Run-time (hh:mm:ss): 00:11:17
Language:
In Spanish.
Synopsis: The Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (CADA) is a Chilean activist group of artists who used performance to challenge the Pinochet
dictatorship in Chile. One of the most important contributors to the 'Escena Avanzada', CADA incorporated strategies of theatricality
and performance as an essential element to all its 'art actions', while questioning the practices and institutions of all
politics and conceiving art as a necessary social practice that eradicated the traditional distance between the artist and
the spectator. Committed to the foundation of an open and spontaneous practice of spectatorship, their 'interventions in everyday
life' intended to interrupt and alter the normalized routines of the daily urban life of the citizen, by means of a semiotic
subversion that decontextualized and semantically restructured urban behaviors, locations and signs.'Para no morir de hambre en el arte' is a multi-faceted 'art action' performed in 1979 addressing the problem of hunger and
poverty, endowing milk with the symbolic power to represent this unrepresentable political issue. The performance consisted
of several actions: passing out milk to people in Santiago's slums; parading milk trucks through the city's streets; calling
attention to the performance with full-page ads in periodicals; enacting the group's message in front of the local United
Nations building; altering the façade of a museum to draw it into the theme of the performance; broadcasting, through loudspeakers
located outside the CEPAL building, a critical speech; and filling an acrylic box with 100 milk bags, an issue of the periodical
'HOY' and an audiotape with the broadcasted critical speech in an art gallery.Shown in this video clip is camera material of the action inside the gallery. Artists and audience gather around the acrylic
box; a close-up allows reading an inscription: 'Para permanecer hasta que nuestro pueblo acceda a sus consumos básicos de
alimentos' ('To remain until our people have access to their basic food needs'). The artists then seal the box. They talk
about the connections between art, society, and politics, as well as about their interaction with the inhabitants of marginalized
communities.
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Copyright Holder: C.A.D.A. (Colectivo Acciones de Arte)
Contact: Carolina Barra
Address:
Carolina Barra
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Chile
Email: carolina.barra@mnba.cl
Copyright Holder: C.A.D.A. (Colectivo Acciones de Arte)
Contact: Carolina Barra
Address:
Carolina Barra
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Chile
Email: carolina.barra@mnba.cl