featuring political prisoner Karin Eitel. Through graphic composition, Rosenfeld and Eltit denounced how violence can be enacted not only physically, psychologically, or sexually, but also through the camera. A member of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, which took up arms against the Pinochet dictatorship, Eitel was accused of participating in the kidnapping of Colonel Carlos Carreño. After being detained and brutally tortured by agents of the National Information Center (CNI) in November 1987, she was forced to “confess” to these alleged crimes on camera, in a piece of state-sponsored propaganda..

In the context of the Cold War, the United States played a key role in enabling state terrorism across several Latin American countries, with the goal of dismantling democratic governments advancing progressive and socially equitable policies. Rosenfeld’s intervention in front of the White House in Washington, D.C. thus operated not only as a critical commentary on the intersection of political and economic power in one of the world’s most powerful nations. Her decision to reference this location again in her later intervention at the Santiago Stock Exchange made explicit the U.S.’s interference in Latin America—both in using the region as a testing ground for neoliberal policies before their global rollout, and in politically and militarily supporting various dictatorships, including Chile’s.

In 2007, Lotty Rosenfeld was invited to participate in Documenta 12, in Kassel, Germany—one of the most prestigious contemporary art events, held every five years. In addition to screening Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (1979) at the Museum Fridericianum, she performed two public space interventions. Both the museum intervention and the mile of crosses she created along Wilhelmshöhe Allee—a boulevard connecting the Wilhelmshöhe Castle with the city center—were removed by city cleaning services only a few hours later. In front of the Fridericianum, Rosenfeld attempted to prevent the removal by standing in front of a municipal truck. Despite the presence of the mayor and the artist’s explanations, the interventions were erased for being considered unlawful interference with traffic, and as such, punishable by law.

Beyond the collective work done with C.A.D.A. and Women for Life, the collaboration between Diamela Eltit and Lotty Rosenfeld was consistent and diverse, ranging from the award-winning video installation Traspaso cordillerano (1981) to the creation of the Eltit-Rosenfeld Archive, a documentary project rescuing the memory of the women’s suffrage movement in Chile. El padre mío (1985), Chile: Historia del sufragio femenino (1889–1949) (1991), ¿Quién viene con Nelson Torres? (2001), and Cuenta regresiva (2006) are joint works directed by Rosenfeld with scripts written by Eltit.