Case study #1 Dealers.




Memory Frames was a commission of the 1st Hecho en Casa (Homemade) Urban Intervention Festival in Santiago de Chile, 2012. The work is made by Andrea Wolf but is actually the name and content of her 2008-2009 “online interactive narrative and video installation with a machine-like physical interface that screens fictitious interpretations of home videos. "6 memories I have never had" is the working title. In 2012, these fictions were reformatted for the Alameda facade of the GAM under the original title of Memory Frames - the memory machine-like physical interface was substituted with a cultural institution.

The artist statement for the original is a slogan from the academy of Memory Studies, established in the Memory Boom of the 1980s that has since paid dividends in this type of social and cultural capital. “The present is permeated by the past through memories, experiences, and the unconscious that reorganized themselves in relation to the present events, creating a narrative of our lives under the light of future expectations. Hence, past, present, and future coexist”.
In April 2022, after supporting the urban insurrection's violence and destruction in this convenient coexistence that is the building's raison d'etre, the GAM is complaining that it cannot open late on Friday night because of the Hobsbawmian Invented Tradition of violence as a protest that it curated has become habitual.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Case study #11 Democracy in Crisis through the looking glass called a camera lens

Image
The first of Guzman's trilogy "The Battle for Chile" opens in 1973, 6 months before the Golpe Estado, with an election in which the Confederation of Democracy won the majority of seats in both houses against Allende's Popular Unity coalition. This continuing minority defeat is called a victory in that Allende's party gained a couple of seats but the fraud allegation of between 200-300 thousand newly registered voters unaccounted for is not questioned. Before the election result, one person interviewed in Plaza Baquedano said it was a choice between Marxism and Freedom. Another said that the opposition will win. The interviewer asked all the Right of Centre Citizens if they believed in elections? Of the Allende supporters, the interviewer calls them all compañero and asks who will win? They all answer Socialism and the fight. He doesn't ask them if they believe in elections, the constitution, or any other institutions of democracy. When we were in Plaza Baqueda...
Read more

Case study # 20 1000 white negations No Less, NO + Men in Black

Image
  The last interview with Chilean Artist, Lotty Rosenfeld (1943-2020) in Art Review (2020) succinctly summarizes the Cultural Industry's distortion and justification for Leftwing violence and destruction through art activism. If you don't know anything about the reality in Chile, read this introduction and tell me if your prejudices have been confirmed. "The protests that spread across Chile last year (2019), violently and often lethally suppressed by the police and army, were sparked by a rise in fares on Santiago public transport. This issue was a pretext for expressing long-simmering resentment towards a political system and constitution with roots in the dictatorship years of Augusto Pinochet, together with an underlying fury at a pervasive inequality that had allowed a tiny elite to control one-third of the country’s wealth" I have made a little homage, not to Lotty Rosenfeld (RIP), but to all art activists who confuse life with art. It is based on Rosenfeld'...
Read more

Case study #8 Public Art Dialogue Community. An open call to shut up.

Image
  Open Call for Nominations for The 2023 International Award for Public Art. As PAD has declined to allow my peers to review my two research articles on Ground Zero, Santiago de Chile, I decided to nominate, for the second year running, the unmaking of Plaza Baquedano as Ground Zero for the international award for public art. Artist; The New Constitutionalists (aka Lista del Pueblo and Primera Linéa) Public Artwork; (100 words) Plaza Baquedano was negated, literally and physically by protest violence and destruction, beginning on 18 October 2019, and took two years to unmake this public space. This wholesale destruction was applauded by global solidarity groups. In Chile, the Museum of Contemporary Art Director, Francisco Brugnoli, described this as a "community action" to be analyzed like any monument. After the statue monument was removed in early 2021, the remains of the Unknown Soldier were exhumed for fear that protesters would dig them up. A desolate public space is the...
Read more