Out of the Blackout and into the Light: How the Arts Survived Pinochet’s Dictatorship (original) (raw)
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the Arts Survived Pinochet’s Dictatorship
2016
This article shows how various artists segued out of the cultural blackout of the late seventies and into a phase of surprising artistic production during the military regime in Chile. At a time when political parties were banned and public gatherings considered illegal, Chileans found alternative ways to oppose the military government. In this climate, I argue that artistic expression took on political meaning. The fact that the "No" Campaign of 1988 was able to oust the dictator with an optimistic message of joy and hope, attests to the point that Chileans were able to shed their fears and change their outlook. Throughout the decade, the arts-innovations in poetry, music, theater, narrative and the audiovisual media-had offered people a much-needed forum for expression.
Rethinking Post-Authoritarian Chile through Its Popular Music
Twentieth-Century Music, 2023
This article is a study of Chilean popular music produced during the 1990s, the first decade following the end of the Pinochet dictatorship. The return of democracy and a period of strong economic growth contributed to a boom in the Chilean music industry. A wealth of music was recorded and the opportunities for listening to live music multiplied. The article's main objectives are to illuminate the ways in which Chilean popular music addressed democracy's inspiring promises and frustrating limits and to consider how Chileans used popular music to foster new post-authoritarian identities. First, it argues that music was used to reclaim national symbols that had been coopted by the dictatorship. Second, it considers the music of two generations of musicians who returned to the country after living in exile. Finally, it focuses on punk and hip-hop, the styles that produced the most significant examples of protest music in the post-authoritarian period.
The Brigada Ramona Parra and the art of muralising protest during the Pinochet Regime
2019
In 1946, while demonstrating in support of a group of striking nitrate workers, a twenty-year-old female communist named Ramona Parra was shot to death by police in Santiago, Chile, in what has come to be known as the Bulnes Square Massacre. A product of political marginalisation, the details of Parra’s life are sketchy. But for fleeting mentions in art history books she is otherwise a mystery. Her death, however, has had a far-reaching significance, for she became and remains a martyr symbol of the Chilean struggle against oppression. In particular, her name was proudly taken to identify the artistic movements of the muralist brigade of the Chilean Communist Party (CCP), the Brigada Ramona Parra (BRP) in 1968. On September 11, 1973, Chile, and with it the CCP, was thrown into turmoil. The country that homegrown poet Pablo Neruda once described as a ‘long petal of sea, wine, and snow’ was transformed from Latin America's foremost social democracy under Salvador Allende to the region's darkest dictatorship under the military regime of Augusto Pinochet. The latter ushered in a period of widespread torture and the murder of an estimated 3000 Chileans. Furthermore, the regime carried out an assault on culture that saw the erasure of swathes of leftist literature, film, music, and art, which included the whitewashing of BRP murals that had for five years colourfully decorated and secured Santiago’s streets for Salvador Allende. As Geoffrey Hutton stated in the immediate aftermath of the coup, ‘Now, a bullet through the head is more effective than a vote in the ballot-box’. In the process of writing a brief history of the BRP collective, this article contextualises the violence imposed on Chile by Pinochet’s Military Regime; and in doing so documents how members of the left perpetuated modes of artistic expression and protest at home and in exile throughout dictatorial rule. By attributing meaning to the murals of the BRP, the aim is also to contribute, if only moderately, to the reconstruction of a fragmented, distorted, and, in part, whitewashed (i.e., destroyed) past. Interwoven is an acknowledgment of the role the BRP played in the 1988 ‘No’ campaign; in this respect, the efforts of the BRP, which are largely without recognition, to paint and ultimately reclaim Santiago’s streets served as an essential subsidy to the widely lauded and successful savoir-faire TV campaign orchestrated by Eugenio García.
Latin American Politics and Society
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MODERN DICTATORSHIPS and their ART WORLDS
Duke University Press, 2019
The relationship between art and politics during dictatorial regimes is both contested and fraught, despite many academic and artistic attempts to disentangle this issue. At the same time, facing modern dictatorships' impact on cultural production and producers is not without political and theoretical weight. Caterina Preda's book Art and Politics under Modern Dictatorships: A Comparison of Chile and Romania explores the cultural policies of two contrasting modern dictatorships: Chile under Augusto Pinochet (an instance of authoritarian, right-wing military regimes) and Romania under Nicolae Ceaus¸escuCeaus¸escu (a totalitarianism, left-wing communist regime of Eastern Europe). As atypical and seemingly disparate as these case studies might look at first glance, Preda's comparison of two diametrically opposite political regimes illuminates the topical roles culture (and art) can play under dictatorship both in supporting, as well as in resisting, the status quo and its cultural policies. The complex role of culture within these contrasting regimes is encapsulated by two of the examples Preda engages with in the book: both the National Folkloric Ballet (BAFONA) and opera were promoted by the Pinochet regime in Chile on the grounds that culture and art should be linked to private corporations' agenda. Thus Chilean classical music, opera, classical theatre, and ballet were supposed to educate the masses in line with a cultural program that emphasized an elitist, traditionalist, conservative, and antiforeign political agenda. These cultural-political directives were easy to follow by a highly educated public. BAFONA's performances were regarded by the authoritarian regime as a "cultural embassy" whose grand merit was that it reinterpreted and "re-dignified"
Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2007
eds.) (2004) Memoria, duelo y narración. Chile después de Pinochet: literatura, cine, sociedad (Memory, Mourning, and Narration. Chile after Pinochet: Literature, Film, Society), Iberoamericana Vervuert (Frankfurt am Main), 334 pp. £24.50 pbk.