Arts, Faculty of
Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Witkowski, Jacqueline
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
This dissertation examines how textile forms and metaphors came to be used by artists in the Southern Cone of South America after 1955, in a moment that was marked by authoritarian governments. Within the countries of Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, textile materials, techniques, and concepts initially appeared under a modernist, primarily formalist paradigm. But as each country faced increasingly repressive regimes, artists harnessed such forms and traditions to address local historical and sociopolitical concerns. I examine how references to unspun wool and fiber, and threads more broadly, were not only explored through their material qualities but also acted as a process to engage the political context. Artists further utilized and adapted textile concepts through accompanying mediums such as poetry and forms of writing. The evocation of textiles accompanied an effort to relocate national narratives concerned with marginalized communities, such as Afro-Brazilians and Indigenous groups, who, during dictatorships, were further stripped of social programs and human rights. Through case studies of artists Lygia Pape in Brazil, Cecilia Vicuña in Chile, and Mirtha Dermisache in Argentina, this dissertation examines the specific ways in which each brought together a combination of textiles forms, materials, metaphors, and writing to address experiences of their volatile historical contexts. Therefore, my argument moves outside considering textiles as political solely based on their handmade quality or “low” status as craft, which permitted them to go undetected; rather, I am analyzing how their utilization in South America at a moment steeped in interconnected political and aesthetic challenges perhaps necessitated the textile as an operational force. I argue that the medium and concepts afforded by the textile – or what has recently come to be called “textility” – were able to provide alternative methods to understanding tumultuous historical situations and support avenues outside of dominant hegemons and forms. They established an expanded framework that could provide for the inclusion and recognition of peoples, histories, and techniques that had been pushed to the margins. The aim of this methodology, therefore, is to make visible what have been the very invisible historical and contemporary situations around colonization, disappearance, and processes of language.
Disappearing Threads: Art between Text and Textile in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile after 1955 by JACQUELINE WITKOWSKI B.A., DePaul University, 2010 M.A., The University of British Columbia, 2014 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Art History and Theory) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) May 2021 © Jacqueline Witkowski, 2021 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the dissertation entitled: Disappearing Threads: Art between Text and Textile in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile after 1955 submitted by Jacqueline Witkowski in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Art History and Theory Examining Committee: Dr. T’ai Smith, Professor, Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC Supervisor Dr. Ignacio Adriasola, Professor, Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Alessandra Santos, Professor, French, Hispanic and Italian Studies, UBC Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Professor Emeritus, Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC University Examiner Dr. Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, Institute for Gender, Race, and Social Justice, UBC University Examiner iii Abstract This dissertation examines how textile forms and metaphors came to be used by artists in the Southern Cone of South America after 1955, in a moment that was marked by authoritarian governments. Within the countries of Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, textile materials, techniques, and concepts initially appeared under a modernist, primarily formalist paradigm. But as each country faced increasingly repressive regimes, artists harnessed such forms and traditions to address local historical and sociopolitical concerns. I examine how references to unspun wool and fiber, and threads more broadly, were not only explored through their material qualities but also acted as a process to engage the political context. Artists further utilized and adapted textile concepts through accompanying mediums such as poetry and forms of writing. The evocation of textiles accompanied an effort to relocate national narratives concerned with marginalized communities, such as Afro-Brazilians and Indigenous groups, who, during dictatorships, were further stripped of social programs and human rights. Through case studies of artists Lygia Pape in Brazil, Cecilia Vicuña in Chile, and Mirtha Dermisache in Argentina, this dissertation examines the specific ways in which each brought together a combination of textiles forms, materials, metaphors, and writing to address experiences of their volatile historical contexts. Therefore, my argument moves outside considering textiles as political solely based on their handmade quality or “low” status as craft, which permitted them to go undetected; rather, I am analyzing how their utilization in South America at a moment steeped in interconnected political and aesthetic challenges perhaps necessitated the textile as an operational force. I argue that the medium and concepts afforded by the textile – or what has recently come to be called “textility” – were able to provide alternative methods to understanding tumultuous historical situations and support avenues outside of dominant hegemons and forms. They established an expanded framework that could provide for the inclusion and recognition of peoples, histories, and techniques that had been pushed to the margins. The aim of this methodology, therefore, is to make visible what have been the very invisible historical and contemporary situations around colonization, disappearance, and processes of language. iv Lay Summary This dissertation examines how textile forms and metaphors came to be used by artists in the Southern Cone of South America after 1955, in a moment that was marked by authoritarian governments. Within the countries of Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, textile materials, techniques, and concepts initially appeared under a modernist, primarily formalist paradigm. Textiles for Lygia Pape, Cecilia Vicuña, and Mirtha Dermisache, brought together a combination of writing and information that were combined to parallel their experiences during volatile moments in history. I argue that the medium and concepts afforded by the textile – or “textility” – were able to provide alternative methods to understanding tumultuous historical situations and support avenues outside of dominant hegemons and forms. The aim of this methodology, therefore, is to make visible what have been the very invisible historical and contemporary situations around colonization, disappearance, and processes of language. v Preface This dissertation is an original and independent work by the author, Jacqueline Witkowski. Portions of an early draft of Chapter 1 of this dissertation were published in “Resistance, Identity, and Modernism Unhinged: Lygia Pape’s Textile Experiments,” in The Center as Margin: Eccentric Positions on Art, edited by Joana Antunes, Maria de Lurdes Craveiro, and Carla Alexandra Gonçalves, Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2019. Portions of an early draft of Chapter 2 were published in “Threading Together Politics and Poetics in Cecilia Vicuña’s Fiber Art,” Journal of Textile Design Research and Practice 7, 1 (2019): 38-52. vi Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................... iv Preface .............................................................................................................................................v Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... vi List of Figures ............................................................................................................................. viii Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... xi Dedication ................................................................................................................................... xiii Introduction ....................................................................................................................................1 0.1 Experimental forms: Metaphors between text and textile in the Southern Cone .............. 1 0.2 Recent scholarship ............................................................................................................. 8 0.3 Methodology and questions ............................................................................................. 11 0.4 Context ............................................................................................................................. 14 0.5 Threads and Lines ............................................................................................................ 20 0.6 Chapter organization ........................................................................................................ 22 Chapter 1 Re-weaving Brazilian identity in the face of dictatorship: Lygia Pape’s embrace of Indigenous forms ......................................................................................................25 1.1 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 25 1.2 Tecelares: Establishing the local ..................................................................................... 35 1.3 Placing the nonobject in Brazil ........................................................................................ 46 1.4 The Legacy of Oswald’s Antropofagia: From Concrete art and poetry to the new ‘Canibalismo’ ............................................................................................................................ 54 1.5 Ttéias: Embracing the local ............................................................................................. 62 1.6 The body confronting policies ......................................................................................... 69 1.7 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 78 Chapter 2 “El Quipu que no recuerda nada”: Activating fiber in Cecilia Vicuña’s quipus ........................................................................................................................................................84 2.1 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 84 2.2 Re/Framing Vicuña and her practice ............................................................................... 89 2.3 Upending democracy, erasing histories ........................................................................... 99 2.4 Writing, hermeticism, and operating under censorship ................................................. 109 2.4.1 Word weapons ........................................................................................................ 116 2.5 Locating the Quipu ........................................................................................................ 123 vii 2.6 Pulling at threads: Vicuña’s precarious acts .................................................................. 129 2.7 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 134 Chapter 3 Conceptual forms under Censorship: Locating legibility in Mirtha Dermisache’s asemic writing ....................................................................................................138 3.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 138 3.2 Argentina’s art milieu .................................................................................................... 145 3.3 Not European, not Indigenous, but Argentinean ........................................................... 158 3.4 Graphisms and information dissemination .................................................................... 164 3.5 CAYC, Censorship, and Conceptual Art ....................................................................... 169 3.6 Potentiality and Asemic Writing .................................................................................... 178 3.7 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 183 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................187 Figures .........................................................................................................................................195 Bibliography ...............................................................................................................................202 viii List of Figures Figure 0.1 Cecilia Vicuña, Quipu Menstrual, 2006 .................................................................... 195 Figure 0.2 Outstretched cords of Quipu Menstrual with El Plomo mountain in background 2006............................................................................................................................................. 195 Figure 1.1: Pape, Tecelar, 1956 .................................................................................................. 195 Figure 1.2: Pape, Ttéia Parque Lage, c. 1978 ............................................................................ 195 Figure 1.3: Kaibi basket designs ................................................................................................. 195 Figure 1.4: Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporu, 1928 ........................................................................... 195 Figure 1.5: Lygia Pape, Tecelar, 1957 ........................................................................................ 195 Figure 1.6: Lygia Pape, Ballet Neoconcreto, 1958 ..................................................................... 195 Figure 1.7: Pape, O Ovo, 1967 .................................................................................................... 195 Figure 1.8: Lygia Pape, Divisor, 1968 ........................................................................................ 195 Figure 1.9: Lygia Pape, Roda dos Prazeres, 1968 ...................................................................... 196 Figure 1.10: Max Bill, Tripartite Unity, 1948-49 ....................................................................... 196 Figure 1.11: Helio Oiticica, Parangolés, 1964-72 ...................................................................... 196 Figure 1.12: Lygia Pape, Objeto-Poema (Rompe), 1957 ............................................................ 196 Figure 1.13: Lygia Pape, Objeto-Poema (Em/Vão), 1956-57 ..................................................... 196 Figure 1.14: Lygia Pape, Desenho, 1961 .................................................................................... 196 Figure 1.15: Augusto de Campos, Olho por Olho, 1964 ............................................................ 196 Figure 1.16: Lygia Pape, Trio do embalo maluco, 1967 ............................................................ 196 Figure 1.17: Diagram-map of Rio showing Madureira, Bonsucesso, Vargem Grade and Leblon..................................................................................................................................................... 196 Figure 1.18: Pape, Ttéia Parque Lage, c.1978 ........................................................................... 196 Figure 1.19: Lygia Pape, Ttéia Parque Lage, c. 1978 ................................................................ 197 ix Figure 1.20: Pape, Ttéia 1A, 1979 ............................................................................................... 197 Figure 2.1: Cecilia Vicuña, Palabra e hilo, 1996 ....................................................................... 197 Figure 2.2: Cecilia Vicuña, La Realidad es un línea, 1994 ........................................................ 197 Figure 2.3: Cecilia Vicuña, Hilur, 1997 ..................................................................................... 197 Figure 2.4: Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA), Para no morir de hambre en el arte, 1979 . 197 Figure 2.5: CADA, Para no morir de hambre en el arte, 1979; performance outside Museo de las Bellas Artes ........................................................................................................................... 197 Figure 2.6: Raúl Zurita, Escritura en el cielo (La vida nueva), 1982; poem written with five airplanes and white smoke in the New York (poetry action) ...................................................... 197 Figure 2.7: Cecilia Vicuña, Palabrarmas, begun in 1977 .......................................................... 197 Figure 2.8: Cecilia Vicuña, Palabrarmas, begun in 1977 .......................................................... 198 Figure 2.9: Lotty Rosenfeld, Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento [a mile of crosses on the pavement], 1979-84 .................................................................................................................... 198 Figure 2.10: Cecilia Vicuña, cover of Sabor a mi, 1973 ............................................................ 198 Figure 2.11: Cecilia Vicuña, Sabor a mi, 1973 ........................................................................... 198 Figure 2.12: Narrative quipu, 1400-1532; Reportedly found at the site of Ancon, Central Coast, Peru; Cotton, camelid fiber ......................................................................................................... 198 Figure 2.13: Cecilia Vicuña, Journal of Objects of the Chilean Resistance, 1973-1974 ........... 198 Figure 2.14: Cecilia Vicuña, Quipu de Lamentos, 2014 ............................................................. 198 Figure 2.15: Cecilia Vicuña, El Vaso de Leche, 1979; performed in Bogotá, Colombia ........... 198 Figure 2.16: Cecilia Vicuña, Debajo o Encima del Agua, n.d. ................................................... 199 Figure 2.17: Cecilia Vicuña, Con-Con, 1966 ............................................................................. 199 Figure 2.18: Arpillera featuring the scene of a community undergoing a random search by DINA..................................................................................................................................................... 199 Figure 3.1: pages from Mirtha Dermisache, Libro n1 and Libro n2, 1967 ................................ 199 Figure 3.2: Leon Ferrari, Letter to a General, 1963 ................................................................... 199 x Figure 3.3: Leon Ferrari, Western Christian Civilization, 1965 ................................................. 199 Figure 3.4: Emilio Pettoruti, El Quinteto, 1927 .......................................................................... 199 Figure 3.5: Xul Solar, Nana Watzin, 1923 .................................................................................. 199 Figure 3.6: Joaquín Torres-García, Composición, 1931 ............................................................. 199 Figure 3.7: Joaquín Torres Garcia, Inverted Map of America, 1943 .......................................... 200 Figure 3.8: Marta Minujin, La Destrucción, 1963 ...................................................................... 200 Figure 3.9: Oscar Bony, La Familia Obrera, 1968 .................................................................... 200 Figure 3.10: Mirtha Dermisache, pages from Libro n.2, 1967 ................................................... 200 Figure 3.11: Mirtha Dermisache, pages from Libro n.3, 1968 ................................................... 200 Figure 3.12: Mirtha Dermisache, pages from Untitled book, 1968-1979 ................................... 200 Figure 3.13: Mirtha Dermisache, Untitled [public reading], 2009 ............................................ 200 Figure 3.14: Leon Ferrari, Cuadro Escrito, 1964 ....................................................................... 200 Figure 3.15: Mirtha Dermisache, Diario n1 Año 1 (interior), 1972 ........................................... 200 Figure 3.16: Mirtha Dermisache, Boletín informative [Informational bulletin], 1974 .............. 201 Figure 3.17: Mirtha Dermisache, Untitled (postcard), c. 1975 .................................................. 201 Figure 3.18: Mirtha Dermisache, Libro de espejo, 1975 ............................................................ 201 Figure 3.19: Mirtha Dermisache, Libro de vidrio, 1975 ............................................................. 201 Figure 4.1: Cecilia Vicuña, Quipu Womb (The Story of the Red Thread, Athens), 2017 ........... 201 xi Acknowledgements This project would have not been possible without the support and generosity of several institutions and individuals. I thank the institutions that provided financial support during this project: The Center for Craft, Creativity, and Design, MITACS Foundation, and the University of British Columbia. I also must thank Fernando Piola and Silvana Kaprinscki at the USP Contemporary Art Archive, Aline Siquiera Cordeiro at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, and Federico Brega at the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende for their guidance, help, and patience. I would, foremost, like to thank my advisor, T’ai Smith, for the courses, the readings, the research opportunities, and the conversations that have shaped me as a scholar. I deeply appreciate all the generous feedback, keen eye for grammar, and honest support she provided throughout the writing process. Thank you for setting an example of how to be an encouraging mentor and advisor. My readers, Ignacio Adriasola and Alessandra Santos, provided insightful comments, bibliographic recommendations, and personal contacts that helped my research abroad become so fruitful. Thank you to Ignacio for pushing me to ask deeper questions and to Alessandra for your perspective. For all of their help at every stage, I am so grateful. My sincerest thanks to the AHVA department, especially the professors and administration staff. I want to thank Serge Guilbaut, Carol Knicely, John O’Brian, Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Katherine Hacker, Jaleh Mansoor, Joseph Monteyne, Maureen Ryan, Erin Silver, and Julia Orell for their many seminars, lectures, and conversations, both in and out of the classroom. I want to thank so many brilliant friends and colleagues who listened and offered their support through the countless cups of coffees, phone calls, and walks. Thanks to Carla who xii helped me navigate Rio de Janeiro in the early days of research and who I now consider a dear friend and collaborator. To Sheila and Kirsty who made coming back to Rio feel familiar. Many thanks to Kristen, Katherine, Vikki, Catherine, Laura, Pam, Heather, and Marisa, who always managed to provide the best advice at the right time, often with a side of humour. This dissertation would not be possible without my family, who reminded me that I was “art smart” whenever I had my doubts. I want to especially thank my mom for her unwavering love and moral support throughout it all. Also, a big thank you to my Vancouver family—you have been a sounding board since the beginning and are always quick to provide some levity and perspective. Finally, the last stretch of the dissertation would have been impossible without the daily reminder from Winnie to get up and go for a walk. xiii Dedication To my family. 1 Introduction 0.1 Experimental forms: Metaphors between text and textile in the Southern Cone In 2006, Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña carried heavy threads of felted wool up to Cerro el Plomo, a glaciated peak outside of the capital city of Santiago de Chile. Dyed a deeply pigmented red, these strands were meant to signify the “blood of the glaciers.” As surrounding communities, including farmers and the Diaguita Huascoaltinos, an Indigenous group that lives in northern Chile, protested against the extractive project polluted the run-off water,1 Vicuña’s site-specific installation functioned as a political plea to cease the recently granted rights for the mining of gold and silver by a foreign corporation.2 The inability of the locals to access clean drinking water South America due to the commodification and control of water and mineral mining had become increasingly prevalent as wide-scale privatization had increased beginning in the early 1990s.3 Vicuña’s use of the quipu thus pointed specifically to an acknowledgement of Indigenous land rights, highlighting how those who were most affected by the government’s 1 See Gonzalo Aguilar Cavallo, “Pascua Lama, Human Rights, and Indigenous Peoples: A Chilean Case Through the Lens of International Law,” Goettingen Journal of International Law 5 (2013): 215-249. 2 The mining project Vicuña references is the Pascua-Lama project occurring on the border of northern Argentina and the Atacama region of Chile, developed by the Toronto-based company, Barrick Gold. In 2006, Chilean authorities approved the project before it was suspended in 2013 2 The mining project Vicuña references is the Pascua-Lama project occurring on the border of northern Argentina and the Atacama region of Chile, developed by the Toronto-based company, Barrick Gold. In 2006, Chilean authorities approved the project before it was suspended in 2013 for violations against the environmental permits. The project ceased completely on September 18, 2020. 3 Wide-scale water privatization began in the early 1990s and created ongoing conflicts throughout Latin America. Most notably, uprisings in Cochabamba, Bolivia, against the privatization of water began a larger pushback in the continent. However, countries like Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and Argentina struggled with ongoing rights to water. See Lisa Boscov-Ellen, “Thirst for Profit: Corporate Control of Water in Latin America,” CommonDreams.org, published 20 June 2009: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2009/06/20/thirst-profit-corporate-control-water-latin-america. 2 contracts with foreign corporations were again disadvantaging the most vulnerable members of Chilean society.4 In a letter to then Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, Vicuña wrote, “Water is life and water is memory. Our ancestors lived and died for water and water will give life to those to come.”5 The red wool, knotted in various segments, referenced the traditional form of the quipu, a mnemonic device that had been used in the Andean region since 400 BCE, most notably during the Incan empire.6 With the invasion of the Spanish into the area, the information around the quipu had been almost erased as the colonial empire rejected its significance. Indeed, Vicuña’s Quipu Menstrual – which became a performance and installation and was accompanied by a poem – articulated multiple concerns facing her country [Figure 0.1]. She used this form to call attention to the extensive history of colonialism and the ways in which colonizing methods were still enacted upon the land and the people by hegemonic and foreign powers. By mobilizing the quipu, she drew attention to various ways colonial and Chilean policies had fostered the erasure of knowledge about the Indigenous populations of the Andes—people who had lived on that land for thousands of years and for whom this traditional, thread-based artefact continues to have cultural meaning. Significantly, when Quipu Menstrual was meant to appear in the exhibition space of the Cultural Center at the Palacio de la Moneda or seat of the government head in Santiago de Chile, other artists included in the show argued that Vicuña’s installation blocked the view of their artworks. While their complaint seemed, on first glance, to be a merely aesthetic criticism, 4 While Bachelet was the president of Chile at the time of Vicuña’s letter, President Richardo Lagos finalized the agreement with Barrick Gold. 5 Cecilia Vicuña, “Letter to Bachelet,” Quipu Menstrual, published 20 May 2006, http://www.quipumenstrual.cl/letter-to-bachelet.html 6 The Incan empire existed from roughly 1450-1532. 