Passing Through the Body: Recent Exercises of Memory and Collectivity, Forty Years After the Dictatorship in Chile

Abstract

The military dictatorship in Chile (1973–1989) promoted an ideology of the individual body, dismantling all social and collective matrices. The various artistic expressions discussed in the following text can be seen as practices of situated memory, that link the violence of that period to the exercise of a necessary intersubjectivity between different spaces of intervention and bodies. In doing this, and by taking as a starting point collective and the notion of alienated space, the aim is to reconstitute a conscious corporeality of memory and collectivity. This paper seeks to revise interpretations of these performative and photographic exercises and to ask how meaning can be produced without subjecting memory to a process of reification or immobilisation.