Case study #21. Today, the art of protest is Mother's Milk. It received the Golden Lion.

The ongoing violent and destructive urban insurrection that began in Chile in October 2019 was precipitated by secondary school students from the Instituto Nacional (IN). Dressed in balaclavas and jumpsuits, they launched Molotovs from the school building roof in central Santiago for a whole year before the uniform performance of storming and vandalizing Metro Stations collectively established the medium of this art of protest. A fire and brimstone Civil Disobedience with arson to disobey and crowbars and hammers to make weapons of rock for a Civil War without arms.

This month, two buses have burnt in front of secondary schools, a Director has been assaulted and the Instituto Nacional was occupied by students yesterday. Balaclava clad, jumpsuit-wearing rioters, returned to join the school uniforms and barricade the street in central Santiago to launch Molotov bombs at a police vehicle in the performance of the art of the right to protest.

This month at the Venice Biennale (curated under the theme of The Milk of Dreams), Chilean artist/poet/activist Cecilia Vicuña accepted the Golden Lion award for Lifetime Achievement. She said, “our art and consciousness can play a role in the urgent need to move away from violence and destruction.” This year, she earlier wrote a concrete-poem-essay for the book “About Monuments”, to describe the Chilean urban insurrection. “The collective body of the uprising converted into a base to launch poems and performances.” Adding that “All revolutions or evolutions begin by toppling monuments”. And "the idea of a monument is ephemeral or immaterial" in authentic cultures. Fire is an event, not a thing.

A police vehicle, a public secondary school, or an immolated police officer could be a monument. A negation, as a hole in the ground, is renamed Plaza de la Dignidad. This is the place Vicuña imagines as the ephemeral and immaterial monument, the centre of Santiago de Chile. It is the performance she applauds with words. Her paper-performance-poem for the decimated Plaza Baquednao/Monument Baquedano/Metro Baquedano is a Fire and Brimstone sermon packaged as the Milk of Dreams.