3 Vicuña understood that the request was another form of erasure—one that only reified the political oppression of Indigenous voices and concerns under which she had been compelled to create the work.7 The curators insisted that she thin out the long lengths of wool, forcing her to create, in the end, what she felt was a version débil, or weak version [Figure 0.2]. As she explained at the time, “Outraged by this request, I wish to remove my work from the show, but then I see: the violence against the threads is the violence against the glaciers…so I decide to stay, and create … a wounded quipu that tells the story of the censorship it endured.”8 Created to recognize the violence done to the land and people of the region through mining (a situation repeatedly ignored by the press), the curators’ requirements that she thin out the the cords further pointed to the ongoing disavowal of Indigenous peoples and forms.9 At the broadest level, I will argue in the following pages that the adoption of textile techniques, threads, and associated metaphors by artists from the Southern Cone countries of Brazil, Chile, and Argentina in the 1960s and seventies emerged out of a moment in which artists sought to challenge the hegemonic influence of international modernism by incorporating 7 In the performance that proceeded to object to the decision was Vicuña’s Quipu Menstrual, a quipu – or series of knotted cords – of unspun wool that was first stretched on the ground while visiting El Plomo, the highest peak seen visible to Santiago. Vicuña writes to Bachelet, “On the day of the election I climbed up to the mountains and made a large Menstrual Quipu at an altitude of 2000 meters, in front of El Plomo. A quipu dedicated to you, your triumph, so that you and us women will remember the connection between water and blood. I dreamed that you would be the conscience of this relationship.” The full letter begins by commenting on the fact that while Vicuña did not vote for Bachelet, she dedicated the quipu to her triumph in the election that had taken place earlier in 2006.” Letter to Michelle Bachelet,” Quipu Menstrual, http://www.ceciliaVicuña.org/en_letter.htm 8 Cecilia Vicuña, “Censorship,” Quipu Menstrual, published 20 May 2006, http://www.quipumenstrual.cl/exhibition.html 9 Underneath the glaciers laid an estimated 17 million ounces of gold and 635 million ounces of silver; yet, despite mining as a key industry to the country, over the past 30 years 7.5 billion gallons of water have already been lost from mining activity. See “Chile: A Problem of Ice, Water, and Mines.” Panoramas (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, October 1, 2013): http://www.panoramas.pitt.edu/content/chile-problem-ice-water-and-mines. 4 references to Indigenous forms and identity. Indeed, in order to understand Vicuña’s use of the quipu as a political force, it is necessary to grasp two distinct but related histories. On the one hand, artists turned to textiles and fiber art as a response to the masculinist legacy within art and abstraction, as well as the industrial aesthetic of 1960s Minimalism. On the other hand, artists referenced Indigenous forms and histories as a means of rejecting colonial influence and carving out a specific South Americas identity. As I will discuss, the embrace of Indigeneity was not entirely unproblematic; these artists sometimes rehearsed, inadvertently, a primitivist language that used an abstract conception of Indigeneity as simutanelously timeless and modernist. However, their intentions in working with these formal associations were motivated by an increased concern with the political plights of Indigenous people, especially under dictatorial regimes. Indeed, it should be acknowledged that artists, theorists, and governments from Latin America throughout the twentieth century often focused on Indigenous and “primitive” forms in an effort to get “back to nature,” or remind viewers of what existed before the arrival of industrialization that seized control of the land.10 The autochthonous histories embedded in the countries of South America and Latin America more broadly were embraced in order to legitimize the newly established sovereignty of Latin America countries, becoming a marker of “genuine” identity against the colonizing apparatus. Consequently, Indigenous forms and 10 See James E. Sanders, The Vanguard of the Atlantic World: Creating Modernity, Nation, and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Tracy Devine Guzmán, Native and National in Brazil: Indigeneity after Independence (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013); and Beverly Adams and Natalia Majluf, eds., The Avant-Garde Networks of Amauta: Argentina, Mexico, and Peru in the 1920s (Austin, TX: Blanton Museum of Art, 2019). 5 connections became increasingly important in the national rhetoric after periods of long, tumultuous colonization efforts that either wiped out populations or forced them to the periphery. Relatedly, in the international art world of the 1960s and seventies, the emergence of textile and fiber art signaled a rejection of the cold steel and pre-manufactured forms of Minimalism. Especially in the United States and Europe, the revival of craft centered mainly on women’s production, as artists turned to materials that might drape and fold, and ultimately, reveal a more subjective and bodily connection to making than the industrial forms that preceded them.11 For many, questions concerning the tactility and materiality of the medium were at the crux of their artworks, especially within a moment that saw an explosion of responses to the gestural and authorial hand of Abstract Expressionism. At the same time, the strong legacy of textile practices within Latin America influenced an alternative path with American artists like Lenore Tawney and Sheila Hicks writing of their admiration of “ancient” approaches to weaving and highlighting the designs and backstrap looms that came out of Mexico, Guatemala, and Andean cultures further south. This veneration could be seen when the German, former-Bauhaus student Anni Albers traveled to Mexico and then Peru and referenced ancient weaving techniques in her writing, and would look to “the weavers of Ancient Peru” as a support for her experiments within a modernist present.12 11 See Elissa Auther, String, Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 12 See Virgina Gardner Troy, Anni Albers and Ancient American Textiles: From Bauhaus to Black Mountain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). Troy’s text cites Albers’ interest in Andean textiles, her experience at the Bauhaus, and her visit to a De Stijl exhibition as influencing her modernist approach to pictorial weavings. She would also collect and apparently unravel several textile artifacts from ancient Peru, as well as dedicate her text, “On Weaving” to the “weavers of Ancient Peru.” 6 Thus, the following dissertation does not aim to analyze the European and North American artists who looked to Latin America for imaginative inspirations; instead, it seeks to situate how South American artists worked within the tropes and legacies of modernism from the Global North, including a Primitivist appropriation of Indigenous forms, to produce fiber-based work that sought to challenge the standing histories around modernism and the related history of colonialism. Beyond Vicuña’s work in Chile, I consider work by two other women, Lygia Pape in Brazil and Mirtha Dermisache in Argentina, artists whose countries subscribed to European models of art making, but which, by the 1960s and 1970s, had started to carve out a different path. The three artists, all of whom turned to instantiations of text and textile, notably worked at a moment when the revitalizations of craft and fiber art was starting to gain more recognition in the Global North. They thus contended, at once, with their local, artistic contexts and the broader geographies of how modernism operated in the Global South. Furthermore, their historical moment was only complicated further with the shifting and unstable governments of the 1950s through seventies, which gave rise to dictatorship, censorship, and the fear of “disappearance,” which had become a widespead system of authoritarian control.13 The textile and its components offer a paradigm through which all three artists negotiated their artistic and political contexts. With its connection to language and writing, the medium is one where, as Walter Benjamin once articulated, “the past [is] stiflingly entangled in the warp of 13 The United Nations Human Rights Office define “forced” or “enforced disappearance” as the “the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.” “International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance,” United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, accessed 20 November 2020, https://www.ohchr.org/en/hrbodies/ced/pages/conventionced.aspx 7 the present.”14 Therefore, in consideration of Vicuña’s, Pape’s and Dermisache’s practices, my dissertation explores the geopolitical relationship between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres through iterations of fiber and textiles and their associations to language. Vicuña’s written and visual practice speaks to such historical and contemporary concerns around the colonial violence endured by Indigenous populations, as much as the violence that came with the 1973 coup d’état in Chile. In Brazil, artists examined the historical ramifications of colonization in their countries alongside the arrival of repressive governments. Finally, in Argentina, artists grappled with staging their own interventions within conceptualism that spoke to the local politics of the 1960s. Working with textile and fiber structures, in addition to poetic texts, all countered political and art historical concerns. My line of enquiry considers how textile and fiber art became politically activated within South America, first to engage the import of modernism, and secondly, as a strategy in their political efforts against dictatorial regimes. As textile and fiber art moved into the second half of the twentieth century, it would be incorporated into a variety of discourses surrounding lost and ignored voices and environmental activism. I use each chapter to stage a particular problem set, in relationship to the artists’ specific contexts: Lygia Pape in Brazil, Cecilia Vicuña in Chile, and Mirtha Dermisache in Argentina. While other artists in these countries deployed textile and textile forms in their practice—some examples of which I will reference in the chapters—I have chosen to focus on these three due to their specific engagement with the complexity of writing and its relationship to textiles. Each chapter will consider the broader historical processes and 14 This phrase comes from Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’ in Illuminations, discussed more fully by scholar Esther Leslie in her chapter, “Walter Benjamin: Traces of Craft” in Obscure Objects of Desire (Crafts Council 1997). 8 discussions to situate how these artforms emerged to problematize Western constructions of modernism and later conceptual forms. 0.2 Recent scholarship Scholars have paid relatively little attention to the artists under analysis here, though the visual art movements they participated in, or worked in parallel with, have been the subject of numerous studies over the last twenty years. For example, in art historical texts surrounding the emergence of neoconcretismo in Brazil, the experiments of artists such as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica are favored over those performed by Lygia Pape. Multiple monographs and exhibitions have examined the work of Clark and Oiticica, including Irene Small’s thorough consideration of Oiticica, in addition to Sergio Martins’s and Monica Amor’s broad examination of the theoretical developments of the nonobject.15 In Brazil in 2010, Vanessa Rosa Machado published Lygia Pape: Espaços de ruptura, a text that focused on Pape’s larger oeuvre and its connection to her home of Rio de Janeiro.16 Machado’s book would help spearhead two larger exhibitions that examined her work from concretismo to neoconcretismo, that were still mired in a connection to 15 Irene Small, Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Sergio Martins, Constructing an Avant Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949-1979 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013); Mónica Amor, Theories of the Nonobject: Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, 1944-1969 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016). 16 Vanessa Rosa Machado, Lygia Pape: Espaços de rupture (São Paulo: Annablume, 2010). Pape is featured often in texts centered on neoconcretismo like Guy Brett’s Brasil Experimental: arte/vida, proposições e paradoxos (Rio de Janeiro: Contra Copa, 2005). Other notable sources that discuss her interest in neconcretism are Fernando Cocchiarale, Lygia Pape: Entre Olho e o Espírito (Porto, Portugal: Mimesis, 2004), and Denise Mattar, Lygia Pape: Intrisecamente Anarquista (Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, 2003). Often texts on the artist are published by the cultural spaces that exhibited her work. 9 Oiticica and Clark rather than nuancing her individual approaches.17 That is, beyond the relatively short essays by Paulo Herkenhoff and Luiz Camillo Osorio found in exhibition catalogues, there has been no sustained critical engagement into Pape’s work to situate her textile works.18 With the exception of a chapter on Vicuña by Catherine de Zegher, found in the curator’s Inside the Visible catalogue (1996), and the recent publication of Fray: Art and Textile Politics (2017) by Julia Bryan Wilson, wherein the author connects the the artist’s work to the politically generative qualities of craft, Vicuña’s poetry has remained the focus of scholarship, and her material practice as a visual artist has been less engaged. The published texts around the Chilean avant-garde have centered primarily on the Escena de Avanzada, a group established by theorist Nelly Richard at the advent of the Pinochet regime.19 Richard’s work alongside Chile, Arte Actual by art historians Milan Ivelic and Gaspar Galaz, secured a roadmap that much of the scholarship of this moment has followed.20 For Vicuña, who went into a self-imposed exile at the onset of the dictatorship, her work has garnered a space that is not typically placed as an example 17 Pape had a series of small exhibitions in the 1990s in Brazil (namely Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo) and would be featured in exhibitions on Neo-concrete art. Lygia Pape: Magnetized Space was on exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain (2011); Serpentine Gallery in London, England (2011-12); and the Pinocoteca do Estado de São Paulo in São Paulo, Brazil (2012). Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms was on exhibition at the Met Breuer in New York City, NY (March– July 2017). 18 The exhibition catalogue, Lygia Pape: Magnetized Space (2011) reproduced much of Pape’s archive and papers with a series of essays by art historians that would situate Pape into the realm of Concrete and Neoconcrete art. In Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms (2017), curator Iria Candela provided short essays focusing on her vanguard nature. 19 Most notably, Richard wrote: The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural Transformation, and Poetics of the Crisis, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004) Cultural Residues: Chile in Transition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), and Masculine/Feminine: Practices of Difference (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 20 Milan Ivelic and Gaspar Galaz, Chile, Arte Actual (Valparaíso, Chile: Universidad de Valparaíso, 1988). 10 of the Chilean art scene in this period, and thus has largely been excluded from monographs on this historical period in Chile. In 2018, the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires (MALBA) held the first major retrospective of Mirtha Dermisache. Yet even within that country, the artist remains relatively unknown, despite (or perhaps because of) her particular method of abstract drawing that mimicked the form of text and language, but was nevertheless asemic, during a time that tended to favor artworks grappling with the burgeoning information systems and the advent of the computer technologies. For example, Andrea Giunta’s comprehensive text, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art of the 1960s, which documents the whirlwind of developments occurring throughout the 1950s until 1968, nowehere mentions Dermisache’s name. This is despite the fact that Dermisache had a long career involving two influential and experimental institutions and a small international semblance of fame, and often worked with or in parallel with some of the most significant artists of the period.21 Other texts, like Inés Katzenstein’s edited volume Listen Here Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde, covers the extensive writing, manifestos, and art production of the Argentine vanguard. But again, favoring the happenings and other performance-based projects that defined this decade, misses artistic avenues taken by Dermisache.22 Moreover, the fact that these three artists referenced or adopted textile structures—joint harnessing texts and textiles in their work—has, especially in the case of Pape and Dermisache, remained underexamined. For Pape, the focus of scholars remains on her performance and 21 Andrea Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2007). 22 Inés Katzenstein, editor, Listen Here Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004). 11 installation, while in the literature on Dermisache, little outside of her writing has been considered.23 All three artists worked within and beyond the boundaries of global modernism; they questioned the colonial histories underpinning modernist forms; and they harnessed threads and thread-like lines in their efforts to address censorship and ongoing state violence. These connections, I propose, necessitate the study undertaken here. 0.3 Methodology and questions This dissertation does not present a comprehensive survey of modern or traditional textile practices in Latin America or in South America. Such an undertaking would result in a series of omissions and exclusions concerning how textiles and fiber art developed in different cultural milieus, and furthermore, would be a disservice to the multitude of Indigenous populations and other ethnic groups who have their unique approaches towards fiber. As well, many countries like Mexico, Cuba, and Colombia, possess artistic struggles against or appropriate aspects of European modernism, but in such contextual specificity to connect their practices to those within the dissertation would not provide the nuance of each country, and would thus fall into the trap of supporting the operative constructs of Latin American art that disavow the complexities and contradictions of these countries. Rather, my intention is to find pathways that showcase a formal consideration and turn towards textile materials that occurred in similar economic, political, and artistic contexts. The following chapters illustrate the capacity of thread and fiber to act as vehicles of a sociopolitical 23 See Belén Gache, “Reflection on Asemic Writing: The Case of Mirtha Dermisache,” in Mirtha Dermisache: Because I Write! Agustín Pérez Rubio, ed. (Buenos Aires: MALBA, 2017): 15-32. In this essay at the beginning of the exhibition catalogue (and throughout), little attention is paid to the formal elements present in Dermisache’s work. 12 expression, especially important in the moments these artists worked; and indeed, another reason why a comprehensive study of textiles might be impossible. Locating the difference between the artists and their countries is of utmost importance in order to not conflate practices, cultural specificities, and histories; rather I include such categories in order to nuance and offer texture to the project to underscore that, despite their geographical and temporal distances, artists were intent on turning similarly to text and textile. Therfore, it is necessary to situate the artists in order to examine what led to an inclusion of the textile. I therfore position my analysis of Pape, Vicuña, and Dermisache between an analysis of the political situations that necessitated experimental forms, on the one hand, and the literature underscoring the metaphorical capabilities harnessed by text and textile, on the other. Importantly, these three artists did not consider themselves to be textile practitioners; only two of the artists (Pape and Vicuña) intermittently used fiber-based materials in their work; and the three more often worked in the mediums of printmaking, installation, poetry, and drawing. Nevertheles, I have chosen these three artists due to the ongoing references to textile forms in their practice. I therefore consider threads and fibers, in addition to their evocations of both in other mediums, as sites of power where language, culture, and politics come to be addressed. The possibilities of textiles extend not only to information or record keeping, but are indeed interwoven in the historical and political economy of these countries. Thus, the questions that underlie my research are: How might the harnessing of textile metaphors by certain artists from the Southern Cone have helped them address the persistence of colonialism and the marginalization of Indigenous and Afro communities within the dominant cultures of Brazil, Chile, and Argentina in the 1960s and 70s? How might an examination of textile metaphors help us better understand the intertwined role of politics and aesthetics during 13 this period? Why did artists articulate this conjunction and navigate a terrain of widespread dictatorships and censorship through textile metaphors and forms? How then do the representations of warp and weft or the knots in the quipu provide a kind of diagram (in the Deleuzian sense) for understanding the political and aesthetic situations occurring in these countries? What might the term “textility” offer to an understanding of this period in these specific locales? Textility provides a critical framework through which to explore how form and matter operate in these works. Initially framed in Anglophone discourse by Tim Ingold, the concept of textility invites a conversation about the generative material force that is “itinerant, improvisatory, and rhythmic.”24 Indeed, we might comprehend textility’s various deployments within abstraction as possibilities to re-establish shifting relationships to time and history. The term can be deployed to help map various interpretations of history. Ingold’s notion of textility is further compelling because it distributes the affective power between maker, material and form in such a way that they come to bear on each other in a conditional “system of relations.”25 Furthermore, when paired with Victoria Mitchell’s argument in “Textiles, Text, and Techne,” around the significance of textuality, we might see how this term works to antagonize the “contiguity with the physical forms of bodies and of things.”26 The use of the textile and its attendant metaphors offers the artist an ability to maneuver through the authority of language. 24 Tim Ingold, “The Textility of Making,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, Volume 34, Issue 1, (January 2010): 91–102. 25 Tim Ingold, “Making Culture and Weaving the World” in Matter, Materiality, and Modern Culture, ed. P.M. Graves-Brown (New York: Routledge, 2000), 60. 26 Victoria Mitchell, “Textiles, text and techne,” in Obscure objects of desire: Reviewing the crafts in the twentieth century, Tanya Edward, ed. (London: Crafts Council, 1997): 330. 14 Therefore, my argument moves away from considering textiles as political solely based on their handmade quality or “low” status as craft, which permitted them to go undetected. Rather, I aim to understand how their utilization in South America, especially at a moment steeped in interconnected political and aesthetic challenges, may have necessitated the textile as an operational force. I therefore argue that the concepts afforded by the textile provided the three artists I consider alternative methods to understanding tumultuous historical situations and support avenues outside of dominant hegemons and forms. They established, in other words, an expanded framework that could provide for the inclusion and recognition of peoples, histories, and techniques that had been pushed to the margins. When considering textiles in this expanded way, it further nuances the development of the art historical field and adds shape to the historical processes under which textile-imbued practices could become a tactic to counter such systems and models of thought. I will thus articulate how these three artists’ work operates under the deployment of textility in order to adopt and antagonize European forms, imbuing them with the local historical and political situations, and moreover, showcasing why such connections were necessitated. 0.4 Context When discussing modern and contemporary Latin American art, it is crucial to demonstrate the construction of the term and the conflation of ideas and identities that “Latin America” represents, and what it does not.27 It is a broad category that encompasses disparate 27 See Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Beyond ‘The Fantastic’: Framing Identity in U.S. Exhibitions of Latin American Art,” Art Journal 51, 4 (Winter 1992): 60-68. Ramírez most recently gave a talk at the University of Houston (October 2020) where she questioned if in the contemporary moment, the term “Latin America” still belongs. She asked how might a consideration of the 15 cultures and locations that have their own specific art historical developments. Therefore, this dissertation does not operate under the wide umbrella of Latin American art. Rather, in order to recognize this pluralism and acknowledge the differences and antagonisms that cannot be aligned under a particular group identity, I have chosen to focus on the the three countries that comprise the Southern Cone, and will analyze three artists from that region who worked both within their own specific cultural networks and were a part of globalized artistic and theoretical networks. As such, the following scholarship interrogates the nexus between artistic production and identity, and highlights the complexities of colonialism and postcolonialism in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. In the following chapters, I articulate the complex interactions between these three artists and the (largely international) artistic networks that were hegemonic at the time. Undertanding this relationship entails examining the histories of colonialism and modernisms, as well as the relationship of the dominant culture to Indigenous communities, which bore the brunt of such developments through exploitation. Therefore, my focus on Brazil, Argentina, and Chile is grounded in the distinct responses to European modernism that occurred within the region. The term “modernism” first requires an acknowledgement of its heterogeneity that goes beyond its previously conceived singular narrative under a Western construction, in addition to the uneven modernization that historically occurred.28 My intention is to continue the break from the center-periphery model imposed by a hegemonic assumption and offer up the ambivalent circumstances in which these artists operated individual aspects of art making would showcase the specificity of the artist, rather than utilizing the broad category seen in “Latin American Art.” 28 See Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Introduction” in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 16 to further demonstrate there is no single lineage.29 As Fredric Jameson notes in A Singular Modernity (2002), the term modernismo originates with the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío in 1888, but was quickly surpassed by vaguardismo, wherein there erupts a tension between what the first term offered. That is, modernismo was used to describe the literary milieu intent on pushing against Spanish colonialism. Jameson writes, “the option of introducing a new word – vanguardismo – is limited by the way this choice cuts short a tension within modernism itself between ‘high moderns’ and avant-gardes and thereby forecloses and interesting an productive problem in advance.”30 For Darío, modernismo was first informed by a French influence yet intent on confronting the colonizer; the vanguardia emerged in the twentieth century to shock audiences. Jameson makes clear the inability to remedy the vast definitions and delineations of the terms, and notes by the mid-twentieth century, modernism became tied to a state of progress, one that was pushed by Europe and then the United States. This is seen especially with exhibitions in the 1950s to the end of the 1960s in South America, where the US attempted to instill a political connection through artistic endeavours. The language of modernism then becomes one mired in a center-periphery discourse. But, as I will illustrate, artists within Brazil, Argentina, and Chile did not simply receive, imitate or passively absorb such models; rather they pushed against the colonial core in an effort to dismantle, or at least destabilize, such discourses. It was not, however, a simple endeavor. For example, in the city centers of Buenos Aires and São Paulo, European examples of modernism were welcomed with enthusiastic reception in the 1910s. Furthermore, when painters and critics pushed against foreign models in the 1920s, 29 See Okwui Enwezor, “Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence,” South Atlantic Quarterly 109, 3 (2010): 595-620. 