Collection Title: CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte) collection
Title: Para no morir de hambre en el arte (unedited footage)
Alternate Title: For not dying of starvation in art
Date: 1979 Oct. 3
Location: Filmed in Santiago, Chile, on Oct. 3, 1979.
Work Type: Performance., Political performance., Acción., Video/action on art and politics.
Credits:
CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte), producer, director ; Lotty Rosenfeld, Diamela Eltit, Raúl Zurita, Juan Castillo, Fernando Balcells, creators.
Cast/Performers:
Luz Donoso, Jaime Valenzuela, Fedora Torreblanca, participants.
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