“Of the love that moves the sun and the other stars”

In September 1973, amid General Pinochet’s CIA-backed military coup, Latin America’s first democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, addressed the Chilean people one last time—including the “patriotic professionals,” as he called them, who resisted “sedition” to defend “the advantages which a capitalist society grants to a few.” Up to this point, the leader of the leftist coalition Popular Unity had defended Chile against what he described as an invisible US-led financial blockade, designed to incite unrest by choking the country’s economy, and a disinformation campaign, both neo-colonialist maneuvers against a viable anti-imperialist movement, which prompted the launch of Operation Truth in 1971.

Artists at home and abroad rallied to support Chile’s socialist democratic turn, with the Committee of Visual Artists for Popular Unity staging countrywide shows around Allende’s 1970 election. The Museum of Solidarity, established the following year, amassed hundreds of artworks from national and international names like Lygia Clark, Alexander Calder, and Frank Stella. Now counting around 2,700 pieces in its collection, the museum continued receiving contributions in exile, as the 1974 Venice Biennale called for Chile’s freedom, and was re-established in Chile in 1991 after the junta’s demise.

Antonio Dias was among the first artists to contribute work to the museum’s original incarnation. Project for a People’s Flag (1972) proposed raising a red flag in front of the museum (which Dias realised in 2012) and distributing red postcards to visitors. That pitch—a red screenprint with a letter to art critic Mário Pedrosa, who led the International Committee for Artistic Solidarity with Chile—is included in the museum’s annual rehang,  curated by Amalia Cross. “Of the love that moves the sun and the other stars” borrows a line from Dante’s Divine Comedy (1321), referred to in a 1982 Raúl Zurita poem imploring readers to wake up, and centers works from the collection and on loan that reflect art’s capacity to mobilize people into action. Take Cecilia Vicuña’s 16mm film Sol y Dar y Dad, Una palabra Bailada (1980), which embodies its title, “solidarity, a danced word,” with actors dancing around a park holding words like “Y,” “dar,” and “dad” (from “to give”), as children spontaneously join in. Or Kjartan Slettemark’s Stoppa Chilematchen! poster supporting calls for the 1975 Davis Cup in Sweden to boycott Chile, with Slettemark appearing naked at protests holding a sign reading “Boycott the Junta” and “Stop Chilematchen.”

Santiago-born Vicuña co-founded Artists for Democracy (with David Medalla, John Dugger, and Guy Brett) while in exile in London. She formed the Tribu No (No Tribe) collective in 1967, aligned with Popular Unity’s liberatory vision, and wrote the “No Manifesto” to hold space for undefined future horizons. The text describes a “loving” impetus to “undermine reality from within,” which speaks to Elías Adasme’s courageous 1980 performance El arte debe ser ineludible (“Art must be inescapable”). A video of Adasme wearing a t-shirt and handing out flyers printed with the work’s title in downtown Santiago, not far from the presidential palace La Moneda, appears alongside his October 1980 statement calling forth “a new way of operating in life.” Amplifying Adasme’s defiance are Antonio Caro’s Defend Your Talent (1974), a print of a hand’s silhouette and Valie Export’s drawing of a hand reaching for the work’s title, Natur (1974), scrolled on a page. Both function like associative specters here, recalling the murder of beloved Chilean singer-songwriter Victor Jara by Pinochet’s henchmen days after the coup, who apparently (according to one popular rumor) cut off his hands (or broke them, per his widow) in macabre recognition of his artistic power.

Nearby, Juan Downey’s 1988 video The No Tape taps into the agony and exhaustion of living under neoliberal fascism, with repeated flashes of “No” broadcast on television ahead of the 1988 national referendum that triggered the beginning of the dictatorship’s end in 1990. In the same gallery, Alfredo Jaar’s September 11, 2013 (2013) places a 1973 photo of La Moneda being bombed next to a video of the site forty years later. This comparative study recalls Vicuña’s observation of the 2019 protests against severe socioeconomic inequalities in Chile, which the state violently suppressed: “a preview of what awaits people around the world,” Vicuña warned, “unless we wake up fast to defend our democratic rights!” The years since have demonstrated the lengths Western imperialism will go to maintain power under the guise of “democratic” neoliberal capitalism. This is true not only in Palestine and Venezuela but in metropoles such as NYC, which have become vulnerable to imperialism’s boomerang and the neocolonial tactics of economic strangulation, disinformation, and military force that have historically brought leaders like Allende, who dared serve the people rather than the ruling classes, to their knees, if not to early graves.

With that in mind, no wonder “The Caravan of Love,” artist-duo Konantü’s capsule show installed in the museum for the 17th Santiago Media Arts Biennial, took the triangular wooden props on wheels and the possible patterns they can create affixed to the wall into the courtyard for a series of interactive performances inviting participants to configure those shapes together, the month “Of the love…” opened. From generation to generation, art has demonstrated its capacity to move people into formation: a fact worth remembering.