30 Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, London: Verso (2002), 101. 17 this attempt was to further local and national forms, but the proverbial baby was not thrown out with the bathwater. As Brazilian artists retooled consumption to produce a cannibalized model of modernism and in Argentina, artists homed in on conditions central to their contexts, but never divorced themselves from geometric abstraction entirely. With the end of Second World War, artistic models developed against the prevailing abstract expressionism occurring in New York, and instead sought to align again with Europe rather than look to North America. Travel would become increasingly important during this period, first within the artistic context and then further under the looming political threat of the dictatorships. Artists from Argentina and Venezuela flocked to France, supporting the Gallic nation’s celebration of technological innovation in response to the American “takeover” of modernism.31 Specifically, these South American artists adopted the artistic language of Kinetic art and pop art at the same time that Nouveau Réalisme and the Situationist International were gaining ground in France. The international discourses would showcase the employment of similar tactics in both regions.32 The exodus to Europe, and then the subsequent return of these artists, meant an increased turn to internationalization in the capital city of Buenos Aires, especially among the elite. For Brazil, this period had competing factions and ideologies around abstraction split between the Concrete artists in São Paulo, who favored objectivity, and Rio de Janeiro, who disavowed rationality. In Chile, short-lived artists groups emerged in the twentieth century, but none pushed vehemently against European forms; in fact, many embraced cubism and impressionism as they undid the academic art of the 31 See Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). For a continuation of the American imperialism see Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (London: Pluto Press, 1971). 32 Martha Sesín, “Playing their Game: France, Latin America, and the Transformation of Geometric Abstraction in Postwar Paris,” PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2008. 18 country.33 Only in the wake of the golpe did a vanguard develop to create a new visual language to reject ideological discourses.34 Beginning in 1964 with Brazil, each country experienced a period of repression under dictatorship that would shape artistic practices, seen most fervently in Chile. Perhaps, through understanding the nature of how modernism/modernity has been historically established, seen as flowing from a center, we might take into consideration the assumptions of the center and periphery. Finally, it is important to pay attention to how the term, Indigeneity, is deployed throughout this dissertation and, how indigenismo was understood by the artists under examination. First and foremost, it is imperative to note the ongoing visibility and developments in scholarship around Indigenous Peoples within South America.35 Since the 1970s and 1980s, Indigenous activists throughout the Southern Cone, but especially in Chile and Brazil, have worked tirelessly against development projects that would impact their ancestral lands. Beyond these decades, and as illustrated in each chapter, Indigenous populations throughout the Southern 33 Luis Vargas Rosas founded Grupo Montparnasse, a small group of Chilean artists who took inspiration from the artist Paul Cèzanne after members came into contact with the French artist in Paris in 1920. In 1923, when the group returned to Chile, they had their first exhibition and would subsequently shift the painting scene in Santiago with their postimpressionist interests. See Pedro Emiliano Zamorano Pérez, et al. “Pintura chilena durante la primera mitad del siglo xx: Influjos y tendencias,” Atenea 491 (2005): 159-186. 34 A golpe is the Spanish word referring to a coup d’état; it also refers to a sudden change or shock. 35 I want to acknowledge that this project does not aim to unpack the contributions Indigenous resistance has brought in the Southern Cone; rather, this dissertation analyzes how these artists understood the concept of Indigeneity in the 1960s to the 1980s. Furthermore, I do not wish to situate these artists as portraying an accurate depiction of Indigenous contributions. May aim is rather to unpack how they understood the events occurring in their countries from the perspective of non-Indigenous people. As an art historian living and working in Canada and aware of how Indigenous communities have been framed in a colonizing discourse, I aim to understand what led Pape, Vicuña, and Dermisache to utilize such mediums and materials to locate them within the historical framework of the 1960s-80s, but I do not intend to situate their work as a perfect attempt of understanding Indigenous concerns. 19 Cone existed within the cultural imaginary even if they were not actively mobilizing or protesting. The Kayapó in Brazil have become one of the most famous examples of mobilization to protect the environment, successfully protesting against a series of dam projects in the Xingu River in 1989.36 Mapuche activists in Chile in the late 1990s and early 2000s began to organize to claim rights over their territories, through hunger strikes and arson.37 Yet, as illustrated by Pape and Vicuña, artistic understanding of Indigenous identities and politics in the 1960s and seventies was often less specific, largely due to inadequate reporting on those issues at the time.38 The term indigenismo and the attendant interest in Indigenous forms, as they were mobilized by urban, mostly elite artists, more frequently operated under the framework of a larger identity politics that signaled, often reductively, non-European. That is, for Pape and Vicuña, the specificity of such groups was not always in their purview. Indigeneity simply became a way of signaling dissent against the acting artistic and then governmental authorities. Argentina, moreover, needs to be understood in light of its own colonialism and the nineteenth century’s Conquest of the Desert (1878-1885), which largely shaped and influenced how Argentines actively erased the presence of Indigenous peoples from the culture and politics of that nation, especially when in 1979, the country celebrated the hundredth anniversary of these colonial crusades.39 36 See William H. Fisher, “Megadevelopment, Environmentalism, and Resistance: The Insitutional Context of Kayapó Indigenous Politics in Central Brazil,” Human Organization 53, 3 (Fall 1994): 220-232. 37 See Macarena Gómez-Barris, “Mapuche mnemonics: Beyond modernity’s violence,” Memory Studies 8, 1 (2015): 75-85. 38 See Jorge Coronado, The Andes Imagined: Indigenismo, Society, and Modernity (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). 39 See Carolyne R. Larson, The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina’s Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020). 20 0.5 Threads and Lines In the last decade, art historical scholarship has increasingly embraced the medium of textiles, and the interest is largely driven by an attention to the political significance of its form.40 Such an expansion provides nuanced relationships between touch and memory and builds on the theoretical armatures associated with spinning, weaving, and even, wearing.41 The once decorative qualities of textiles are no longer solely emphasized; rather, their transmedial capacity has squarely placed them beyond a conversation of form and function.42 Artists, too, have explored the metaphors associated with textiles. In this capacity, textiles have gained 40 As noted by historians Mateusz Kapustka, Annika Reineke, Anne Röhl, and Tristan Weddigen: “The textile is fundamentally political, it is the fabric of social conflicts, as the history of the weaver uprisings has shown. In the case of the textile, there is always the danger of the ornament covering up the material, of formalism concealing politics.” Anika Reineke, Anne Röhl, Mateusz Kapustka, and Tristan Weddigen, eds., Textile Terms: A Glossary (Berlin: Edition Imorde, 2017). Recent publications that include a purview of approaches towards the medium are Jessica Hemmings, ed., The Textile Reader, London: Bloomsbury Press, 2012; and Jenelle Porter, ed., Fiber: Sculpture, 1960-Present, New York: Prestel, 2014. 41 The Textile Reader includes one section explicitly devoted to “Politics” and included such texts as Arthur C. Danto, “Weaving as Metaphor and Model for Political Thought”; Susan S. Bean, “Gandhi and Khadi, the Fabric of Indian Independence,”; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Culture,”; and Sarat Maharaj, “Arachne’s Genre: Towards Inter-Cultural Studies in Textiles.” 42 See T’ai Smith, Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). Smith’s analysis of the Bauhaus weaving workshop reframed the group’s dialogue with modernism and interrogated the relationship set out between craft and medium. She also considers the workshops engagement with writing, as they set out to theorize the practice of weaving. 21 significance for their ability to speak to the everyday and the personal, and operate beyond the ‘soft’ interventions that their handmade status allows.43 A common connection drawn in the new textile scholarship focuses on the significance of the Latin word texere. In stressing the importance of its translation: to weave or to knit, the word parallels textus (and its derivation of text) which had a wider meaning of ‘written account’ or ‘content’ but literally meant ‘woven thing’ as is formed from the past participle of the verb texere. Thus, we can see how text and textile might assemble in patterns and rhythms to eventually form cloth or writing. But while no doubt necessary as a way to understand just how weaving offers its own communicative force, it is impossible to limit definitions under a purely modernist or colonial establishment. In this vein, this dissertation focuses not so much on the final product of the textile, but rather on the operational force that threads, as the constitive element of textiles, came to represent in this moment. In the works of Pape, Vicuña, and Dermisache, the thread was charged with conceptual possibility, or what Anni Albers has referred to as “the event of the thread.”44 As I will highlight, the use of the thread allowed their work to operate, often covertly, at political moments of duress. While these artists were neither weavers nor knitters, for instance, they neverthless used or referenced threads in various capacities, and though various mediums, to speak to their sociopolitical sphere and art historical contexts. 43 See Jessica Hemmings, Yvonne Vera: The Voice of Cloth (Paderborn, Germany: Kalliope paperbacks, 2008). Hemmings explores the work of Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera, whose writing grapples with typically silenced experiences like abortion, rape, infanticide, and incest. In the text, Hemmings points to the often inconsequential materials of textiles that play a central role in these narratives to help further convey information. 44 Anni Albers, “Preface,” On Weaving, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), xi. 22 Thus, in my broader consideration of “threads,” I also examine the materiality of lines—as found for instance, in the graphical filaments that cover Dermisache’s surfaces. Lines, like threads, do not produce the final product on their own. Alongside the more material qualities of their work, each artist delves into the constituents of language as influential operations. Like threads, the lines that comprise words, or mere scrawl on a page, act as sites of power. Given the dictatorships in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, words (and their absence through censorhsip) took on more meaning and had to be carefully employed. The lines that comprise words can thus locate potential and mimic the capacity of threads to become something more. Each artist interrogated the function of words, poetry, and language. 0.6 Chapter organization The chapters are organized following the interventions and deployment of threads and fibers beginning in the 1950s. In chapter one, “Re-weaving Brazilian identity in the face of dictatorship: Lygia Pape’s embrace of Indigenous forms,” I examine the artist’s writing around the importance and inclusion of printmaking within the Neo-concrete experience as the beginning of her interest in peripheral mediums and populations. This would be taken up as the artist was both an educator in Rio de Janeiro and had been impacted by the sociopolitical movements happening around her in the late 1960s and afterward. Her work would morph into explorations around textile-imbued installations as well as consider the ways in which the system denied rights to Indigenous and Afro-Brazilians, as land claims went ignored and racial separations from the southern zone of the city were established. I also draw on texts from poet and writer Oswald de Andrade, who promoted what he called a “cannibalization” of techniques and thoughts in his 1928 manifesto as a way to establish a uniquely Brazilian methodology to the 23 arts, not based in its colonial predecessors. This interest would become the root of Tropicália, a movement that coincided with the establishment of the dictatorial government in Brazil, where poets, musicians, artists, and writers used double-entendres to provide a voice to their concerns. Pape’s work takes up many of these ideas and further antagonized the syncretism of Brazilian art historical discourse wherein she references weaving through metaphorical and material ways. The second chapter, “‘El Quipu que no recuerda nada’: Activating fiber in Cecilia Vicuña’s quipus,” underscores Vicuña’s exile out of her native Chile to London and Bogotá, Colombia, focusing on the works she made based on the censorship within her homeland under Pinochet. The chapter connects to the ways in which Vicuña drew on political fervor of the Nueva Canción movement that encouraged an interest in folkloric and Indigenous histories. The employment of thread, fiber, and language in the work examines issues of Vicuña’s identity – ones that were shaped by a violent coup and centered on forced disappearance. By nuancing Vicuña’s aesthetic deployment of such media, I focus on how her work draws on concerns of longstanding violence by the colonial state, complicating the understanding of disappearance in the country. Finally, chapter three, “Conceptual forms under Censorship: Locating legibility in Mirtha Dermisache’s asemic writing,” accounts for the asemic (or indecipherable) text practice of Mirtha Dermisache. This chapter bridges the methodologies of Pape and Vicuña, as it exemplifies how approaches to fibers and threads were dematerialized into graphic filaments to engage a critique of conceptualism in the South American context via the dematerialization of the thread. In Argentina, Dermisache challenged a set of rules that pervaded the country during periods of repressive governments and the control of Indigenous land and histories through her asemic writing. Her writing, too, underlines representation outside of the turn to language seen in 24 Euro-American conceptual projects emerging in the 1960s, a move understood by her contemporaries as apolitical during a distinctly unstable moment. Such interests indeed buttressed those of the European avant-garde, but I argue her meaningless forms and in turn, dematerialization of the textile, interrogated such systems of power and called up the concerns of censorship as much as they pushed against the repressive regime that used language to define, name, differentiate, and order bodies as a way to maintain power over the social parameters of the country. This can be perceived simultaneously as a political gesture in its inability to be co-opted by or used against the state, but also as mirroring a historical situation wherein Spanish colonizers attempted to erase, both physically and in the cultural imaginary, the existence of the Indigenous peoples in the country. To conclude, textiles mediate a modernist investigation into geometric abstraction or forms that are delimited in an autonomous sphere and can migrate easily from European and American contexts with no kind of specificity to location. Such a statement becomes clear with Vicuña’s quipu where we can delineate how a political intervention is not only still visible but increasingly necessary. Furthermore, these three artists and the periods in which they work tackle the complicated dynamics guided by Western imperialism, as much as they operate within a legacy of European colonialization. The three chapters are therefore not merely case studies but rather work together to grasp how textiles were taken up in different capacities, shedding light on the local, but also the broader concerns occurring within the discourses of art history. If the work of Pape, Vicuña, and Dermisache made visible the entanglements of the global and local, colonial and Indigenous forms through the evocation of textile, my dissertaion seeks to illustrate the complex nature of these mediations. 25 Chapter 1 Re-weaving Brazilian identity in the face of dictatorship: Lygia Pape’s embrace of Indigenous forms 1.1 Introduction Lygia Pape, the only printmaker in the group, sought to adjust the subjective and rough handmade technique of woodcut printing to the objectivist and abstract language of geometric-constructivist art.45 —Ferreira Gullar The printed page is divided into two halves: the upper portion is broken up by the dark, horizontal lines moving across the paper, as the white of the paper peeks through; in the lower section, an expanse of black ink washes over with only traces of the block’s wood grain. Connecting these two areas together is a series of triangles that traipse down the center of the page. The carved lines of the upper portion begin their formation, with a slight offset to allow the shape to emerge more fully for the eye. At the point of division between the two spaces, two triangles meet point to point, and appear forcefully in the bottom portion, as their light outline materializes from the black expanse [Figure 1.1]. This is one of Lygia Pape’s first Tecelares or “weavings,” a series of prints that she initiated in 1956 and would continue making for the remainder of the decade. In the Tecelares, Pape began to antagonize the parameters set out by Concrete art, the movement that had reached its pinnacle in Brazil when the Swiss artist Max Bill won the sculpture prize at the first São Paulo Biennial in 1951. Through an examination of weave-like structures, Pape’s prints examined the nature of the plane, thinking through the deceptive nature of line against line to render the two-dimensional surface full of shapes and textures. Pape’s utilization of printmaking, 45 Aracy Amaral, Constructive Art in Brazil: Adolpho Leirner Collection, (São Paulo: Melhoramentos de São Paulo): 152. 26 as observed by Ferreira Gullar – significantly, the poet who spearheaded the move from Concrete art into neoconcretismo, a term now synonymous with Brazilian modernism – points to the distinct way that Pape utilized woodcut, a form that deviated somewhat from the abstract paintings and sculptures being made by her contemporaries. As she explored the spatial reality of various shapes and dimensions, she simultaneously began a trajectory of her career that would become apparent in these proto-neo-concrete explorations. This move moreover paralleled a more heightened awareness of the country’s natural landscape and cultural diversity. As part of the Grupo Frente in Rio de Janeiro, Pape sought to reference not only the diverse population of her city, but also the marginalized populations that lay beyond the cosmopolitan setting, including the Carioca favelas.46 The choice of peroba wood for her prints, with its distinct grain, drew attention to the exploited territories of the Amazon.47 Over the course of her career, Pape’s practice essentially turned from modernist abstraction to an overt engagement with the Brazilian political situation. Indeed, Pape’s practice can be traced, in part, to her particular adaption of political rhetoric following the emergence of the military dictatorship that took over Brazil’s government in 1964, grappling with the way the body became mired in various forms of containment and manipulation, especially as she was imprisoned for a period of time. In the 1970s, she began her Ttéias or “web” series, which further exemplified her interest in textile forms and the limits of Brazilian identity. She asked her students to move through forested spaces to interweave string and twine among the trees, 46 Carioca identifies people and things from Rio de Janeiro. 47 As highlighted in the Introduction, the Kayapó have gained international significance for their long struggle against the Brazilian state in an effort to reduce environmental destruction. See William H. Fisher, “Megadevelopment, Environmentalism, and Resistance: The Insitutional Context of Kayapó Indigenous Politics in Central Brazil,” Human Organization 53, 3 (Fall 1994): 220-232. 27 intertwining themselves with one another and the landscape in the process [Figure 1.2]. Interested in the status of marginal communities that had been pushed to the edges of society, politically, economically, and socially, her projects considered the phenomenological experiences of participants, orienting them more and more explicitly toward social and political concerns. Through the mediums of engraving, installation, film, and writing, Pape’s later work increasingly grappled with the nation’s colonial history and the disenfranchisement of its Indigenous populations, especially at a moment when they faced more persecution by the authoritarian regimes. For example, Pape and Mario Pedrosa, one of the mentors of the shifting Neo-concrete movement, planned an exhibition to celebrate the material and spiritual culture of the Xingu people at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro.48 The exhibition was meant to function as a culmination of Pape’s own academic work as she completed her master’s thesis, Catiti Catiti: na Terra dos Brasis [Catiti, Catiti: In the Land of Brazil], a project meant to move against the stereotypical depiction of Brazil as a tropical paradise.49 Tracing the artist’s shift from printmaking to interactive installations to the increasingly politically motivated work in her films, Master thesis, and photomontages, this chapter aims to examine the complex relationship between form and content that revolved around references to threads and textiles in Pape’s art. Focusing especially on her Tecelares series of prints (1953-1959) and her Ttéias series of installations (1979-2004), I argue that the formal strategy of 48 Michelle Farias Sommer, “Nós, os bugres das baixas latitudes e adjacências.” Select, published February 2, 2018, https://www.select.art.br/nos-brugres-baixas-latitudes/?fbclid=IwAR38AufDP4V3wmLseZw0Dsd2HCKaKvxuL3XUu9RP0SRWYibkVUeAuIE9JFE#.Wndj8xtiSuc. Xingu refers to the eponymous river that gave its name to an Indigenous reserve, the first in Brazil and, at the time of its conception in 1961, the largest in the world. The Xingu River flows from the west-central savannah region in the state of Mato Grosso to the Amazon River Basin in the state of Pará in northern Brazil. 49 in the Philosophy Department at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. 28 “textility” she mobilized in these works functioned as a kind of theoretical or methodological blueprint. As Pape sought to address the problems facing a society under the dictatorship, as well as the imprint of Brazil’s colonial history, she harnessed textile forms and metaphors to address such relationships between form and content. As noted in the introduction, Pape’s work is often compared to artists Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, two colleagues who were part of the Neo-concrete movement, and who were instrumental in the activation of the viewer through the art object.50 There is some validity to this comparison. Like Clark, Pape sought to activate collective experiences. Clark, however, favored a model that focused on internal conflicts within the individual subject, an approach developed by her interest in psychoanalytic therapy during her tenure in Paris. Clark also remarked that she was too old to engage in Brazilian politics, leaving the country for France in 1968, where she would reside until 1976, avoiding the most repressive years of the dictatorship.51 Similarly, Oiticica with his famous parangolés and penetrables (two interactive experimentations), and active involvement in Brazil’s Tropicália movement, would move to New York by 1967, 50 Pape had a series of small exhibitions in the 1990s in Brazil (namely Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo) and would be featured in exhibitions on Neo-concrete art. Interventions in the public realm are frequently associated with Pape’s contemporaries Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, artists who have more considerable international renown as representatives of the Brazilian avant-garde and have been featured in recent multiple solo and collaborative exhibitions. In 2014, MoMA featured the first comprehensive exhibition of Lygia Clark’s work, “Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988” and in 2017, the Whitney Museum of Art featured the first US retrospective of Hélio Oiticica’s work, titled. “Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium.” In 2007, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, featured “Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color,” an exhibition that published alongside it, a seven-volume catalogue of the artist’s work by Mari Carmen Ramírez. 51 See Anna María León, “Lygia Clark: Between Spectator and Participant,” Thresholds 39 (2011): 45-53. León makes a compelling argument that as part of the middle class, Pape and her family might have been in favour of the initial coup d’etat. Further, the author signals that Clark’s work was more in line with participation in art versus a political participation in art. 29 spending time in London, England, though eventually returned to Brazil in 1978.52 By contrast, Pape remained in Rio de Janeiro for the entirety of her career, using her work to elicit connections to the political sphere through the body’s negotiation of space. She spent time traveling throughout the country, focusing on the Amazonas region, and teaching in several universities in the state of Rio de Janeiro.53 Despite such a prolific career, only two solo exhibitions Lygia Pape: Magnetized Space (2011) and Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms (2017) have showcased the variety of contributions that explored the changing dynamics of Carioca culture and identity done up until her death in 2004.54 Even then, there is a tendency to focus on her connections to Oiticica and Clark through the comparisons in the Neo-concrete movement. Still, the relative dearth of literature on Pape cannot be explained solely by the notoriety of her Brazilian colleagues alone, or the fact that they lived in Paris and New York and therefore gleaned a wider audience. Rather, my hypothesis is that Pape’s particular engagement with Brazilian Indigenous forms and content—such as woven baskets, hammocks, and bodily designs commonly seen by members of the Kaiabi, Kayapó, and the vast Tupi language populations—has rendered the formal specificity of her work less legible to audiences in the Global North.55 52 Many of those who participated in Tropicália would leave Brazil, such as singers Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso. They moved to London when declared “enemies of the state” by the Brazilian government. Mario Pedrosa left to Santiago de Chile and began the Museum of Solidarity of Salvador Allende, collecting work that promoted the Socialist government and its leader. 53 From 1972-1985, she taught semiotics at the Universidade Santa Úrsula and was appointed a professor of Fine Art at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro in 1983. 54 The retrospectives that have been most recently exhibited are Lygia Pape: Magnetized Space was on exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain (2011); Serpentine Gallery in London, England (2011-12); and the Pinocoteca do Estado de São Paulo in São Paulo, Brazil (2012). Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms was on exhibition at the Met Breuer in New York City, NY (March– July 2017). 