Viuda (Widow)
CADA
- Date:1985
- Technique:Recording and photomechanical print on paper
- Category: Archive, Action
- Entry date:2011
- Register number:AD06328
Performance and direct action in public spaces were the tools that the CADA group (Colectivo de Acciones de Arte) used to define their conditions for creative participation and the transformation of behaviour and discourses on the everyday. Their aim was not so much about intervention in street space as a new contemplative place, as it was a call to citizens to become actively involved and actually form part of the creative process. It was the group’s way of building a critique of the institutionalisation of artistic discourse by interconnecting the museum and gallery space with the social space. CADA members (originally the artists Lotty Rosenfeld and Juan Castillo, sociologist Fernando Balcells, poet Raúl Zurita and the novelist Diamela Eltit) formed part of what historian Nelly Richard has called the “Escena de Avanzada” (Advanced Scene), which includes all the artists during the dictatorship who were committed to reforming the mechanics of artistic production within the framework of counter-institutional practice. Some of CADA’s works have significant historical relevance, because they transcended the artistic environment and became part of the collective Latin American imaginary, such as No + (1983-1989). The acquisition of this group of works, consisting of eight works and a wide variety of materials (photographs, videos, documents, manipulated magazines and so on), is part of a project begun by the Museum in order to present an outline of the poetic-political practices in Latin America since the 1960s, as an attempt to reactivate their disruptive power. Para no morir de hambre en el arte (Not to Die of Hunger in Art), 1979, is a flagship work, setting out the political and aesthetic intentions of the group; the central presence of milk is a reference to the basic shortages suffered by the Chilean population and to the projects Salvador Allende’s deposed democratic government was implementing to deal with them, which were cut short by General Pinochet’s coup d’état.
Lola Hinojosa