55 55 Tupi-Guarani is one of the largest language group with twenty-one Tupi-Guarani languages being spoken in Brazil by 33,000 Indigenous peoples. Aryon D. Rodrigues classifies that the 30 To understand how Pape’s engagement with textile forms connected to Indigenous histories, the chapter will examine her relationship to various art historical contexts also concerned with indigenismo that would shape Brazilian modernism and later developments. The Tecelares are not often celebrated as examples of neoconcretismo, or acknowledged as contributions towards the nonobject, a term that acknowledges the burgeoning works among members of the Grupo Frente. Yet, Pape continued her focus on the local when she developed the Ttéias that took her from the two-dimensional weavings to three-dimensional space, where she negotiated new formal and socio-political concerns. Pape’s attention to the diversity of groups in Brazil is not common in artworks from the 1960s and 1970s. However, what is unique in both series is the adoption of the formal materials of textiles in the title (weavings/webs) and in their visual elements with the evocation of woven objects like the baskets and hammocks, and Tupi-Guarani family is made up of the following languages: Amanaye, Anambe, Apiaka, Arawete, Asurini do Tocantins (Akwáwa), Asurini do Xingu, Ava (Canoeiro), Chiriguano, Emerillon, Guaja, Guajajára, Guarani Antigo, Guarani Paraguaio, Guarawo (Guarayu), Guayaki (Arhe), Hora (Jora), Izoceño (Chane), Kaiwa (Kayova, Pãi), Kamayura, Kayabi, Kokáma, Kokamiga (Cocamilla), Lingua Geral Amazônica (Nheengatu), Lingua Geral Paulista (Tupi Austral), Mbia (Guarani), Nandeva (Txiripa), Omágua, Parakanã, Parintintin, Siriono, Surui (Mujetire), Takunyape, Tapiete, Tapirape, Tembe, Tupi-Kawahib (Tupi do Machado, Pawate, Wiraféd), Tupinamba, Turiwára, Uruba, Wayami, Wayampipuku, and Xeta (Serra dos Dourados). Before colonization, the Tupi dominated nearly the entire length of the Brazilian coast while the Tapuia (a catch-all term for non-Tupis, primarily the Jê language people) resided in the anterior. The Guaraní are a group of culturally related Indigenous people who reside in Paraguay, southern Brazil, and parts of Argentina, Uruguay, and Bolivia. The Guaraní language is one of the two official languages in Paraguay. “Relações internas na família lingüística Tupi-Guarani,” Revista de Antropologia 27-28 (1984-85): 33-53. Part of this inability to situate Pape’s interest in Indigeneity is the control of the archive, where such aspects of her work are not encouraged. In Europe there is the constant connection to the establishment of concrete art in the region (an emphasis made by the artist’s archive), as well as the complexities of identity that have shaped Brazil have seemingly escaped how the artist grappled with an interest beyond Rio, focusing on the artefacts and histories of such groups that exist in the cultural imaginary as much as they continue to thrive today. 31 the incorporation of broader discourses within Brazilian modernism that touched on the colonial legacy of Brazil. The concern for such center and periphery discourses linked within modernism, as Brazil was seen as a copying rather originally producing ideas, bridges what the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade named an Antropofagia of ideas in 1928, a term reutilized forty years later in 1968 through the Tropicália movement.56 In its most basic definition, Antropofagia translates to “cannibalism.” However, Oswald presented the concept to the art and poetry milieu to support the metaphorical consumption of native and foreign forms that produced cultural products uniquely Brazilian in nature, and further, referenced what Brazil had become stereotypically known for in the European imaginary: tribal cannibals.57 Oswald’s writing emerged at a moment where the country was undergoing a renewed political independence and cultural emancipation; thus, the establishment of an authentic Brazil or an autonomous modern art would hinge on the broader notion of Brasilidade.58 As Styliane Philippou has noted, Brazilian national identity was rooted in an idea of racial mixing, with Brazilian culture being an amalgamation of the European and the tropical. The term Brasilidade thus emphasized distinctions between the Global North 56 Following popular monikers, from this point forward, referred to as Oswald—”Andrade” is often used to name poet Mário de Andrade (no relation). 57 Most famously, the German Hans Staden, while working for the Portuguese, was shipwrecked and held captive by the group for nine months. His rescue by the French and return to Germany in 1557 led him to publish The True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World, America, a book that documented his survival among the cannibal group who mistook him as a Portuguese soldier, and thus an enemy. Subsequently, he produced woodcuts of distinct experiences and ritual acts he had endured during his time among the Tupinambá, including images of cannibalism. Other famed 16th century depictions of cannibalism in South America were in Theodor de Bry’s Voyage to America (1590) and Jean de Léry’s History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Also Called America (1578). 58 See Styliane Philippou’s article, “Modernism and National Identity in Brazil, or How to Brew a Brazilian Stew” National Identities 7, 3 (2005), 245-64. The author articulates how national identity was defined as rooted in race mixing, a cultural amalgamation of the European with the tropical. 32 and the Global South. Pape was not unlike her peers, then, in embracing a kind of Brasilidade, but she aligned herself more with a heterogeneously Indigenous identity than the Afro-Brazilian language that was seen with samba in the Tropicália movement. Keeping in mind Pape’s concern with the various governmental policies that further of marginalized Brazil’s Indigenous populations during this period, how might her work be interpreted as an effort to promote social and political change? To what degree did Pape’s formal interest in certain textile forms align with her advocacy of marginalized groups? Social and artistic movements such as Tropicália indeed arose during the most intense years of the dictatorship, as the Indian penal colonies were put in place, and as the the government attempted to relocate favela residents to outside the major cities.59 An interest in the composition of Brazilian identity was indeed at the political forefront when in 1972 the NGO Conselho Indigenista Missionário emerged, and pro-democracy activists realized the damage that resulted in attacking the government’s maltreatment of Indigenous peoples through investigations by significant international authorities such as the American Red Cross.60 Beyond the proposed exhibition with Pedrosa, Pape wrote in a letter to Guy Brett in 1988 that she was working to defend the Amazonian nations such as the Ianomami, Macuxi, and Maiongon in the north of Brazil and on the border with Venezuela, as “they live in the most dangerous part of our country: there are cruel farms, gold mines, big fires [destroying] the forest, and the Indians are 59 Favelas exploded in the 1940s due to Getúlio Vargas’s economic policies, and by the 1970s, the dictatorship tried to move these residents to more remote areas. Cidade de Deus is one of the more famous examples. See Bryan McCann’s Hard Times in the Marvelous City: From Dictatorship to Democracy in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). In the introduction, he discusses how favela residents were moved, not for their benefit, but to profit from the land development in the city. 60 CIMI: The Indigenous Missionary Council. Jonathan W. Warren, Racial Revolutions: Antiracism & Indian Resurgence in Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001): 84. 33 being killed…”61 Pape undoubtedly sought to consider the limits of Brazilian identity during a tumultuous moment that saw the vast forced “disappearance” (or attempted genocide) of broad sections of the Indigenous population in addition to political dissidents by the military regime. Moreover, her Tecelares and later Ttéias produced under these moments demonstrated the difference and conflicts, such as the move away from the formal concerns of the Global North that occurred with the shifts from Concrete to Neo-concrete programs, and as Oswald’s concepts of Antropofagia were further evoked. Broadly, artists working under the period of dictatorship focus on the violent political situation, first through the lens of Tropicália. For pape, her work came at two pivotal moments, one in which artists were first concerned with moving against Euro-centric abstraction; and in the second, issues of censorship and forced disappearance plagued the country and forced artists to speak metaphorically against the government. For example, on a hot morning on December 14, 1968, Jornal do Brasil published on its front page, “Dark clouds. Temperature suffocates. The air is not breathable. Strong winds invade the country.” This metaphor announced the arrivals of censors and new sanctions imposed on the Brazilian press.62 Thus, Pape renegotiated the conception of modernism within Latin America and the international context while simultaneously situating her work as an intervention into marginalized populations, seen in her engagement with various spaces throughout the city, but also through her references to Indigenous textile designs—voices that were being ignored in Brazil. Only through 61 Lygia Pape: Magnetized Space, 263. 62 Zuenir Ventura, 1968: O ano que não terminou (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1988), 288-289. See Claudia Calirman, Brazilian Art under Dictatorship: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio, and Cildo Meireles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). She discusses how this laid the groundwork to begin the boycott of the 1969 X São Paulo Biennial by artists and countries. 34 understanding the multiple processes of marginalization that occurred during this period can we see how Pape’s work evolves to take on the larger issues facing the country. She begins with a formal engagement of the Tecelares and towards the end of her career, focuses on the marginalized spaces around Rio de Janeiro, highlighting issues of poverty and the repercussions of colonialism and slavery. The following chapter therefore tackles the historical period of violent repression from 1964 to 1985 that would result in politically-charged art forms first by poets and artists under Tropicália (circa 1967-68)—a movement that was inspired by the rhetoric of its predecessor, Antropofagia, of the 1920s.63 Questions this chapter seeks to answer are: to what degree did artists and poets under Antropofagia first rehearse a primitivist logic secured in the European avant-garde? But also, how did Tropicália (influenced by Antropofagia) provide the possibility of a fragmented and self-conscious methodology? Did Pape’s work undertake cannibalization of Indigenous cultures and textile forms in a way that perpetuated a colonizing mode of appropriation? Or did she successfully harness textile forms and metaphors against European culture as a political act or a mode of circumventing the dictatorship and censorship? How did artists and poets (and artist-poets, like Pape) navigate the troubled terrain and persistence of colonialism under dictatorship? How might we understand the place of Indigeneity within Brazilian culture? Despite the long duration of colonization and systemic genocide, there is no Brazil — or concept of Brazil — without Indigeneity. Therefore, this chapter will include a careful analysis of the Indigenous textile metaphors imbued in Pape’s art as a response to her 63 While Tropicália would formally end in 1968, associated musical groups continued to play in Brazil and abroad to protest the government. 35 political and literary environment and the government’s persistence to colonize Indigenous spaces throughout the country. In providing a complete overview of Pape’s artistic production in the late 1950s, the connections between Brazilian identity and Indigeneity, the relationships among text and textile become more evident.64 That is, through understanding how Concrete poetry, Antropofagia, and textiles were interwoven together we might further understand the how her work approached the vexed terrain of Brazilian identity in the 1960s and seventies. 1.2 Tecelares: Establishing the local The Tecelares, produced between 1953 and 1959, vary slightly from a regularized 30 x 45 centimeters. Their production over a length of time sees a transformation from blocky prints to airier, wiry examples of engraving. Earlier iterations often featured more color, exploring the capacity of Concrete art via printmaking, with bold, demarcated shapes of rectangles and circles. Pape would later produce reliefs that mimicked such spatial patterning seen in the Tecelares. By 1956, however, such shapes lost their opaque status in the prints, and rather the designs allowed the creamy white of the rice paper to seep through via the vertical and horizontal lines that cut across. Additionally, the Tecelares lost any distinction of color, and she resorted to using only black paint. Pape reflected in 1975 that these Tecelares were meant to take her from “the 64 Language, textiles, and Indigenous history hold a distinct relationship and are ignored in Adele Nelson’s discussion. She addresses Pape’s use of printmaking yet does not thoroughly examine the approach to the materials Pape mobilized for the embodied and experiential form of knowledge. The work’s phenomenological aspect, Nelson argues, was grounded in the relationships between the figure/ground and design/support. Also, while this characterized Pape’s connection to the Concretism group in Brazil, her utilization of a peripheral medium and technique, alongside the manifestation of textiles that arises, sees the artist in a more prescient approach often ignored. “Sensitive and Nondiscursive things: Lygia Pape and the Reconception of Printmaking” in Art Journal 71, no 3 (2012): 26-45. 36 traditional organization of the category ‘printmaking’ to real space—a phenomenological transition.”65 Her observation reflects an interest in, and a burgeoning of, the Neo-concrete movement and the Nonobject cemented by Ferreira Gullar’s propositions. Indeed, the artist published a statement on printmaking in the Sunday supplement of the Jornal do Brasil only a few pages from the Neo-concrete manifesto. It was in her 1959 statement on printmaking where she established how the medium worked within the nature of neoconcretismo. The woodcuts transcended mechanical space to connect to the external environment. For Pape, she saw this as a way to parallel the formal and political concerns taking place in Brazil. The development of the Tecelares and the shift to the Desenhos signaled an adjustment within Pape’s aesthetic concerns — one that moved toward a geometric simplicity and subsequently allowed for an assessment of the tension occurring within the frame, a tactic in line with the endeavors taken up in the Neo-concrete manifesto. The manifesto, signed by Pape, saw the expansion of the picture plane as operating outside of any theoretical apprehension and toward an execution that allowed for an expression “of the complex reality of modern humanity inside the structural language of new plasticity.”66 A few months later, the publication of Gullar’s “Theory of the Nonobject” would play an indispensable part in understanding the new approach to the picture plane as he argued how the rupture between the frame and the base were an attempt at limitlessness —or a liberation from conventional cultural 65 Ibid., 88. 66 Amílcar de Castro, Lygia Clark, Ferreira Gullar, Reynaldo Jardim, Cláudio Mello e Souza, Lygia Pape, Theon Spanudis and Franz Weissmann, “Manifesto neoconcreto,” first published in 1959 in Jornal do Brasil, Ibid., 82. 37 and artistic frames —that allowed for the possibility of the nonobject.67 This overall transformation of Concrete art into neoconcretismo came from an aesthetic disjuncture between a careful calculation of geometry and the notions of freedom and unpredictability, or when broken down further: intellectualism versus sensuality.68 Pape’s work produced during her engagement in concretismo shows attentiveness to the geometric form, but with noted consideration to their relationship to the picture plane, bridging the Concrete/Neo-concrete divide. The Neo-concrete concern with space is evident in the Tecelares as they evoke the declarations made by the manifesto: “‘because the artwork is not limited to occupy a place in the objective space – but transcends it [to establish] a new meaning – that the objective notions of time, space, form, structure, color, etc. are not sufficient to understand the work of art to realize its ‘reality.’”69 Gullar’s theoretical projects and the production of nonobjects by the Neo-concretists further pushed participatory objects and performance-based works into the 1960s. Pape reached certain conclusions towards the picture plane that then manifested in the prints; the latter were examples of the unity of construction with the “vital and organic relationship between positive and negative.”70 The composition of the prints exemplified the varying configurations of either vertical or horizontal lines coupled with investigations of geometric shapes interfacing one another on the plane. Printed generally only once or twice on 67 Ferreira Gullar, “Theory of the Nonobject” in Michael Ashbury, “Neoconcretism and minimalism: On Ferreira Gullar’s Theory of the Non-object,” Cosmopolitan Modernisms, pages 170-173, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. 68 Alexander Adler, “The Brazilian Form” in Art in America, October 12, 2011; https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/playing-with-form/ 69 Amílcar de Castro, et al., “Manifesto neoconcreto,” 82. 70 Lygia Pape, “Gravura: Depoimento de Lygia Pape” [On Printmaking: A Statement by Lygia Pape], originally published in Jornal do Brasil, Sunday, March 22, 1959, p.8; in Lygia Pape: Magnetized Space, 87. 38 rice paper because of the vibrancy that resulted in not flooding the block with paint, the Tecelares shifted and morphed to uncover varying degrees of negative black space that are exposed by the artist’s employment of a peroba woodblock – a native Brazilian hardwood. The material, with its relative inexpensiveness and accessibility, further localized the connection to both Brazil and specifically Rio de Janeiro, as the medium varied from the painting and sculpture typically produced under Grupo Frente and Ruptura artists.71 As Pape noted in 1959, “I became fascinated by the characteristic texture and veining of each type of wood… I am still dazzled by the printed pores, or the white carved out from the template, and the final print.”72 She discussed that she always worked with the grain of the wood and refrained from using top wood, as it did not allow for the real character to shine through.73 Additionally, she highlighted how the black and white space is negotiated and comes into play, writing that the black is the printed color, surface, or virtual space, whereas the white lacks color and provides a hollowness and “real space.”74 The Desenhos held a similar tension around space but focused more on angled horizontal and vertical pencil lines that in their multiplicity would produce a vibrancy and tension on the page.75 Often with a higher degree of negative space than the Tecelares, the Desenhos shifted focus towards the interplay of the lines on the paper’s material surface rather than emphasizing the grain of wood. Her drawings and weavings begin to evoke textile-like objects, especially in the context of hammock and basket designs found in certain Indigenous groups like the Kayapó and Kaiabi, 71 Nelson, “Sensitive and Nondiscursive Things,” 28. 72 Pape, “Gravura,” in Lygia Pape: Magnetized Space, 85. 73 Ibid., 86 74 Ibid. 75 The Desenhos and Tecelares emerge before the Ttéias and indeed, become the forebears to the later work. 39 who live in the state of Mato Grosso. Basket designs and weaving for the Kaiabi were important among both sexes: men become skilled in twilled-plaited baskets and woven club handles while the women learn to spin and weave cotton.76 Becoming a skilled weaver was a requirement for marriage and a source of pride and prestige in the community. Designs featured on baskets incorporated mythic entities, threads, paths, or animals and were often taught by the men to the women, in order to be included as interwoven designs for hammocks. Women used the ‘twilled’ technique and were able to produce more complex geometric designs. Transmission of knowledge around designs came from within one’s family, where young men practiced designs from their male relatives. The example of the thirty different designs made by the Kaiabi can be seen in how Pape approaches printmaking [Figure 1.3]. The vast expanses of black paint seen in early iterations of the Tecelares show little paper and at the same time, the geometric lines might mimic or abstract certain designs first utilized by the Kaiabi. Designs, like those found in baskets or hammocks, held similar importance when it came to body paint.77 For example, Kaiabi men paint their bodies with the designs found on their woven baskets, linking identity, prestige, and a more vital relationship to the group through bodily designs. The Kayapó use red paint uniformly to cover the parts of their body that came into contact with the ambient world such as their calves, feet, hands, forearms, and sometimes 76 Simone Ferreira de Anthayde, Aturi Kaiabi, Katia Yukari Ono and Miguel N. Alexiades, “Weaving Power: Displacement and the Dynamics of Basketry Knowledge amongst the Kaiabi in the Brazilian Amazon,” 249-274, in Mobility and Migration in Indigenous Amazonia: Contemporary Ethnoecological Perspectives, (NewYork: Berghahn Books, 2009): 264 77 Hammocks are made in a variety of ways, echoing the materials and techniques specific to the different states of Brazil. Most hammock manufacture employs a variation of weaving, even within Indigenous communities despite the introduction of more mechanical loom-based approaches since the sixteenth century. See Inga Wiedemann, “Brazilian Hammocks,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 104, 1 (1979): 105-133; and Hubert Schmitz, “The Hammock Industry,” in Technology and Employment Practices in Developing Countries, (London: Routledge, 1985): 125-141. 40 the face. The trunk of men’s body, however, can be covered in black or with patterning based on animal or fish species, while women cover themselves in a more simple design element of stripes or spots done through stamping with the rind of a fruit or painting directly onto the body by a stylus constructed from a leaf’s center rib. Women paint intricate geometric designs with unique compositions on all infants; after weaning, boys ceased to be painted this way while girls might continue to be painted by mothers or grandmothers.78 Patterns found on women were mimicked among the group rather than featuring unique designs for infants, suggesting a shift in the focus on the individual to the communal.79 Like the patterns found in basket weaving among the Kaibi, the bodily patterns and color hold importance for the Kayapó. The black paint makes up most of the intricate designs and covers only the central region of the body, as well as the cheeks and forehead.80 Considering Pape’s attention to Indigenous groups in the Amazonas region, as well as film projects that focused on Brazil’s Indigenous groups, it is likely that her ‘weavings’ operated as an early inclusion of peripheral populations who faced maltreatment throughout the twentieth century. 78 Terence Turner, “Social Body and Embodied Subject: Bodiliness, Subjectivity, and Sociality among the Kayapó,” Cultural Anthropology 10, no. 2, Anthropologies of the Body (May 1995), 143-170. Men paint men and boys (at least from the time the latter are inducted into the men’s house), and women paint women and girls (in earlier times before the general use of clothing, collective painting sessions were held every two weeks or so and were the main activity of the women’s age sets during most of the year). 79 Ibid., 151. The women’s style used for infants thus emphasizes individuation as the result of a prolonged and intense interaction between a socializing adult and a child, who must patiently submit to the process of being configured in to a cultural defined unity, while the adult men’s and women’s style emphasizes collective shared, culturally stereotyped identities produced through communally organized social activity. 80 Black is a significant color choice, as the word also means ‘death’ and thus, the use of the color associated with a reversion to a natural state incompatible with normal social existence and during hunting, a black band replaces the red one across men’s eyes to signify the destruction of the other. Ibid., 152-153. 41 It is here where Pape’s work made a pivotal disruption. The Tecelares drew on the tensions of modernism through the geometric approach seen in these prints as they simultaneously negotiated the national narrative around identity. Moreover, she engages with the concept of Antropofagia that first encouraged a consideration of Brazil’s Indigenous origins. Featured in the center of Oswald’s “Manifesto Antropófago” [Antropophagite Manifesto] (1928) is an illustration by the artist Tarsila do Amaral of her figure Abaporu, a Tupi-Guarani word that translates into “man who eats man.” The seated being features a disproportionately small head with large feet anchored to the ground and is flanked by a teeming cactus and a bright moon [Figure 1.4]. It was in Oswald’s earlier “Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil,” where he awakened such notions around the Indigenous populations of Brazil that were centered on moving away from European logic and intellect, thus Abaporu’s small head, and interest in the natural and authentic world, articulated by the monstrously-large feet. His point in both manifestos was that Brazil had not imported its culture from the European continent, rather through the title “Pau Brasil,” Oswald makes evident that it was the Portuguese who depended on Brazil. Pau Brasil, or Brazilwood, signified a native hardwood that was one of the first resources exported by the Portuguese and concurrently made extinct. Just as Oswald and Amaral pointed to the symbolic ingestion, so too does Pape through her use of peroba wood which connected to a local consideration of materials and peoples across Brazil. Artists who later adopted these texts return to canibalismo as a method to ingest outside influences to produce a uniquely Brazilian form. Pape further digested and consumed what Oswald provoked in his later 1928 declaration, “The spirit refuses to conceive a spirit without a body. Anthropomorphism. Need for the cannibalistic vaccine. To maintain our equilibrium, against meridian religions. And against 42 outside inquisitions.”81 Through this approach of highlighting the body’s intricate process – both as the hand engraves the wood and acts as a personal connection to the work and the local environment, perhaps more closely aligned with handicraft – Pape continued Oswald’s dismantling of what he saw as imported “religions of salvation.” These “meridian religions” referenced the divisions between the body/soul, native/foreign, and modern/primitive which were dualities constructed during the colonization of Brazil. Thus, in this passage and in the broader manifesto, there is a direct challenge that Brazil was not simply a muddy copy of European culture when it underwent civilization – rather the necessity for the cannibalistic vaccine was to remedy such interpretations and devour European culture; which, for Oswald was the formation of distinctively Brazilian modernism.82 That is, Pape’s work joined both the Concrete movement that founded itself on an abstraction first established in Europe and the ingestion of these principles to provoke a sense of historicity that would come to define her practice within Neoconcretism.83 She countered the notion of the ‘primitive’ in order to understand tactics taken by those marginalized and Indigenous populations making up Brazil. The lines carved into the peroba wood offer insight into the style of geometric abstraction of interest in Brazil. It renounced the modernist interests of European and North American artists and this denial served as the locus for what may be considered a “Brazilian 81 Oswald de Andrade and Leslie Bary, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” Latin American Literary Review 19, 38 (1991): 39. Bary explains the use of “meridian” religions as religions of salvation… Meridian as a dividing line seems, in the context of the manifesto, to connote the divisions between body/soul, native/foreign, and so on, which Oswald is attempting to dismantle. Ibid., 44, footnote 14. 82 Jessica Hemmings brings up similar ideas in her book, Yvonne Vera: The Voice of Cloth (Heidelberg, Germany: Bettina Weiss Verlag Kalliope paperbacks, 2005, and she discusses the undervalued (and thus overlooked) nature of cloth. 83 Concretism and Concrete Poetry were considered international art movements that would have specific factions (such as concretismo) in Latin America. 43 Art.” In the specific divestment from previous models of abstraction, Pape’s Tecelares illustrated the historical concerns couched in Oswald’s manifesto. His writing went against the invasion of Portuguese interests not through a refusal, but the metaphorical consumption of “otherness” as a way to empower Brazilian identity. His writing established connections to the specificity of Brazilian history, later embraced as part of a modernism intent on calling attention to the country’s heritage. By the 1960s and the emergence of Tropicália, his cannibalism of cultures would be employed in poetry, music and art to unite populations and highlight a collective Brazil through metaphors that went against the government’s political gestures. Pape’s commitment to expanding national identity came through in her work as it embraced local and international concerns through an artistic praxis. In the Tecelares, the virtual and real space marked by the black ink and white paper promotes concern for the artwork as much as the viewer. The prints demonstrate a break with concretismo through the interplay of an Indigenous interest in forms of weaving and bodily design and the utilization of the locally sourced peroba wood, despite having qualities that made it a difficult medium to handle. Not only did she embrace the phenomenological space, but she moved away from privileging of any distinct positions, providing a nuanced understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s theories. The Tecelares were guided by an interest in a dynamic space and a consideration of a specific body, a preliminary approach to what would come in her work. This inclusion of Antropofagia characterized a new strategy of cultural emancipation to set Brazilian production against a European legacy, as well as liberate forms from other hierarchical relationships previously 44 instated.84 By employing peroba wood and its grain, and in turn, various intersection and working lines, Pape plays with the weaving of the lines carved into the block of wood to provide the final iteration. The Brazilian material grasps the attention of the viewer, engulfing the prints with its notches and grain that seep through and are made evident through the thin pieces of rice paper. The wood grain marks the paper, acting similarly to the ingestion called up by Oswald. In one such early Tecelares from 1957, the grain is overwhelmingly present in the composition [Figure 1.5]. It appears as though the wood has been painted on directly, until a wavering and subtle diagonal line pierces the wood from each corner. However, rather than making an “x” in the middle, she offsets two smaller crisscrossed lines to establish a rectangle shape in the middle of the paper. Such action is nearly indecipherable because of the black expanse that makes up the middle section, with other lines from the grain imprinted upon the paper. On the left and right-hand side, the vertical lines of the wood grain fill the paper, and in so doing, lend a weaving characteristic. It seems that the lines have all connected to manifest the Tecelares, yet still it is indecipherable whether it was the wood or Pape’s marks that enacted the final product. The encounter speaks to her interest in propelling forward what she saw as specifically Brazilian forms, materials, and concerns through her artistic production. The connotations of the wood as raw material are intrinsically linked to the country’s history, as they are — in this case — with Pape’s art making. Pape first approached printmaking through the introduction of the metaphorical textile – the engravings that symbolically represent weavings, only for the artist to uncover her visual poems that would then shift into the Ttéias – large and engulfing projects that consume the 84 See Susan Martin and Alma Ruiz, eds. Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Hélio Oiticica, Mira Schendel (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000), for a discussion on the role Antropofagia played in Brazilian art from the 1960s onwards. 45 individual in a new capacity. Over time, the weavings move from the static form in the prints to the wires strung at heights to provoke final metaphorical embodiments of the textile, echoing woven hammocks hung off the floor.85 Her interest in the gesture of weaving or medium of textiles links to the broader import of artistic traditions that did not stem solely from an imported modernist leaning, rather the designs that arrive in the Tecelares and later, the Ttéias, had a basis in the forms seen in the weaving and body painting of various Indigenous groups in Brazil. Pape’s aesthetic and written poetry connected to marginalization wherein they play with the expectations and patterns of perception, drawing attention towards techniques and populations that went largely unconsidered by her contemporaries. For example, Oiticica’s interactive Parangolés and Tropicália installation are a few of the projects produced that sought to explore the margins of society, and even then they focused on the favelas within Rio de Janeiro, but he did not fully consider the practices of Indigenous populations. The advancement of an interactive relationship within the printed field via Pape extends such arguments that the work achieved a non-discursive form of knowledge.86 In the visual poems, interactive books, and even the Ttéias that arrived later in her artistic oeuvre, Pape endorsed ideas first put forth through Antropofagia and continued to build on such ideas throughout her career. Such a relationship is based first and foremost on the continued acknowledgement of Indigenous forms that she sought through the use of the Tecelares and later Ttéias but necessitated more significant considerations around the relationships drawn between knowledge-making, writing, and textile-based practices. 85 The Ttéias also look much like the shed of a loom, and particularly the “harp” of a jacquard head loom. See “Unmakings,” accessed September 20, 2020: http://unmakings.blogspot.com/2013/06/inspiring-punch-cards-for-looms.html 86 Nelson, “Sensitive and Nondiscursive Things,” 28. Nelson describes how the Desenhos and Tecelares were activated to achieve a sensitive and non-discursive form of knowledge, “creating new types of conceptual spaces to boast a phenomenological conception of knowledge.” 46 1.3 Placing the nonobject in Brazil The art historical scholarship around Brazilian modernism tends to focus on the establishment of Concrete Art in the country via the first São Paulo Biennial in 1951.87 But the movement, which would gain traction throughout the 1950s and form a brief coalition between artists in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, would fall apart by the end of the decade, as the Carioca program in Rio de Janeiro held stronger theoretical principles under Pedrosa and Gullar, and were combatted by Paulista theorist and artist Waldemar Cordeiro and Augusto de Campos.88 When Gullar penned the Neo-concrete Manifesto, the Carioca group were then defined by their rejection of traditional mediums: “not painting, not relief, not sculpture.”89 Gullar’s “Theory of the Nonobject” further separated the two factions as the nonobject was defined by “not anti-object, but a special object in which one brings about the synthesis of sensory and mental experiences: a body that is transparent to phenomenological knowledge, integrally perceivable, 87 Scholars who have linked Concretismo to Developmentalism include Jamie Hilder, Designed Words for a Designed World: The International Concrete Poetry Movement, 1955-1971, (Montreal, QC): McGill-Queen’s Press, 2016, and Elena Shtromberg, Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016). 88 Cordeiro was Grupto Ruptura’s main theoretician and wrote the group’s manifesto, “Ruptura” featured in Suplemento Correio Paulistano on January 11, 1953. He also wrote “O objeto” (Revista Arquitetura e Decoração, São Paulo, dezembro 1956), and “Teoria e práctica do Concretismo carioca (Revista Arquitetura e Decoração, Sao Paulo Abril 1957). See Abstracionismo, geométrico e informal: a vanguarda brasileira nos anos cinquenta, ed. Fernando Cocchiarele and Anna Bella Geiger, Rio de Janeiro: FUNARTE, 1987. Sergio Martins notes that Augusto de Campos repeatedly accused Ferreira Gullar of feigning an exaggerated antagonism for personal reasons, arguing that in reality neoconcretism was not crucially different from concretism. See Augusto de Campos, “Não adianta ser ‘neo.’ é preciso ser novo,” Folha de São Paulo (September 5, 1984); and also Augusto de Campos, “Recordando Cordeiro,’ in Waldemar Cordeiro, 1925-1973 (São Paulo: Centro Cultural São Paulo, 1983), 17-18. Constructing an Avant Garde: Art in Brazil, 1949-1979 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013): 200, footnote 9. 89 Monica Amor, Theories of the Nonobject: Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, 1944-1969, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016): 1. 47 that gives itself to perception without surplus.”90 Thus, literature devoted to the nonobject typically centers on how artists in Rio de Janeiro shifted their focus to participatory projects, concentrating on Oiticica’s proposal in Esquema Geral da Nova Objetividade [General Scheme of New Objectivity], the Bichos sculptures by Lygia Clark, and finally, Pape’s interactive books. However, this overlap between the São Paulo Grupo Ruptura and Rio de Janeiro Grupo Frente requires a stronger consideration when understanding Pape’s work, as she was not only influenced by the phenomenological aspects of art but also poetry, a concern held by the Paulista Concrete poets. Indeed, as posited by Eduardo Ledesma, the optical sense of movement often portrayed in Brazilian Concrete poetry that allowed for perception and depth to render it “object-like,” prefigured later works by the Carioca artists that followed such parameters.91 Because of his projects and wide success in the art world, Hélio Oiticica has become the center of such scholarship that analyzes the phenomenologically-based practices that exploded throughout the Sixties in Brazil.92 Lygia Clark, who was propped up by Gullar as efficiently demonstrating the properties of the nonobject through the Bichos, also gained notoriety outside of the country because of her successful collaborative work with Oiticica. Pape’s Ballet Neoconcreto n1 [Neoconcrete Ballet n1] (1958), Livro da criação [Book of Creation] and Livro do tempo [Book of Time] (1959), alongside such continued developments of O Ovo [The Egg] (1967), Divisor [Divider] (1967) and finally the Roda dos Prazeres [Wheel of Pleasures] (1968), have all found a place in the scholarship connected to Oiticica and Clark because of their Neo- 90 Renato Rodrigues da Silva, “Ferreira Gullar’s non-object, or how neoconcrete poetry became one with the world,” in Word & Image 29, no 3 (2013): 259. 91 Eduardo Ledesma, Radical Poetry: Aesthetics, Politics, Technology, and the Ibero-American Avant-Gardes, 1900-2015 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2017): 232. 92 Notably, Irene Small’s book, Hélio Oiticia: Folding the Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) has dominated the English scholarship on the artist. 48 concrete attributes. 93 Ballet Neoconcreto brought language into choreography, as she translated a poem into bodily movement [Figure 1.6]. For her book series, by contrast to Clark and Oiticica, Pape engaged the necessity of the viewer to manipulate the object. The books were separated into various components that were then placed in real lived space, augmenting the environment around them. Yet her implementation and theoretical deployment of Gullar’s, and later Pedrosa’s, writings would go unnoticed. Specifically to Pape, this includes her treatment and engagement of the nonobject as a tool to explicate the treatment of marginalized bodies in Brazil. The development of her interest in the nonobject includes the performance O Ovo, where she explodes out of a white cube on the beach, like Venus rising from the sea, or in Divisor, when children from the local favelas became physically connected by a huge blanket of material [Figures 1.7 and 1.8]. In Roda dos Prazeres, she asked her participants to place colored liquid on their tongues, confronting their expectations of flavor and color [Figure 1.9]. All these works are indications of Pape’s dedicated consideration of the body’s exploration of space and later the attention to perception evoked under phenomenology. What is essential to this discussion is how Pape not only engaged similar methods of performance and phenomenology as her peers, but also strove to consider which specific social and ethnic bodies interacted with her work and how. Monica Amor’s Theories of the Nonobject: Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela 1944-1969 traces how the nonobject developed in Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela, beginning with the 93 For Ballet Neoconcreto, Pape encased dancers in white cylinders and orange rectangular boxes. Her goal was to bring the formal elements of Reynaldo Jardim’s poem into a three-dimensional space, as the performers moved around the stage set to music. The Book of Creation and the Book of Time asked her viewers to use the various sheets of paper found in both and manipulate their immediate environment. This would move towards more phenomenological approaches with Roda dos Prazeres, a project that had different coloured liquids in a circle and asked the viewer to taste them; the flavour did not always meet the expectation of the coloured water. 49 Asociación Arte Concreto Invención (AACI) and ending with the Venezuelan artist, Gego.94 Each of her case studies exemplifies how the frame was eliminated in favor of an engagement with real space, a renouncement of the tenets of European Concrete art that relied on illusionism. That is, the nonobject broke the frame to become a “dismembered picture.”95 Mere contemplation was not enough, rather the viewer had to use the nonobject in order to reveal the sense of the work.96 This development is based purely on a rejection of exclusively European Concrete art, as seen in how Clark directly confronts the Mobius strip proposed by Swiss artist Max Bill [Figure 1.10].97 But as Amor makes clear, the development of geometric abstraction throughout Latin America was undoubtedly a heterogeneous endeavor. Beginning with the genesis of Concrete art in Argentina, she moves on to discuss the theoretical underpinnings of Ferreira Gullar’s article, “Theory of the Nonobject” through a focus on Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark in Brazil, and then finally concludes with an analysis of the metal nets of Gego, who not 94 Amor focuses on AACI as a way to understand the advent of Concrete art, namely what they saw as a revolution in form and politics in the pictorial plane. The group focused on a fragmented plane, broken down in sections and situated parallel to the wall, meant to shatter the pictorial support of figure-ground relations - a necessary step in unmasking the fallacy of illusionism. While crucial to consider the trajectory of the nonobject, my analysis is more in line with how artists harassed the textile and writing in different capacities beyond their participatory function. Amor, Theories of the Nonobject, 18. 95 Ibid., 109 96 Amor also critiques the use of ‘modern’ in the Brazilian context, arguing that “the modern did not define a period but a constant search for what suited the progressive aspirations of the country.” Ibid., 20. She highlights that the use of modern depletes the past and recent historical attempts at concisely defining the intellectual, material, and political trajectories of an epoch and a place; it remains a localized tool. 97 Swiss sculptor Max Bill won the international sculpture prize at the First São Paulo Biennial (1951), for Tripartite Unity (1948-49). The Neo-concrete group, notably Lygia Clark, responded to, and indeed rejected, Bill’s project with works referencing his Moebius strip but those that encouraged a participatory function. She first invited her audiences to make their own Moebius strips through a piece of paper and scissors in the mid-1960s. Ibid., 130. 50 only rejected the base, but mass, volume and the containment of the object as well.98 Amor is most of all specific in highlighting how such an analysis of the nonobject contends with ongoing art production today, especially concerning participatory aesthetics and the postmedium as well as tackling how such “peripheries” contend with the international circuit.99 Her approach to the nonobject centers on Oiticica and Clark’s transformation of the picture plane into a framework that required action from the viewer over passive contemplation.100 By comparison, the nonobject for Martins, in his book Constructing an Avant-garde: Art in Brazil 1949-1979, functioned to legitimize Brazilian modernism. He cites that the founding of the nonobject is based on a myth, or a story of Gullar having dinner with Clark who showed her dinner guests a new piece of work. Two interlocking painted wooden plaques (the prototype for the Bichos) would become hotly debated in order to place them within a medium category, in which they realized they could not. Martins places the struggle to understand the arrival of the nonobject as one that was based in Brazil through the conversations and varying viewpoints held between the Paulista and Carioca groups. He traces the pivotal arrival of the nonobject through a consideration of Concrete poetry because of Gullar’s status as a poet. Before neoconcretismo, the Grupo Frente and Grupo Ruptura had exhibited together in 1957 at the National Exhibition of Concrete Art. The exhibition shed light on the different approaches taken by the two groups, and Martins sees the manifesto by Haroldo de Campos and the São Paulo poets as beginning to 98 Ibid., 23. 99 Amor uses the postmedium to capture the intense experimentation that occurred in Brazil from 1959-1961. Ibid., 17. 100 Clark’s work would evolve into a concern for how to relate to the self and other, as the Mobius strip transformed into Diálogo de mãos (Hand Dialogues) in 1966. 51 question the nature of the object.101 This is different from Amor because for Martins, the nonobject came into fruition through a relationship to poetry, as the Concrete poets maintained a presence in São Paulo, while Gullar and Pedrosa were in Rio. They lived in between the poetry and the visual arts. Yet for Amor, the nonobject arrived from Europe. It developed based on an understanding of gestalt posited by Max Bill, who looked to the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which were then manipulated and used by Gullar and Pedrosa. Martins posits that the interest in gestalt for Gullar and Pedrosa was neither a refusal nor a critique, rather the nonobject provided the space to keep the question of non-determination an open one. On the one hand, Amor’s text grapples with the theoretical entanglements of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of subjectivity and how it made its way into Gullar’s encouragement to reject representation, but is devoid of the historical relationship between the nonobject, Concrete poetry, and Brazilian Antropofagia. On the other, Martins traces closely the development of Brazilian modernism looking to Oiticica as antropophagically redefining the field of constructivism. If for Amor, the nonobject arrives out of a crisis of form, then for Martins it appears on the threshold between poetry and art, as a shift from concretismo to neoconcretismo occurred. Even then, as he illustrates later, the theory of neoconcretismo was based in contradiction because of the changes happening under the modernizing ethos of Brazil.102 Both Amor and Martins articulate how the nonobject arose out of a concern with differentiating the Brazilian context from the European approach, and Martins describes the nonobject as one more entwined between the Dada readymade and the Surrealist object. He makes explicit the political position of Gullar and the passage between the 1950s into the 1960s—the latter a period that 101 The Noigandres Manifesto, or the Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry (1958), was written by Haroldo and Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari. 102 Martins, Constructing an Avant-Garde, 91. 52 would be politically defining for the country and the artistic communities, and moreover highlights the tie between the nonobject with the poet communities in São Paulo, despite an adversarial position to Gullar.103 Yet, under both models, when Brazilian modernism is evoked, it is through Hélio Oiticica’s treatment of Antropofagia. Martins argues how the artist went on to cannibalize Piet Mondrian, one of his most significant modernist figures, thus encouraging the possibility as to how avant-gardism first began to enter the country. Color became used rather than seen, following Mondrian’s dictum to “free vision.”104 For Amor, the parangolés that emerged in Oiticica’s repertoire are evidence of how the nonobject handled social concerns but was concerned with the shift against representation. Thus, the employment of the parangolés was precisely the anti-structure where he saw favelas, the samba, and carnival existing; much to the same space the nonobject was to occupy for Gullar [Figure 1.11]. Martins tackles Oiticica’s relationship to Tropicália, focusing on the movement itself outside of the parangolés and penetrables.105 He notes the romanticized relationship the artist held with the Afro-Brazilian communities in the favelas Oiticica frequented.106 For Amor, she too discusses the political potential of Oiticica’s work but without the connection to Tropicália107. However, what both Martins and Amor disregard are the populations beyond the Mangueira favela. 103 Ibid., 62. 104 Ibid., 57. 105 Martins articulates a historical difference of the 1960s where Gullar’s politics were too intellectual, and Oiticica was trying to establish his voice outside the group. 106 Oiticica produced a poem and screen-print titled Seja Marginal, Seja Herói (Be Marginal, Be Heroic) in 1968. These commemorated the image of a slain Alcir Figueira da Silva, a favela resident in Rio de Janeiro who killed himself rather than be arrested by police during a bank robbery. Figures such as Alcir became heroes to many in the favelas who pushed against the government. 107 Amor, Theories of the Nonobject, 147. 53 The question is then how to place Pape’s articulation of the nonobject. Her deployment does not fit precisely within either model, particularly as what hinged her development from the Concrete to the Neoconcrete movement would be her Tecelares. The nonobject emerged as a way to counter a European hegemony of forms, especially as articulated by Amor in the various capacities in which it emerged in different countries and moments. Yet for Pape, her approach to Concrete art arrived first with the typical geometric shapes seen more broadly with the Grupo Frente, Rio’s faction of Concrete artists. The reliefs, produced in the early 1950s, took up the visual effects in which two planes appear to be in dialogue, forming independent facets of the same object. By 1956 and 1957, however, the artist shared her Tecelares series. By the time her signature was featured in the Manifesto Neoconcreto [Neoconrete Manifesto] of the Sunday supplement in 1959, Pape’s work would move from her weavings into the participatory books of the Livro da criação, and Livro do tempo (1959).108 What is important to note is the consideration of Pape’s interest in Neo-concrete arrives first through printmaking and the performance of the body to elicit early weavings.109 Neither Amor nor Martins take into consideration Pape’s work that considerably pushed against the marginalization of forms through 108 The Sunday Supplement (Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil (SDJB)) was produced between 1956-1961, and was dedicated to and designed by artists in Rio de Janeiro. It was here where Pape and the Neoconcretists published their texts. 109 This engagement with the book form during the early sixties made evident her consideration of what was happening with the Concrete poetry movement as they sought to “reinvent the book.” Her foray into the Neo-concrete movement and the Nonobject was based in decidedly Brazilian characteristics as poets focused on wordplay and the consumption of European forms to distil a uniquely Brazilian approach. Such strategies occur before Oiticica’s Parangolés in 1964, and it is clear Pape utilized the format of the book to exemplify forms of knowing and experiencing in a proto-performance aspect. She also lived and worked in Rio de Janeiro for most of her adult life versus travelling outside of the city, and even the country, as Oiticica left for New York and Clark for Paris. Pape indeed employed the Nonobject and neoconcretismo through an anthropophagic lens, and her polemic approach to art-making can be seen from the choices of wood in printmaking to her friendship with Mario Pedrosa and their subsequent, but cancelled, exhibition together on the Indigenous populations of Brazil. 54 her weavings, but also in her Divisor. These emerged at the same time as Oiticica’s parangolés but are never cited as having the same dynamic potential. Indeed they function similarly to Clark where they question the picture plane in an animated capacity, in the same way O Ovo saw Pape push through the white cube. The rejection of the frame, for Pape, had its first iteration in weaving—just not the weaving of the European variety, but that of hammocks or baskets by the Indigenous populations of Brazil. 1.4 The Legacy of Oswald’s Antropofagia: From Concrete art and poetry to the new ‘Canibalismo’ To discuss Pape’s work outside of the broader Brazilian literary context is impossible. Not only were Oswald’s texts far-reaching, but in the 1950s and Sixties, as Concrete art developed, so did Concrete Poetry. In tandem with the production of the Tecelares, Pape was also working on the Object-Poems, wherein she combined printed words with paper cut out shapes. One such Object-Poem from 1957 featured multiple pages of paper featuring a cover page. Beginning on the first page, a large circle is cut away leaving the viewer to see the series of cutaway circles below. First, the word rompe appears in typed black ink, and as the pages are turned, the circular cutouts appear with the words fronte, ressoa, rompe, ruge, amplia, and alarma, dancing around the right-hand page with the left-hand side filled with the ring of circles mimicking a speaker.110 The words seem to boom as the viewer opens the poem further, peeling away the layered speaker [Figure 1.12]. Whether the noises are emitting from the center or being drawn back in remains uncertain, but her work explores the spatial concerns alluded to in the 110 Translated to forehead, resounds, breaks, roars, wide, alarms. 55 poems of Décio Pignatari and brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, members of the Paulista Noigandres group. Pape utilized interactive techniques in an ongoing series of object poems and later, light poems. The semi-translucent nature of the paper featured prominently in the light poems, specifically Em/Vão [In/Vain or Useless] (1957) and Sono [Sleep] (1956-7), where she centered phenomenological techniques to interrogate the perspective of the viewer.111 Em/Vão included two sheets of colored paper — red and orange — that, when illuminated by the light bulb above, cast dancing shadows on the nearby walls, as the material moved in the atmosphere. Sometimes these shadows intersected when Pape overlapped the physical pieces of paper (like two interlocking planes), giving a saturated shadowed center to the two forms, which hung from invisible thread, almost seemingly aloft on their own [Figure 1.13]. While the poems reflected an awareness of the environment where they were to be installed, the Tecelares and the Desenhos also considered how light and dark expanses of color would create a spatial awareness by representing light and shadow in the compositions. The quadrilateral forms protrude into the viewer’s physical space, particularly as seen in the Desenhos with their thin paralleled lines that created three-dimensionality despite its two-dimensional status [Figure 1.14]. Pape’s approach to employing the page as a structural support for the Concrete poem was a tactic used by the Noigandres poets beginning in 1952.112 The poetry group, and later magazine, began with text on paper and evolved to phenomenologically centered performances of the poem. The written works of Décio Pignatari, and brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, would become pivotal to the establishment of concretismo in the country, and later 111 Em/Vão translates to “useless” or “in a vacuum” and further highlights Pape’s incorporation of a play on words seen within Concrete poetry. 112 Noigandres ended in 1975. 56 exploration of the nonobject.113 Coupled with the first Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta [National Exhibition of Concrete Art], on December 1956 at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo that saw the early difference in the theoretical program explored by the intellectual Paulista Grupo Ruptura and the intuitive Carioca Grupo Frente, were the watershed documents of Gullar’s “Neo Concrete Manifesto” and “Theory of the Non Object” both published in 1959, and catalyst for the breakup between the groups.114 The importance of phenomenology as proposed by Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty was an early and intrinsic part of the conversations happening between Mario Pedrosa and poet Ferreira Gullar, who had specific roles in shaping the move towards neoconcretismo.115 The form and space of the page preoccupied the Concrete artists, and they held onto a conceptual interest in the possibility of cannibalizing form and content. Ferreira Gullar’s approach to the nonobject under the Neo-concrete movement was first established through his position as a poet and would be an influential contribution. His Neo-concrete experiments started with the series Livro-Poema [Book-Poem], where Gullar cut into books to create a new arrangement of words that exist as poetry, and in turn, activated the viewer reading the text 113 The insertion of Brazilian Concrete poets into the international circuit was known as “Poundian Paideuma” — a kind of lineage they saw linked to Ezra Pound. See Marjorie Perloff, “‘Raising the Referential Temperature’: Poundian Reverberations in Brazilian Concrete Poetry” Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Politics 42 (2015): 5-38. 114 The National Exhibition of Concrete Art featured poetry by brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Décio Pignatari, Ferreira Gullar, Ronaldo Azeredo and Wladimir Dias Pino, and visual arts by Waldemar Cordeiro, Luis Sacilotto, Geraldo de Barros, Lothar Charoux, Judith Lauand, Nogueira Lima, Hermelindo Fiaminghi and Kazmer Féjer of São Paulo and Franz Weissmann, Amilcar de Castro, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Aluisio Carvão, Lygia Pape, Décio Vieira and Rubem Ludolf, of Rio de Janeiro. Aracy Amaral, Constructive Art in Brazil: Adolpho Leirner Collection, (São Paulo: Melhoramentos de São Paulo): 121. 115 While the São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro Concrete groups were geographically separate, up until the late 1950s, they shared artistically similar sentiments. 57 through a sensorial experience.116 Where Pape differed was through her medium, especially as her approach to the material portrayed an ongoing connection to language alongside the picture plane — a reflection that came preliminary to the attributes seen in the neo-concrete experiments. Amidst Pape and the Paulista poets, poetry would go beyond the bound book and would appear on posters or even as paintings or sculptures. The interaction involved in the plastic works by the Neo-concretists were similar tactics imposed by the Concrete poets as both projects were displayed on walls, hung in galleries, stenciled or even assembled from construction materials, like those blocks of wood employed first by Pape.117 By the 1960s and at the advent of the Brazilian dictatorship, the Concrete poets produced some of the most determined campaigns against the government through a connected involvement with Tropicália.118 Among these artistic factions (of which there were overlaps), there was the resuscitation of Oswald de Andrade’s notion of Antropofagia. It would be reemployed as a tactic for musical artists to imbue their work with influences around the world, as well as drawing attention to the cultural makeup of Brazil that went overlooked in that 116 Rodrigues da Silva, “Ferreira Gullar’s non-object,” 263. 117 Ledesma, Radical Poetry, 231. Concrete poetry was regularly exhibited in galleries next to other Concrete art, as in the 1977 exhibition titled ‘Projeto construtivo Brasileiro na arte (1950-1962)” held in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, demonstrating that presumed binary opposite such as ‘poetry’ and ‘painting’ or ‘Concrete’ and ‘abstract’ were, in the case of Concrete art, overlapping fields. The multi-disciplinary aspects of Concrete Poetry are notable in the sense that their books were composed as artistic projects encompassing design and printmaking and were shown in galleries, or worked as installations and sound performances, as I note in Pignatari’s “Beba Coca-Cola.” For example, in 1963, Augusto de Campos published “citycitécidade,” a poem that appears in a vertical line and simultaneously operates in multiple languages (namely English, French, and Portuguese). This string of letters, with their urban characteristics, clearly have Latin roots, and function not only on an international level but tie into the modernizing ethos and the establishment of the new capital, Brasília. Hilder, Designed Words for a Designed World, 117. 118 Haroldo de Campos found a fascination with Oswald de Andrade, and it flourished as the dictatorship era became a moment of ‘self-cannibalism.’ 58 moment. The shift into the 1960s and to the years leading into the dictatorship—noted as particularly volatile from 1968 to 1975—would have Concrete poets interested in developing and lending a specifically political program to their work. But before these tactics appeared in the 1960s, Oswald’s program had already been revitalized in smaller iterations. For example, in Décio Pignatari’s notable poem, “Beba Coca-Cola” [Drink Coca-Cola] (1957) there is the play on the word beba that leads the viewer to insert the word baba almost instinctively, or what translates in Portuguese from drink into drool. Already poignant given its commodity nature and reference to neo-colonialism, the poem suggests imported products and the Coca Cola-ization materializing in Latin American countries after World War II.119 Moreover, as the poem develops, beginning with both the seemingly innocuous and incredibly dark “drink Coca-Cola” statement, its original meaning devolves into permutations of coca-cola and beba, ending with the word cloaca, or sewer. Put to music in 1966 by Gilberto Mendes, a Paulista composer, Pignatari’s poem was not the only one set to music.120 The Tropicália singers recorded many Concrete poems as songs starting in 1968. Such an anthropophagic approach to poetry gained traction and fuller political qualities in the following years. The mutations of words and language by the Concretists can be seen when Oswald first wrote, “Tupi or not Tupi,”—a refrain that toys with the English version of Shakespeare’s prolific play quote, “To be or not to be,” —and calls forth the most familiar 119 Here we might also reconsider Cildo Mereiles’s Insertions into the Ideological Circuit, where he too used Coca Cola as a tool to circumvent censored statements in the early 1970s. 120 It was performed as “Motet em Ré manor - Beba Coca-Cola.” The work used a single chord which expands or contracts, appears or disappears within clusters and aspirated sounds, but remains as the only pitch content of the piece. The focus lies on the relentless rhythm which develops over a constant metric alternation of 3+2+2+2+2+1 beats. “Gilberto Mendes: Motet em ré menor” New Consonant Music, https://www.newconsonantmusic.com/works/page.php?Ref=AVK105 59 language groups of Indigenous populations in Brazil, made famous within and outside of the country for cannibalism. There is an apparent upset in the syntax of both Oswald and Pignatari’s lines, but one that undermines the ideology that fulfills it. Adam Shellhorse has argued that as the political moment became especially tense with speculations of a military coup d’état, that this canibalismo carried over and informed the visual aspects which the concretists included in their poems, particularly in Augusto de Campos’s poem Olho por Olho [Eye for Eye], published in 1964. The work, in its entirety, is composed of a pyramid of collaged eyes and lips from readymade materials such as magazines and cultural ephemera. The apex of the pyramid refers to the political situation in Brazil with a triad of street signs: there are three circles, the left is empty, the middle has an arrow facing up, and the final circle holds an arrow pointing right [Figure 1.15]. He alludes to Conservative Right’s ability to move forward and the inability of the Left to stop it. The exclamation point featured at the top designates danger, but the overall reference that Augusto makes is to the American dollar bill that has featured its own pyramid and the “eye of God” watching over humanity. Like Pignatari and Oswald, Augusto plays with the cooption and ingestion—or the cannibalization portrayed by the body parts—as a way to address the intrusion of U.S. capital and corporate interests into the Brazilian political sphere.121 By October 1967, others too saw the importance in this return to Oswald de Andrade. In an article titled just that, “A Volta de Oswald de Andrade” [The Return of Oswald de Andrade], in the Sunday Supplement of the Jornal do Brasil, philosopher and screenwriter Luiz Carlos Maciel commented, “I am sure that, from now on, Brazilian culture will fall more and more under the 121 See Adam Joseph Shellhorse, “Subversions of the Sensible: The Poetics of Antropofagia in Brazilian Concrete Poetry,” in Revista Hispánica Moderna 68, no. 2 (2015): 165-90. 60 sign of anthropophagy in its deepest sense.”122 Such examples showcased artists’ insertions against the foreign-backed coup and how Oswald’s modernist manifesto acted as an early tool. As Tropicália emerged under the dictatorship, Oswald’s tenets were not only proposed by poets, but by artists and musicians. In the case of the song “Panis et circensis,” a misspelled Latin title translating to Bread and Circuses, musicians combined Brazilian instruments and musical genres with imported and international pop and rock sounds.123 The disjointed connections used satire to surpass ongoing censorship. In 1967, MAM Rio held the significant exhibition, “New Brazilian Objectivity,” where Oiticica’s famed Tropicália installation was featured and thus inspired the name for the movement.124 This plywood labyrinth was covered with colored fabrics and had macaws and tropical plants placed atop a sandy, pebbly ground. Oiticica defended his writings on New Objectivity, citing the term as that which considers the experience of the Brazilian avant-garde, and indeed artists experimented and transcended traditional mediums. Later, in his manifesto Tropicália, a text that would further shape the tenets of the movement, Hélio Oiticica considered how one might embrace multiple identities versus a 122 “Tenho certeza de que, daqui por diante, a cultura Brasileira cairá cada vez mais sob o signo da antropofagia, no seu sentido mais profundo.” Wall text from Tropicália - Um Disco em Movimento exhibition, Rio de Janeiro, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, August - September 2017. 123 Such a play on parody, kitsch, and sarcasm was seen with the musical approach of Tropicália wherein international rock was merged with Bossa Nova. 124 The artists featured in the exhibition were Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Rubens Gerchman, Lygia Pape, Glauco Rodrigues, Carlos Vergara, Flávio Império, Nelson Learner, Mario Peruse, Sérgio Ferro, and Waldemar Cordeiro were the artists and critics features in the exhibition. Caetano Veloso used Oiticica’s work to name the musical movement. Tropicália - Um Disco em Movimento exhibition, Rio de Janeiro, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, August - September 2017. 61 “universalist myth of Brazilian culture…based on Europe and North America.”125 Indeed, there is a nod to Oswald here. Concurrently, Pape was working through various mediums that portrayed her interest in the ethnic heterogeneity of the Brazilian population, using films and performance to elucidate the cultural makeup of the country. In one of her earliest videos, Trio do Embalo Maluco [Crazy Rocking Trio] (1967), three cubes, colored red, blue and white are clustered together. Two Afro-Brazilian men break out of these structures (with Hélio Oiticica in the third and final box), and in so doing, have the physical space to begin playing musical instruments most often associated with the samba [Figure 1.16]. Such references to this musical genre were relevant first to Oiticica and had become a significant part of those musicians participating in the Tropicália movement, as samba was a decidedly Brazilian form that, at the same time, acknowledged the contribution and influence of African cultures. While Pape never directly alluded to the politics in this 125 Hélio Oiticica, “Tropicália,” published in Patrick Frank, ed. Readings in Latin American Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004): 178-179. Oiticica wrote further, “In reality, with Tropicália I wanted to create the myth of miscegenation—we are blacks, Indians, whites, everything at the same time—our culture has nothing to do with the European, despite being, to the day subjugated to it: only the black and the Indian did not capitulate to it…For the creation of a true Brazilian culture, characteristic and strong, expressive at least, this accursed European and American influence will have to be absorbed, anthropophagically, by the Black and Indian of our land, who are, in reality, the only significant ones, since most products of Brazilian art are hybrids, intellectualized to the extreme, empty of any meaning of their own.” Miscegenation was offered by the Portuguese as proof of their open-mindedness towards race. The policy was intended to minimize African and Indigenous presence in the country, by creating this myth of racial democracy that promoted a European identity by encouraging Afro-Brazilians to seek social validation exclusively outside of their racial group. Racism is a fundamental issue in Brazil, and while by law, racial or color discrimination is a criminal offence, for many years advertisements for jobs included the phrase ‘boa aparência’ (good appearance), meaning that only light-skinned people need apply. For discussions around race in Brazil see: Yuko Miki, Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Marshall Eakin, Becoming Brazilians: Race and National Identity in Twentieth-century Brazil, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017; and Tshombe Miles, Race and Afro-Brazilian Agency in Brazil, London: Routledge, 2019. 62 performance, she discussed the politics of violence within culture as one that leads towards a transformation. In her 1968 text titled “On Madness and on Culture” she articulated the integration of three words: ‘creation,’ ‘madness,’ and ‘fantasy.’ Their interplay with one another turned ‘fantasy’ into a protection against the rational mental organization that turns an individual into a rational subject, and then renamed it ‘madness.’ Madness was associated with freedom, or “a triggering element of CREATION.” Thus, she established ‘creation as totality. Madness as total act’ to bring forward a notion of “Creationmadnessfantasy” where, rather than seek the safe mold familiar to him, “man is prompted to reflect, challenge reason criteria, and deal with the dynamics of things.”126 The Trio do just this as they engage with ‘madnessfantasycreation’ in literally pushing against the white cube that contains them and samba culture. By breaking out against the structures that control them, the triggering element of ‘creationmadnessfantasy’ coincided with the notions around Antropofagia and the Tropicália manifesto of Hélio Oiticica, with its suggestion of transformation and ultimately, change. Her text further highlighted an interest in the structures of control forced upon bodies within the public sphere and her interest in imposing awareness and in such, transformation. 1.5 Ttéias: Embracing the local In an undated diagram-map, Pape sketched out the city of Rio de Janeiro noting only four areas in the city: Bonsuccesso in the Northeast, Madureira in the Northwest, Vargem Grande in the Southwest, and Leblon in the Southeast. A net appears in an elongated rectangle as cross-hatched diagonal connect these four neighborhoods, becoming a two-dimensional ttéia scrawled 126 Lygia Pape, “Da Loucura e da Cultura” [On Madness and on Culture], June 10, 1968, republished in Lygia Pape: Magnetized Space (Madrid: Museo Reina Sofia, 2014): 241. 63 across the page [Figure 1.17]. Pape, in 1979, published a statement on the development of the Ttéias, the web structures that first had their appearance in the wooded area of Parque Lage in the city. She writes on how the teia will connect areas of the city, manifest in the natural landscape, and act as a conceptual device.127 Pape’s concern for her ‘alienated’ students to think about how others lived has a resonance to the Neo-concrete movement that arises in this mock map. It connects the industrious, lower class area of Bonsuccesso to the favelas of Madureira, to the burgeoning condominiums among the forest in Vargem Grande, to the most expensive areas of real estate in Leblon. Her work thought about the far-reaching areas of the city and how to connect seemingly disparate populations through a collaborative project of craft weavers, assistants, and herself. It evoked the famous line from Oswald de Andrade’s manifesto that had crucial implications as it called out all Brazilians, but also Indigenous cannibals, or Brazilians and Europeans who were united through cannibalizing: “Anthropophagy alone joins us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.”128 The Ttéias arrived after the Tecelares and the Desenhos and can be understood as three-dimensional developments of these two earlier explorations that Pape completed in 1950s and early 1960s. The Ttéias alongside many other works produced in the 1960s and 70s, further engaged in the highly popular interest of phenomenology that arrived in Brazil with the writings of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and would be taken up in multiple applications by theorists, poets, and artists beginning in the 1960s. The webs forced an exertion onto the body, participants were asked to move around and between the hanging wires, getting caught in these webs. Bringing participants into the picture plane — an approach that arrived more famously in Divisor— again 127 Pape originally refers to the project with the word “Ttéias,” but throughout the text, she writes the word “teias.” 128 de Andrade and Barry “Cannibalist Manifesto,” 38. 64 occurred in her experiments in Parque Lage. The forested area sits at the base of the hill where the prominent Cristo Redentor [Christ the Redeemer] statue resides and also houses the Escola de Artes Visuais [School of the Visual Arts], opened despite the dictatorship in 1975, arguably ignored and remained free from censorship.129 In the photos that document the earliest experiments, students are seen threading thin pieces of white rope around tree trunks to materialize webs. At torso and neck height, the ropes cause the participants to dance amidst the webbing, bobbing in and out [Figure 1.18]. One such photo shows a young man staring directly at the camera as he threads the material around a vast trunk, while the remainder lies in a spiral shape, a play with primordial forms and perhaps a nod to the nature of Indigenous interventions [Figure 1.19]. What first began as these wavering strands of rope draped across trees, would morph into more extensive explorations with wires that would take place in her studio and classroom. The web project connected to Concrete poetry and ultimately to Pape’s interest in cannibalizing language and forms. In the statement on the Ttéias, Pape highlights the origin of this wordplay on teia—web or weave—or “the new principle of moving upward or downward, to and fro, not restricted to a single point of view.”130 The word téteia translates to “something delicate or pretty,” but also can denote a child’s toy, specifically dolls.131 Through the addition of 129 The Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage (EAV) emerged to go against the Institute of Fine Arts (Escola Nacional de Belas Artes at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, established in 1891. Theorists and artists who have worked at the EAV include Hélio Eichbauer, Lina Bo Bardi, Mário Pedrosa, Alair Gomes, Roberto Magalhães, Celeida Tostes, Gastão Manoel Henriques, and Paulo Herkenhoff, among others. “Apresentação” Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, http://eavparquelage.rj.gov.br/a-escola/ 130 Lygia Pape, “Ttéia. Área aberta” [Ttéia. Open Area], 1979, in Lygia Pape: Magnetized Space (Madrid: Museo Reina Sofia, 2014): 370. 131 In the middle of the twentieth century, téteia could also be understood as a slang reference of young women. 65 an extra ‘t’ and addition of the accent, Pape incorporates the wordplay that distinguished Concrete poetry. Ttéias are not only webs but have an additional element of delicateness and playfulness as seen in the dancing participants, and they connect groups and areas not always in touch with one another through such qualities. Her interest in weaving together space, as she portrays in her map, comes together to signal where she sees ‘poetic things’ happening, or magnetized spaces as she referred to them.132 Webs, for Pape, were constantly shifting and changing; vibrating in the city through the sensations evoked on Mangueira Hill where the writers and dancers meet, an area made famous artistically by Hélio Oiticica and his inclusion of the dancers in his Parangolés series.133 Both in her wordplay first seen in the poets and her understanding of weaving as an idea that can be detected by sensations, Pape expands the possibility of how Ttéias connected to an idea of a Brazilian art form. The silver and gold strands extending either from floor to ceiling or across corners of a room broadened her ideas of phenomenological experience—or vivência—that carried through the Carioca art scene with the projects of Oiticica and Tropicália.134 Vivência, according to scholar Emma Sidgwick, spoke to body-oriented culture and “arose out of aversion to the inscription of a dominant patriarchal signifying system, to be understood as the coercive order of tradition enforced by the political regime for centuries.”135 The term ultimately translates from the Portuguese to “life experience;” however, in its Brazilian context, the definition was further 132 Pape, “Ttéia,” in Lygia Pape: Magnetized Space (Madrid: Museo Reina Sofia, 2014): 370. 133 Mangueira is one of the most famous samba schools in Rio de Janeiro. 134 Paulo Herkenhoff, “Lygia Pape: the Art of Passage,” in Lygia Pape: Magnetized Space (Madrid: Museo Reina Sofia, 2014): 47. We can also think about the earlier projects produced before the Ttéias, including Trio de Embalo Maluco, which involved samba music and the three squares that each of the musicians would pop out from and play their instruments. 135 Emma Sidgwick, “Vivência: From disciplined to remade lived experience in the Brazilian avant-garde of the 1960s,” Subjectivity 3 (2010): 199. 66 nuanced and considered the processual ‘experience of living.’ Within the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé and Umbanda religions, derived from Yoruba culture, embodiment acts as a generative potential for action, particularly when considering axé and orixá. Axé is the “life force” in which events happen and holds the potential to manifest these events; humans possess this power and can manipulate it in order to enhance their situation. Orixá is defined as the personal gods, which control one’s inner person. The two terms play a vital role in Yoruban epistemology as the axé restructures and transforms the life-world in order to bring about knowledge not constituted in knowing a thing itself but revealed in relationality. Even more, the notion of a “lived experience” speaks directly to Pape’s encouragement to have her students move about such webs, just as she encouraged her viewer to move between spaces in her earlier “weaving” projects. In an interview with Federico Morais in 1975, Pape articulated how printmaking was a form of knowledge and voiced an interest in utilizing engraving as an investigation into reality and forms of knowledge, part and parcel to the expansion of dynamic space, working in what she named “verbal and nonverbal languages.”136 The body then is not passively construed but rather an experiencing agent in space especially in consideration of Carnival, celebrated actively in Rio de Janeiro, that evolved from the collective rituals of the late nineteenth century to the ongoing competitions of music, dance, and samba schools across the city and state. A reconsideration of her approach to the peroba wood wherein the grain interacts with the warp and the weft imposed on the paper provides a further connection to Antropofagia in that the wood itself takes on a cultural form of Brazil connected to the syncretic approach to art-making. Oswald’s importance 136 Frederico Morais, “A gravura como forma de conhecimento” [Printmaking as a Form of Knowledge], 1975, O Globo, Rio de Janeiro, Monday, July 21, 1975, in Lygia Pape: Magnetized Space (Madrid: Museo Reina Sofia, 2014): 92-3. 67 of how “Anthropophagy alone joins us” becomes further heightened, as the ‘us’ is all Brazilians.137 The engagement of wood, Indigenous designs in the prints, as well as looking to vivência and joining together populations through the webs highlights how Pape understood Brazilian identity. The Tecelares and Ttéias, created under a modernist paradigm, are rooted in attention and concern for populations and cultures outside the walls bearing them. This experience of living that arrived and came into prominence with the phenomenological type of experiments in the Brazilian avant-garde were ultimately rooted in the colonization of Brazil and the mass transport of slaves and their traditions from Western Africa. Despite the abolition of slavery in 1888, Africans and their descendants were still continually denied rights by the government.138 Pape expands her consideration of the Brazilian makeup by including not only Indigenous designs and attachments to weaving, but also assesses how Afro-Brazilian marginalization connects to the makeup of the population. She considers those marginalized, quite literally as we see with the outer three cities of the diagram map she made up, but also throughout her other work that calls up the importance beyond the artist’s own identity. Her concern for Brazilian culture, in its multiple iterations and explorations, is indispensable. The interaction happening through the positive and negative space unfolding in the Tecelares again occurs with the long thin strands of gold and silver wires seen in the Ttéias. Through their installation—never entirely parallel or perpendicular to the surrounding area—the Ttéias defy expectations of ever physically meeting despite its interwoven nature [Figure 1.20]. 137 De Andrade and Barry “Cannibalist Manifesto,” 38. 138 From the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Brazil encouraged European immigration for a variety of reasons. Given the end of slavery, landowners were desperate for workers, while the government increasingly hoped to whiten the formerly enslaved African population. See Jeffrey Lesser, Negotiating Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 68 The installation is both overwhelming in its resemblance to the looms first depicted with the Tecelares series, while its material qualities, much like the black and white in the engravings, call attention to an illuminated spatial capacity occurring around the artwork and its viewer. In their first iterations, she exhibited the Ttéia in corners of rooms, toying with notions of space, physicality, and the phenomenological experience of the room. What is so striking is the characteristic of the vertical loom and the titles she chose, Ttéia (webs), like Tecelares (weavings), which corresponds to a keen interest in the forms and designs of Indigenous populations. Pape’s inclusion of the body within the Tecelares and the Ttéias is a poignant parallel between what arises through weaving and bodily adornment. This connection to Brazilwood and Pape’s exertion of effort to carve and work the material, only to print geometric designs that mimic such patterns found on the bodies of Indigenous populations, further illustrates such a connection to understanding the broader implications of Brazilian identity, through a consideration of Indigenous cultural practices. In these examples, designs held specific power, but more importantly, for Pape, it was the Indigenous populations of Brazil that informed the work. The relationship of weaving or webs to the body is exemplified in body paint used by Indigenous populations. There is power in weaving arumã to create a basket or a hammock and power in painting designs on others. It is a corporal act that Pape copies in her engraving of the wood and the lacing of wires and ropes around trees or in galleries. Although the connections between the spatial references both in the aesthetic realm and in her political discussion are evident, there is a historical link made with the material qualities of the engravings, their subject matter, and Pape’s interpretation of Antropofagia. Her work began with the use of the body through extracting the wood to create a print, only for such weavings to 69 turn into large-scale webs that trapped and contained the body, asking it to negotiate different spaces. The webs started as experiments with fiber, first carried out in the forested areas of Parque Lage, and then moved to installations that captured the visual and sensorial quality of the white cube. The Tecelares and Ttéias operate between art and textiles and elucidates the qualities seen in Indigenous approaches to weaving and material as much as it exudes the approach seen in the developments out of Concrete and Neo-concrete art. Her work, too, examines the image of the Indian so crucial to the modernizing ethos of the government happening concurrently to these art movements. While at the same time developing and changing to accommodate shifts in the natural landscape, Indigenous populations and their approaches to work would begin to disappear. How then can artists rightly qualify a deeper engagement with Antropofagia when Brazilian populations would be pushed further to the margins?139 1.6 The body confronting policies Despite the celebration and integration of Antropofagia on a broad scale, it has sometimes been conflated to stand in for anything Brazilian, ignoring the specificity of the populations from which the concept drew.140 Outside of the Tropicália movement, Oswald’s Antropofagia reached other cultural facets in Brazil when the first television channel began operating and was named “TV Tupi” in September 1950, and nodded to the Tupinambá tribes. The channel, owned by Assis Chateaubriand, a co-founder of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo 139 Shtromberg documents other artists who engaged with issues around Indigenous populations in her chapter “Maps” in Art Systems, 123-154. She focuses specifically on Cildo Meireles and Anna Bella Geiger, who highlighted the plight of Indigenous workers and their dwindling land rights. However, only Cildo Meireles’ work predates the projects begun by Pape. 140 Sérgio Martins writes, “…indeed, anthropophagy has undoubtedly become an (un)critical cliché that seems applicable to all things Brazilian.” Constructing an Avant-Garde, 78. 70 (MASP) in 1947, gained acclaim with its news broadcasting and various telenovelas.141 However, despite Antropofagia’s impact on the cultural landscape of Brazil, Indigenous populations in the interior and Afro-Brazilian and mixed-race populations of the favelas and quilombolas continued to face discrimination.142 More broadly, the dictatorship did affect all populations in various degrees. Those who could leave the country did, and those who did not could be subjected to torture for dissident behavior.143 In 1968, acting president Artur da Costa e Silva enacted the Fifth Institutional Act, effectively erasing all human rights by dissolving Congress, suspending the right to habeas corpus, and supporting heavy censorship that clamped down the press, theatrical events, music, and the fine arts.144 The strengthened executive branch in power by the end of the year brought the arrests of prestigious journalists, censorship of newspapers across the country, and the 141 Elena Shtromberg, Art Systems, 94. 142 See Mary Lorena Kenny, Deeply rooted in the present: heritage, memory, and identity in the Brazilian quilombos (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2018). Her book discusses the impact of the 2,600 recognized quilombolas (Traditional Black Settlements from the descendants of slaves) on the formation of identity. Quilombolas have to prove their legitimacy to maintain their land rights. 143 A mere week into the military takeover did the government begin ordering their Institutional Acts, which would gain notoriety for one of the most severe effects of the regime’s implementation. The initial act certified their government and gave legitimacy to a new congress that represented not the “interests or will of a group, but the interests and will of a nation.” The first purge of dissidents began in the northeast of the country (seen as the center for communist activity), as the military prepared to move against those who defended Goulart, the Catholic church, and any left-leaning groups such as the communist parties. However, the information would spread of political detainment and torture inflicted upon those arrested and held in centers, but would not showcase the coup in an unflattering light. National newspapers - who were vehemently opposed to the Goulart’s presidency - celebrated the coup, as did the US government who sent congratulatory messages to the acting president, Ranieri Mazzilli. The events that unfolded over the next two years from 1964 to 1966 would further install the military government, disenfranchise any political opposition with “ineligibility laws,” and ultimately institutionalize a secure establishment of the dictatorial regime with a second institutional act that abolished all existing political parties. See Thomas E. Skidmore, The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil, 1964-85 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 144 A few months later, Supplementary Act No. 38 suspended Congress indefinitely. 71 redundancy of many university professors. With the now widespread knowledge of torture and mistreatment of political dissenters, artists had to confront the regime’s presence as the governing body.145 Pape, particularly, would feel the effects of the dictatorship; in 1973, she was imprisoned for three months for aiding political protestors. Before her detainment, Pape contributed to the Tropicália movement through her poems and artwork that held symbolic disregard of the government and walked in the 1968 protest, the March of 100,000.146 With other intellectuals, artists, and students, Pape actively engaged and supported various groups who were working against the dictatorship. The build-up to the March was based on a series of events starting with the influx of students from various socio-economic backgrounds into the university system during the 1950s and early 1960s under the presidencies of Juscelino Kubitschek and Getúlio Vargas.147 Most students were from immigrant-descended middle classes in the urbanizing and industrializing South and Southeast of Brazil. In the years just before and in the nascent development of the dictatorship, the central student marches focused on education reform and the democratization of Brazil’s education through the National Student Union (UNE). Even with the burning of the headquarters of the UNE in 1964 as a tactic to intimidate students into submission 145 The small guerrilla-like actions that occurred against the government spurred the installation of torture against all dissidents despite their social or economic status. Before, those who were middle and upper class were seen as ‘untouchable’ because of possible connections to figures in charge. This was primarily a historical phenomenon as Brazil had so recently been a slave-owning country, and during the first republic, the lower classes were seen as able to torture because of their economic status. Skidmore, The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil, 138. 146 The March of 100,000 in Rio de Janeiro on June 1968 was one of the biggest demonstrations in the country. The dictatorship quickly suppressed protests and began controlling populations more forcefully. From the March of 100,000, 81 people were detained, among them key student leaders. 147 See Bryan Pitts, “‘The Blood of the Youth is Flowing’: The Political Class and Their Children Take on the Military in 1968.” Revista Brasileira de História, São Paulo v.34, n.67 (June 2014): 1-25. 72 and with violent ends to protests at universities in Minas Gerais and Brasília, student marches continued. With the murder of high school student Edson Luís, nearly twenty-six protests in fifteen different cities occurred, including Bloody Sunday on June 21, 1968, wherein three were killed, dozens injured, and thousands arrested. The March of 100,000 in Rio de Janeiro was both in response to Luís’s death and the ongoing violence and repression aimed at students demonstrating peacefully in the streets. In response, the government pulled soldiers from the streets. For Indigenous populations in Brazil, the dictatorship further complicated their rights to land and basic equality. In 1976, the Minister of the Interior Rangel Reis announced that with the concentrated work of various ministries in Brazil, he was sure that within ten years the country could reduce the Indian population from its already dwindling 220,000 to 20,000. And within thirty years, he was confident that all of them would be “duly integrated into the national society.”148 While this announcement by Reis exemplified how Brazil approached its “Indian problem” in 1976, the treatment of Indigenous populations remained dire since the sixteenth century.149 Since the arrival of the Portuguese to Brazil’s Northeastern colonial capital of Bahia, Indigenous peoples were relegated to the lowest class of citizens in the country.150 The twentieth century saw the spearheading and support of a Brazilian modernization that would cause a 148 Warren, Racial Revolutions, 54. 149 Much has been written around the more humane treatment and forms of colonization that came with the Portuguese in Brazil versus the tactics taken by the English, French, and Spanish invasions of the ‘New World;’ yet this is not the case despite its prolific appearance in historical narratives. 150 Estimates vary regarding the population of Brazil’s Indians in the 1500s, ranging from 500,000 to over two-million Indigenous people who spoke over 100 diverse languages. Marcia Mikulak, “Colonial Subjugation and Human Rights Abuses: Twenty-First Century Violations Against Brazil’s Rural Indigenous Xukuru Nation.” Contemporary Rural Social Work Journal 8, no. 1 (May 2016): 57-78. 73 backlash and far-reaching ramifications against Indigenous tribes in the Amazon region. These groups were portrayed by the government in stereotypical and racist depictions as rejecting, rather than embracing, the shifts towards modernity. This continual emphasis on the inability of native groups to modernize and move forward coincided with the ongoing development in the Amazon state that echoed historical colonization through the government’s famous slogan: “providing land without men for men without land.”151 The new capital of Brasília buoyed the economy in the 1960s, and later the trans-Amazon highway would take its place, uprooting and disturbing Indigenous populations throughout the area. The marginalization of Indigenous peoples is often connected to an intrinsic link to the land and a longstanding resistance to assimilating within “Brazilian” identity.152 For example, Marcia Mikulak highlights how the term ‘índio’ has shaped connotations both historically and contemporarily around Indigenous identity in North-eastern Brazil as the word links the population to the lowest caste in society.153 With the abolishment of slavery in the country in 1888, Brazil sought to “whiten” its population through the homogenizing of diverse ethnicities, ultimately leading to the mestiço and mulatto national identities.154 Further to this point, was the 151 Larry Rohter, Brazil on the Rise: The Story of a Country Transformed (London: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2012), 204. 152 Mikulak, “Colonial Subjugation,” 59. 153 Ibid. “According to anthropologist Guillermo de la Pena, the term Indio referred to the peoples found in the Americas; and during Portugal’s colonial control over Brazil, the term came to define the Indian as a “lower-caste” human.” Furthermore, artists considered indigenistas focused more on the ancient heritages of cultural groups rather than depict and deal with the modern plight further highlighting the lack of awareness provided to these groups. 154 Warren, Racial Revolutions, 69. Those with Indigenous heritage were referred to as “caboclos” - a mestiço who was a poor farm labourer of mixed blood and low social class. In 1945, the Brazilian government issued a decree favouring the entrance of European immigrants in the country: “In the admission of immigrants, the need to preserve and develop, in the ethnic composition of the population, the more convenient features of their European ancestry shall be considered.” Ibid. 58. 74 establishment of the Serviço de Proteção ao Índio (SPI) [Indian Protection Service] in 1910, whose overarching goals were paradoxically to eradicate the historical memory and identity of the Indian population, to increase Indian labor in the country, and to control Indian activity and land.155 Such violence enacted on the population included the banning of Indigenous language use, cultural practices, and religious rituals; any transgressions of such laws were to be reported to SPI officials. The dictatorship argued against the existence of SPI, as it was a corrupt organization associated with the former Goulart presidency, so they replaced it with the Fundação Nacional do Índio (FUNAI) [National Indian Foundation] in 1967. FUNAI began operations intending to aid in the modernization of native populations through sanitation, medical assistance, and basic education, even as persistent attacks by biological weapons were used to eradicate whole tribes who were attempting to protect their rightful territories.156 By 1972 the dictatorship had implemented tax incentives for civilians who partook in the settlement, mining, cattle-raising, and agribusiness of the Amazon region, increasing its development. Elena Shtromberg details how resistance to the military occupation of land by Indigenous populations would give rise to unthinkable violence, including “rampant murder, pillaging, and cases of rape alongside exposure to viruses and sexually transmitted diseases.”157 Massacres that utilized the 155 Mikulak, “Colonial Subjugation,” 60. She details how SPI’s official responsibly was to “civilize” Indians by assimilating them. 156 The 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro threatened FUNAI’s existence under the Ministry of Justice. On the first day of his presidency, Bolsonaro placed FUNAI under the Ministry of Human Rights, Family and Women through a provisional measure (MP870). MP870 then transferred decision-making power over the demarcation of Indigenous reserves from FUNAI to the Ministry of Agriculture. As of September 2019, legal battles around land and widespread fires in the Amazon are ongoing. 157 Shtromberg, Art Systems, 132. 75 use of biological weapons to spread smallpox, tuberculosis, and influenza were used.158 The Aborigines Protection Society of London released a statement in 1973 on the uprooting of Indigenous communities by agricultural and mining businesses in the Amazon, arguing, “Unless the law safeguarding their homelands is enforced, the Indians will be swept away by the advancing frontier of colonization and economic exploitation.”159 Despite their claims, the dictatorship’s role in the protection of Indigenous populations remained unchanged from the previous government.160 Accounts of the period detail how the acting government claimed a deficiency in all endeavors by Goulart’s cabinet in order to legitimize their new implementations. Colonization and economic development of the Amazon increased as part of the government’s strategy at the same time FUNAI was established. 158 Ibid., 23. Shtromberg details that throughout the 1950s until the 1970s, newspapers and news programs broadcasted how construction workers attempting to build roads to connect cities and towns but were attacked by Indigenous communities, with bows and arrows – weapons used to symbolize their backwardness and reactions to modernity and civilization. In 2013, a “lost” report on the genocide of Indigenous populations during the dictatorship resurfaced in Brazil. The 1967 document is over 7,000 pages revealing hundreds of alleged crimes and perpetrators. See Jonathan Watts, “Brazil’s ‘lost report’ into genocide resurfaces after 40 years,” The Guardian, 29 May 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/29/brazil-figueiredo-genocide-report. 159 Shelton H. Davis, Victims of the Miracle: Development and the Indians of Brazil (London: Cambridge University Press, 1977): 77. This text provides a detailed description of the detrimental effects development in the Amazon region had on Indigenous populations beginning in 1940. 160 The dictatorship worked to remove itself from any remnants of the formerly “Communist” president, João Goulart. As early as 1963, many military and government officials were unhappy with Goulart’s especially leftist viewpoints, such as his support of the communist-led General Labor Command (CGT), but also the fear of labour unions, intellectuals, peasant unions, clerics, and university students and faculty as threatening to the country. Goulart was in favour of colonization of the Amazon - one of the top priorities of the government was in highway construction. Only, Goulart was more in support of the development of Brazil by Brazilians, and with growing unrest, the United States stepped in to allow American corporations to push their agendas. See Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, New York: HarperCollins Publishing, 1995. 76 Furthermore, similar to the Portuguese missions created to end the congregating of Indians and instead to promote the miscegenation, evangelization, and civilization of the Indians to generate “national workers,” the dictatorship set up Indian penal colonies throughout the country that first started with a military-style of training of the inhabitants and evolved into straight torture and murder.161 The implementation of FUNAI merely called attention to the inferiority of SPI without terminating the ethnic cleansing occurring in both the Amazon and in Northeastern Brazil. The socio-economic development of the Amazon region became a crucial objective in the 1960s, and it is clear that FUNAI was meant to keep Indigenous populations powerless during capital- and nation-building endeavors. The implementation and corruption of SPI further pushed Indigenous populations to the margins throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a time when Pape’s work would turn to projects more specifically concerned with the inhabitants of the country. Her interest in printmaking in the Tecelares explored the integration of positive and negative space, or as she articulated virtual and real space. Thus, considerations of the approaches to the peroba wood and engraving did not stop there and would develop into the Ttéias. With their integration of the body, these installations were a re-imagination of how the Tecelares began. The virtual planes on the print were expanded to include bodies in Parque Lage. Thus, her conception of virtual space moves outside the modernist paradigm at the same time FUNAI reduced Indigenous rights. And while not specific to the Indigenous body, Pape began to consider the populations that lived in this real 161 Warren, Racial Revolutions, 61-77. Like similar institutions in the nineteenth century (for instance, the Indian penal colony in Pensacola, Florida), such prisons housed Indians from all over Brazil. SPI created camps before 1967, which FUNAI then utilized until the 1980s. From 1966-1972 in Minas Gerais, prisoners in Indian penal colonies underwent a military-type training: their hair was cut, marching drills were conducted continuously, and they were forced to perform menial labour. There is evidence to suggest that many were tortured and murdered. 77 space rather than a mere focus on the possibilities of the aesthetic plane.162 The Tecelares and Ttéias more implicitly connect to textile-imbued practices such as hammocks and basket weaving. With the ramifications of colonialism, Indigenous groups and their cultural artifacts would simultaneously be celebrated as markers of national identity while being denigrated to small areas of land. Between the Tecelares and the Ttéias were film projects, like A Mão do Povo [The Hand of the People] (1975), which further located Pape’s interest in the way the Brazilian government treated its Indigenous population. The documentary was produced with complete freedom for the Ministry of Education examines how ancestral land was taken away from groups and led to the loss of Indigenous craft traditions.163 Over the course of the 11-minute film, Pape sets ceramics, patchwork quilts, and other Indigenous handicrafts against the cultural ephemeral and accessible bric-a-brac of the moment.164 The voiceover in the didactic film states how the rural artisan is “alienated from his psychological and cultural roots” and now a “consumer of the most banal kitsch. Plastic flowers, a plastic cover for the blender, the refrigerator penguin. From a natural existence, he now moves on to existence in a ‘half culture.’”165 Pape’s anti-colonial sentiments are apparent in the film, highlighting how the government has ignored cultural production in 162 Interestingly enough, projects that spoke to Indigenous groups like Fossilis, or more marginal positions of populations seen in the Ttéias, would emerge during the 1970s after Pape travelled in Brazil, and was detained by the dictatorship. 163 The film was done with total freedom despite the dictatorship. 164 In 1969, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) staged an exhibition by the same title. The exhibition presented an overview of the material culture of Brazil, gathering around a thousand manufactured objects, dating from the end of the 19th century to the contemporary era. Despite the detrimental treatments of certain populations, institutions were quick to highlight the syncretism of Brazilian culture. In 2016, MASP restaged this exhibition and incorporated Pape’s video as part of a film series. 165 Chloe Wyma, “To break through the Modernist cube: on Lygia Pape at the Met Breuer,” April 20, 2017, in The Art Newspaper. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/review/to-break-through-the-modernist-cube-on-lygia-pape-at-the-met-breuer 78 favor of capitalistic endeavors—a move only strengthened in the recent history surrounding both their mistreatment and the environmental devastation through the construction of the Trans-Amazon highway. By the 1970s, she had already travelled throughout Brazil and much of Latin America to study Indigenous groups in their local environments, documenting her experiences in writing. 1.7 Conclusion The complex and problematic identity of Brazil as a nation and body of people was of profound interest to Pape throughout the 1970s. She would produce projects such as Fossilis (1974) wherein she documents tourist ephemera at the detriment of cultural authenticity. Favela da Maré [Maré Favela] (1974-76) and Espaços imantados [Magnetized Spaces] (1982) showcased peripheral spaces within Rio de Janeiro and focused on the São Cristóvão market or the flow of life moving through the favelas, or what the artist saw as precarious forms of architecture and experiences of everyday life. In 1980, she completed her Master’s thesis with Catiti Catiti: na Terra dos Brasis, and produced a film under the same title that explored Oswald’s Antropofagia further in references to Tarsila’s Abaporu in the opening credits.166 The video wrestled with the stereotypical conceptions of Brazil such as the bikini-clad women walking Zona Sul’s famed black and white mosaic tiled boardwalk as muscled and shirtless men accompanied them. With its whimsical musical background, one that plays a light stream of 166 Bary, “Cannibalist Manifesto,” 46, footnote 19. Oswald de Andrade included in his Cannibalist manifesto this line: “catiti catiti, imara notiá, notiá imara, ipejú” which translates to “new moon, oh new moon, blow memories of me into [the man I want]. It is a poem from the Tupi language and according to Leslie Bary, the note provided in de Andrade’s manifesto “gives the source of this text as O Selvagem, an anthropological work by Couto Magalhães, a politician and anthropologist. Pape’s work connects to this poem very clearly with the full title Catiti catiti: na terra dos brasis [Catiti Catiti: In the Land of Brazil] from 1978. It was a 10-minute, 16mm film produced in black and white. 79 bossa nova, the film seems to cite everything encapsulated in the international imaginary of Brazilian culture and identity.167 The sun, sand, and samba become intimately tied to the wealthy Zona Sul—the areas of Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon—with the beaches and cabanas that dot along the coast. Interjected between the stereotypical images is an even more clichéd scene of a singular disheveled man who dances around while eating bananas.168 Dark, animal-like fur adorns him as his beard and the tangled hair on his head manically flop around. In one scene, Pape spotlights the racist practice of depicting Indigenous peoples that would appear on touristic paraphernalia such as postcards. Picked up at the kiosks that dot the city of Rio de Janeiro where one could purchase such goods as newspapers, magazines, and foodstuff, these postcards had featured on their recto various images of Indigenous persons with the verso featuring “Brasil Nativo” (Native Brazil).169 Between 1977 and 1978, the artist planned an exhibition, titled Alegria de Viver, Alegria de Criar [Joy of Living, Joy of Creating] with her colleague Mário Pedrosa that exemplified the 167 See Ismail Xavier, Allegories of Underdevelopment: Aesthetics and Politics in Modern Brazilian Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). The stereotypical depiction of Brazil in Hollywood and the colonial imaginary began first with the cannibals and then the sexy beachgoers. Eccentric Brazilian characters were present in silent movies as early as 1925; however, in the 1930s with the growth of capital investment by the US in Latin America and the beginning of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbour Policy, Hollywood movies began to be produced in earnest. For example: Flying Down to Rio (1933) with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire transformed the city in a world-renowned romantic vortex; in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), the heroine played by Audrey Hepburn falls in love with a man from Rio; and Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) gave the city a new spin, depicting it as a site for Nazi spies. 168 From 1992-1993, artists Guillermo Gomez Peña and Coco Fusco played their Couple in a Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West. The project offered visitors to see the two dressed as undiscovered people from Mexico, and for a sum of money, onlookers could pay to feed them bananas or have their picture taken. The project furthered the colonial gaze and often misrepresentation of objects inside Western natural history museums. 169 Anna Bella Geiger used similar postcards for her project Brasil Nativo, Brasil Alienígena (1977) showcasing their ubiquitous nature on the boardwalks of the Southern Zone. Lygia Pape and Anna Bella Geiger notably both studied at Fayga Ostrower’s studio. 80 profound effect the Indigenous populations had on the aesthetic field. The title took inspiration from a chapter in Pape’s thesis, Catiti Catiti, na Terra dos Brasis, and from Pedrosa’s text, “Discurso aos Tupiniquins ou Nambás” [Speech to the Tupiniquins o Nambás] (1975), and the larger exhibition involved anthropologists and archeologists to showcase the ceremonies, dances, and objects associated with the Xingu people.170 While it was unable to take place because of a fire in the institution, she continued to bring to light the cultural importance of the Indigenous populations. She never took forms that were not explicitly hers and did not utilize them in a way to evoke a folkloric Brazilian root or establish a nationalist rhetoric, but alternatively, her work explicitly evoked a nod to Antropofagia and would continue to do so through the geometric expressions of the Amazoninos and her Tupinambá series.171 The latter, a project completed in 170 Michelle Farias Sommer, “Nós, os bugres das baixas latitudes e adjacências.” Select, published February 2, 2018, https://www.select.art.br/nos-brugres-baixas-latitudes/?fbclid=IwAR38AufDP4V3wmLseZw0Dsd2HCKaKvxuL3XUu9RP0SRWYibkVUeAuIE9JFE#.Wndj8xtiSuc. 171 The Ttéias, too, did not stop with their experiments in the 1970s. She continued the work with Ttéia no.7, a series of pyramid-shaped piles of dust illuminated under an individual blue light, to a large-scale installation of Ttéia 1.c silver and gold threads that enveloped the body as it moved around and between the wires. Pape writes, “I believe aesthetics provides the ground for ethics. I was raised within this outlook. Many of the things that leave me visually dazzled are far removed from what people call the artistic context. That is why I am drawn by the Maré favela, or the architecture of poor suburban areas and street markets, or Run da Alfândega [in the wholesale district of Rio]. There is no tinge of folklore or nationalism, which I detest, in this interest. These things nourish me because they seduce me. I do not have hierarchies for liking things. It is not in museums and galleries alone that I see art. On the contrary, I feel awed when I spot beautifully creative visual objects just left around somewhere. You could say I am fascinated by form. That was what prompted me to teach architecture in urban areas, particularly the Maré favela. What drew me was that compact mass of houses on stilts. But I did not want to be a voyeur. Seeing all that, collecting photos, looking at that space from afar, but being aware of the poverty there…” Márcio Doctors, “A arte de ver pelas frestas” [The Art of Seeing Through the Cracks], 1988, in Lygia Pape: Magnetized Space (Madrid: Museo Reina Sofia, 2014): 374. 81 2003, saw items such as spheres and everyday objects—i.e. tables and chairs—entirely covered in the revered red feathers of the Tupinambá peoples.172 Lygia Pape’s work bridges a gap between the national and international discourse around modernism and later conceptualism in a unique approach through proposing a connection between Antropofagia, poetry, and textile-based projects. It provides a visual voice to those who were sidelined and persecuted with the development and employment of laws and enactments by the Brazilian government onto the population to perpetuate neo-colonialism further. In this chapter, I established how Pape used Antropofagia as a method to deal with dominant forms and to dialogue with the avant-garde. Pape’s ‘anthropophagous hunger’ can be seen emanating throughout her career. The Tecelares are a poignant point of departure in that she began with a marginalized material as a way to speak to Indigenous designs. Her hunger would further develop in film and interactive works and finalize in the Ttéias. The weavings and webs are pivotal insertions into this development of Brazilian modernism that arrived alongside the nonobject and New Brazilian Objectivity and added an element of cultural creation that paid homage to Oswald as well as to the living populations that fought for their land during the time she was working. Her method of absorption came not only from Oswald but gained momentum through the Concrete poetry movement, participatory projects, and most importantly, through an understanding of the populations who were historically marginalized. For Pape, text and textiles came together to operate not only on a formal level but within the conceptual, bridging together creative contributions rooted in a material form. Aesthetics, she argued, provided the ground for 172 The Banquete Tupinambá (2000), the table and chairs covered in red feathers, was a direct nod to a mantle first attributed to the Aztec, but in 1939, it was discovered to have come from the Tupinambá. 82 ethics. Rather than act as a mere voyeur, she maintained a commitment to and an awareness of class, racial, and economic distinctions. Oswald’s articulation of Antropofagia furthered an understanding of how language and aesthetic devices could be ‘cannibalized’ and was renewed as different artists employed the concept, such as in the Concrete poetry movement and with Pape’s projects. It is with her employment of the textile as a way to cannibalize the dominant hegemonic art forms that her work points to an ongoing dissent toward, even rejection of, Euro-American frameworks by demonstrating a form of resistance through her incorporation of African and Indigenous cultural techniques of Brazil. That is, in Pape’s series of the Tecelares and Ttéias, the reference to textile modes and forms functioned to critique (or at the very least provide an alternative) to the aesthetic colonialism of modernism; and further, it responded to the socio-political shifts that resulted in decreased rights for Indigenous populations and the beginnings of a repressive government in Brazil. Her focus on marginal communities interrogated the establishment of these centers and peripheries in both the socio-political and art historical discourses of the country. Pape foregrounded the voices and concerns of the community with the capability of the textile as both a theoretical concept and a material practice through her exploration of the formal relations of pictorial space, weaving (warp and weft) and thread as a metaphor. Ultimately, this chapter asked what kinds of threads emerged out of Concrete art and how, in Brazil, did artists begin to navigate a shift away from their European counterparts. Pape’s work had a tangible connection to Concrete poetry, but in a way that investigated the Indigenous model of weaving as a method to link to Antropofagia, as well as Tropicália. In the Tecelares and Ttéias, the textile condition provided an interpretation of the phenomenological location of the body in space. Pape’s pedagogical style questioned invisible labor and livelihood 83 in leading her students outside of their comfortable confines of the southern zone of the city in order to lend a perspective outside of their own. Her detainment and activity in the political arena speak to Pape’s engagement with marginalization, an interest that would lead her to study Indigenous populations throughout the country. The establishment of neoconcretismo and the later affiliations with Carioca groups saw a definition as one not only uniquely Brazilian, but as local to the regions. Pape’s engagement with wood and its parallels to the famous manifesto, along with the marginal media of printmaking, was the basis for her interventions. What further highlighted her concepts of Brasilidade was a concern for Indigenous designs and approaches to weaving, seen in the planned exhibition with Pedrosa. According to the ideology of the dictatorship, Indigeneity troubled Brazil’s modernization. By bridging poetry, the nonobject, and an Indigenous element, Pape regarded these overlooked groups and established their importance in art forms. Weaving and webs developed as a response to a geometric abstraction not based in the European origin, but rather spoke to a uniquely Brazilian perspective. 84 Chapter 2 “El Quipu que no recuerda nada”: Activating fiber in Cecilia Vicuña’s quipus 2.1 Introduction After that moment I have lived mostly in English. The coup disintegrated language… the disintegration of my speech began when that axe blow was inflicted on us. If we are to be made into litter and cast-offs, then fine, I assume that post, I am garbage and a cast off, and that is my language, the exploded fragment.173 —Cecilia Vicuña In 1972, Cecilia Vicuña moved from her native country of Chile to attend the Slade School of Fine Art in London, England. The artist, who was also an active poet, was to study painting during her year abroad. However, with the social and political unrest happening in Chile, her return would be impossible because of the violent golpe that took place, leaving the country under control of a military dictatorship from 1973 until 1990. Vicuña’s remark speaks to the multilayered upheaval in the country. In an interview conducted with the artist in 2003, Vicuña articulated the chaos of that moment. Detailing the censorship that had befallen the country, she recounted how the laws and regulations meant to curtail any lingering support of the former Socialist President Salvador Allende, had “disintegrated” her speech. Following this event, she remained in London for three years in a condition of physical and linguistic exile. But if this quote alludes to her forced migration in the wake of a political event, it also speaks to Vicuña’s artistic practice at this moment—the ways she increasingly migrated between text and textile. If the golpe left Vicuña unable to address political problems in verbal form, she learned to adapt and implement a new language—that of the thread. As a practicing poet, Vicuña 173 Cecilia Vicuña, email to Rose Alcalá, 10 February 2003, in Rose Alcalá, editor, Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Press, 2012): 26. 85 draws on the ambiguities and complexities within written and spoken communication through the inclusion of multiple languages like Spanish and English, but also through languages far more unfamiliar to the broader audience, like the quipu or the Mapuche language of Mapundungan. In the inclusion of fiber and an Indigenous language native to south-central Chile and parts of Patagonia, Vicuña located the materiality of language that is inherent in its verbal qualities. The movement between the two devices of communication (language and textile) is exemplified in the project Palabra e Hilo [Word and Thread] (1996), where a piece of thread physically inhabits the book of poetry, moving between the words as though sewn into the book itself [Figure 2.1]. Such interactions and exchanges between language and thread occur in this accordion style book constructed of sandy-colored, thick construction paper with two holes near the center, making visible a cotton cord moving in and out, that could be bundled at the front and closed with a tie. She writes: “The word is a thread and the thread is language. Non-linear body. A line associated to other lines. A word once written risks becoming linear, but word and thread exist on another dimensional plane. Vibratory forms in space and time. Acts of union and separation.” It continues: “The word is silence and sound. The thread, full and empty. The weaver sees her fiber as the poet her word. The thread feels like the hand, like the word the tongue.”174 Her poem exemplifies the migration of thread across media and draws connection to fibers and poetry as interconnected to elucidate what language might now be able. Another of 174 Original translation: La palabra es un hilo y el hilo es lenguaje. Cuerpo no lineal. Una línea asociándose a otras líneas. Una palabra al ser escrita juega a ser lineal, pero palabra e hilo existen en otro plano dimensional. Formas vibratorias en el espacio y el tiempo. Actos de unión y separación. La palabra es silencio y sonido. El hilo, lleno y vacío. La tejedora ve su fibra como la poeta su palabra. El hilo siente la mano, como la palabra la lengua. Cecilia Vicuña, Palabra e Hilo/Word & Thread (Edinburgh: Morning Star Publications, 1996). 86 Vicuña’s projects mimics the cord moving through the paper as well. In an edition of 500, La Realidad es una línea [Reality is a Line] (1994) presents a simple piece of thin black thread that writes the title onto a sheet of paper. Set also with an accordion fold, the paper can be closed and tied with extra string [Figure 2.2]. Such qualities are mimicked in the project Hilur (1997), where Vicuña combines the Spanish word for thread “hilo” with the English word “lure” to fashion a small scroll of smooth, writing paper. Done in ink, the handwritten text by the artist reads: “los hilos/ se hacen palabras” or “the threads / make words” [Figure 2.3]. These “book” projects are only a few examples where Vicuña has explored the relationship between text and textile. Dating back to Vicuña’s initial meditations on this relationship in 1966, when she first “composed” a work titled A Quipu that Remembers, Vicuña focused on the textile’s most basic element: the thread.175 Referencing the historical specificity of Indigenous populations in Chile, she grounded her practice in the Andean region’s distinct employment of the quipu, a mnemonic device consisting of multiple knotted cords coming off one central string. Many of Vicuña’s earliest works included some aspect of fiber in them, whether woven in, typed upon, threaded through, or merely draped in the environment. In 1972, the artist strung up blue thread throughout her bedroom in Concón, calling it El Hilo Azul [The Blue Thread]. This would be, what she called, her first weaving in space. She writes, “Tired of my room’s normality I have criss-crossed it with a blue thread… taut and geometrical as a sky to communicate with other worlds.”176 Vicuña’s practice has thus constantly traversed between two mediums, one of writing and the other through the textile and illustrates how each bolsters the 175 This project did not exist in material form, only as an imagined quipu. See Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Threads of Protest: Cecilia Vicuña’s Concepts and Quipus” in Fray: Art + Textile Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 109. 176 “Stupid Diary, January 22, 1972” on El Hilo Azul (1972). Accessed 20 December 2016. http://www.ceciliaVicuña.com/quipus/elhiloazul 87 other, asking language to open the possibilities of the thread as much as the fiber itself gives a materiality to the written and spoken acts. Thread and weaving were analyzed via the first chapter through Pape’s prints, performances, and installations that utilized properties established in the Concrete Poetry movement and imbued her work with qualities referencing Antropofagia. Most notably, such ideas emerged in weavings and webs that mimicked the bodily, hammock, and basket designs of Indigenous communities. She would advocate for the social conditions and treatment of Indigenous populations and Afro-Brazilians within Brazil, further instilling ideas set forward by Oswald de Andrade in his manifesto that proposed art forms as separate from the European models delivered to the continent. Pape investigated the forms of weaving through printmaking, combining mediums that were reflected in the bodily designs of the Kayapo and the basketry patterns of the Kaiabi, Indigenous groups in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. In later projects, Pape enacted aspects of phenomenology wherein she looked to the developments happening among her Carioca milieu and imbued such sensory aspects into cloth and then, the webs. The Tecelares projects explored a variety of materials ranging from simple rope to the silver and gold wires corralled into corners and throughout rooms. The influence of Indigenous populations extended throughout her career as did the state of existence within the favelas. Thus, Pape’s exploration of those populations considered to be at the ‘margins’ of society remained from the 1950s until the end of her career. With the second chapter, I turn now towards the material deployment of the thread alongside language, but a specificity wrapped up more resolutely in the theme of Indigeneity. This chapter foregrounds the autochthonous forms within Chile in conjunction with Vicuña’s poetry, fiber materials, and songs that consistently reference such histories. For her, the 88 importance of thread lies in its active and perhaps implicit engagement with Indigenous culture. The transformations of the thread in Vicuña’s practice and the catalyst in employing the quipu as a hallmark engage a consistent connection to Indigenous history and showcase how it emerged during a particularly tumultuous moment both for the artist personally as well as for her country. As I will discuss, Vicuña’s biography plays an important role as does her experience of Chile before the coup d’état, especially in the formation of her work. The chapter situates the important place for poetry, not only for Vicuña, but for the country more broadly, and especially in its relationship to Indigenous populations. I discuss the policies towards the Mapuche under the Allende government that were quickly undone under the dictatorship, as well as Vicuña’s vested interest in poetry and activism apparent in her formation and participation in Tribu No, a group of friends who came together to support Socialist ideals through forms of poetry. There is also a broader interest in poetry within Chile that Vicuña follows through her work. To connect her work to the more widespread protests happening under the Pinochet regime, this chapter will look to the works such as the Palabrarmas (c. 1977), Sabor a mi (1973), and Precarios (1964-68). These projects, alongside various quipu installations, employ both language and fiber in various instantiations. It is not merely an attempt to speak for a specific population, but in utilizing textiles and threads within her poetry, she provides an alternative approach to invisible knowledge, experiences, and the capacity to remember. Her employment of knotted strings attempts to carve out space for the Mapuche and other Indigenous groups native to Chile, to recall a history of colonization as well as its ongoing role in the country. The interest in recognition further complicates what is instilled in such a term like Los Desaparecidos [The Disappeared], perhaps asking us to understand it as both a political disappearance and one that happened (and continues 89 to happen) through ecological devastation. Tying her work together is the reliance on thread within art and poetry; thus critiquing how voices were silenced during colonization and perceived political dissidence. Therefore, the questions this chapter aims to answer pertain to Vicuña’s incorporation of language and textile and its use as a space of reflection in earlier projects before the golpe. By approaching her work in this capacity, I will consider Vicuña’s expatriate status and how her identity became further cemented in the violent restructuring of the Chilean political and artistic sphere that led to focus on the desaparecidos as both those who went missing under Pinochet and the legacy of colonization. This chapter will articulate how Vicuña’s work frames the situation of Indigenous communities both within and outside Chile, and how her use of quipu allows her to redress such disappearances and marginalization. In considering this approach to Vicuña’s work, how can language and politics — under burgeoning questions around and in particular at moments in Chile that was undergoing immense shifts first toward dictatorship and then toward neoliberalism — further imbue the thread, especially one meant to embody a knowledge that is not always available or remains invisible. 2.2 Re/Framing Vicuña and her practice Art historians and literature scholars alike have discussed Vicuña’s integrations of poetry and thread, focusing on her forms and the lineage from which they stem. Her biography, because of this, has become of great interest to many scholars. For example, in a 1996 essay by Catherine de Zegher, Vicuña’s homeland functions as a kind of lore and the landscape appears quite romantically within her work. De Zegher sets up a scene where two children watch with wide-eyes as Vicuña, at the riverbanks, traces string over the water. The curiosity of the children 90 against Vicuña’s almost silent and meditative installation of the cord foregrounds an odd mystical quality to the work. Similarly, in Julia Bryan-Wilson’s more recent 2019 publication, Vicuña’s early childhood and teenage years become reflections of the artist’s innate interest in Indigenous artifacts that, “immediately gripped her imagination” and led her to continue to research the quipu at a young age.177 And the artist too brings her history into the work, especially the idea of displacement that stems from her firsthand experience of the inability to return home after the golpe that kept her out of the country for almost seventeen years. According to Vicuña her changed status as a cast-off under the eyes of the new government in Chile, almost at the same time she arrived in London, England, also connected her more deeply to her homeland. Her work shifted radically during those years, with paintings, fiber projects, and writing centered on the fallen heroes, the disappeared, and the vulnerable populations who were forced to live under a dictatorial regime. The idea of cast-offs and garbage entered into her quipu projects as she walked the streets of London for found material that would play a role in her Journal for Resistance developed in 1973. Her biography thus connects her more deeply to the idea of place. With the overthrow of a democratically-elected president and the punishment of those who supported him, Vicuña turned her attention to the history of colonization — another form of silence. Indeed, while she employed threads, the quipu emerged more fully in the wake of Allende’s demise. Language too would shift in multiple ways as Vicuña worked with more political strategies and artistic groups back home had to operate under Pinochet’s censorship. Language indeed becomes a potent tool for Vicuña. Moving between different languages — at once spoken and material — helped the poet-cum-artist present herself as such an 177 Bryan-Wilson, Fray, 111. 91 interstitial subject, one that was exiled but continued to focus on a connection to the homeland despite having lived away since 1975. She will forever remain a “woman of the Andes.” ⁠178 She worked closely with the Andean Mapuche population when, in 1998, she edited an anthology focused on Mapuche poetry titled ÜL: Four Mapuche Poets. The book, celebrated for its support of Indigenous poets, takes its title ül from the ancient practice of song and poetry. The central theme running through the Spanish and Mapundungun texts are connections to the land and Mapuche culture.179 Thus, language for Vicuña is powerful and with the publication of ÜL, it is apparent the ways in which the artist has helped cultivate a space for Mapuche poets. Vicuña has been written about in one of two ways: with an immense focus on her biography as a driving factor in her art production or through an analysis of her poetry with little attention spared for her aesthetic forms. Therefore, in this section I highlight the limitations that exist within each and propose an understanding of her migration and the migration between language and textile as a way to frame her practice as one that centers on the marginal and the disappeared. For Vicuña, this becomes enacted by the Indigenous body, and because of her chosen exile, her own body. What is lacking in these texts is the acknowledgement that her work is biographical and necessitates the personal story for its potency. Indeed, her art relies on its relationship to language and to her poetry, and therefore, all three: poetry, art, and biography, become so deeply intertwined. The mutable states of thread, specifically as first linked to the 178 Vicuña has used this term when she discusses her choice to leave England and return to South America. She would settle in Bogotá, Colombia, because of her self-exile from Chile. 179 The text has accompanying translations in English and features texts by Elicura Chiduailaf, Graciela Huinao, Leonel Lienlaf, and Jaime Luis Huenun. ÜL: Four Mapuche Poets, edited by Cecilia Vicuña (Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary Review Press, 1998). 92 land through the precarios, and then through the quipu, are instant reminders that these cords, like Vicuña, originate in Chile. In her compilation of poems El Quasar, Vicuña writes, “A poem only becomes poetry when its structure is made not of words but forces. The force is poetry. Everyone knows what poetry is, but who can say it? Its nature is to be felt, but never apprehended.”⁠180 Pointing to the distinctions between the energy of a poem versus the words on the page, Vicuña emphasizes the specificity of encountering a poem and its impact upon the reader. Through the action of engagement, in tandem with the material language of which poetry is made does she locate its impact. The two are inextricably bound as the written text by Vicuña moves into the realm of art object, or is incorporated into the object and thus emphasizing the “poetic” qualities. Yet, we must also consider Vicuña’s multi-continental status and employment of multiple languages. Many scholars cite the international reception of her work as an important characteristic. Such a factor certainly shifts the modes of understanding for the viewer based on the language of the reader. In the moment that Vicuña left Chile and began working in Europe, there was the turn to globalism, a phenomenon that would expand extensively in the 1980s. It is at this time that Vicuña’s work is published more widely in Europe, North America, and in Latin America (although not within Chile). Scholars Néstor García Canclini and José Alvergue provide a framework for this globalized nature of language and poetry, with Alvergue focusing specifically on Vicuña’s practice. Canclini makes the point that while migration and travel were synonymous to the new nature of the artist, an imbalance arose within transnational exchange that would not 180 Cecilia Vicuña, QUIPOem, translated by Esther Allen (Hanover: NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 55-54. 93 recognize those outside of metropolitan canons.181 The most provocative aspect of his argument appears when he argues that only when Latin American nations ended their productive infrastructure did the democratization process begin and military dictatorships fall. This situates Vicuña in an unfortunate position. At the same time her work gains momentum in the globalized jet-set nature of the artist, the return to democracy in her native country takes a focus away from international production, an ironic situation given Vicuña’s Chilean nationality but liminal existence. However, globalism, is indeed necessary to understand Vicuña’s work in the first place. For Alvergue, the term is built into the nature of Vicuña’s poetry. He points to the necessity of Indigenism as a method to critique the realm of Western forms that were favored as productive during the turn toward globalism. Indigenism becomes a metaphorical deployment to analyze the participatory democracy that Alvergue sees as present in Vicuña’s work. What Canclini and Alvergue provide in their analyses is how Vicuña’s work must be read with a transnational ear.182 Considering how linked her practice and biography are, I would like to augment her metaphorical use of Indigenism proposed by Alvergue, as one where she places herself as an interlocutor of such cultures. Vicuña’s relationship to Indigenous culture is also one that is more complicated than that of Pape or Dermisache’s references. For example, the artist identifies as Indigenous and has traced her lineage to a maternal grandmother’s connection to the Diaguita group from northwestern Argentina and northern Chile. ⁠ Therefore, the scholarship on the artist either considers the metaphorical deployment of Indigenism in her poetry or situates the artist as an Indigenous woman who deploys textiles because of their historical usage in the area - a locator of her position despite her self-imposed exile. What Alvergue and Canclini provide is 181 See Néstor García Canclini, Imagined Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 182 José Felipe Alvergue, “The Material Etymologies of Cecilia Vicuña: Art, Sculpture, and Poetic Communities,” Minnesota Review, 82 (2014): 59-96. 94 the framework under which globalization was key to providing a more international approach to the artist/poet. However, in utilizing Canclini’s argument of who was supported and who was not, it becomes apparent that for those Mapuche poets supported in the ül project, internationalism would never be in their favor. Rather, my emphasis is how Vicuña operates in a space that necessitates her biography for locating her work, but in locating herself as a woman of the Andes, she is aligning herself directly with an Indigenous body rather than employing the idea metaphorically. She is undoing the international status provided to her by placing herself squarely within her country. So we might then question the role of co-opting autochthonous forms in a moment that sees an undoing of democracy. Migration, beyond globalism, needs to be defined if we are to understand how the impact of settler occupation has pushed Indigenous cultures out of their homelands. Under this guise, colonialism and neo-colonialism must be regarded as defining towards migration, but not in the celebratory position seen under globalization. Further, Vicuña’s transitory nature is brought in line with her migratory utilization of going between text and textile, with an emphasis on the latter to consider the capability of the material to become a potent, yet nonverbal, actor. Like Alvergue, Meredith Clark tackles Vicuña’s poetry production in the 1970s as a continuation to the programs put forward by the vanguard and the meta-poetic, an argument that aligns with Chapter one’s discussion of Pape’s adoption of Concrete Poetry in the 1950s and revival in Tropicália. Though Alvergue analyzes Vicuña’s distinct incorporation of language via Mapudungún, Clark focuses on the presence of a weaving metaphor incorporated into the lines of the work. The weaving technologies of the warp and weft become active through her awareness of spatial orientation of the words; the two structures are embedded literally into the writing. Through the discursive interlacing of speech elements, Vicuña enacts the metaphoric 95 intertwining of fibers that are twisted together to create a culturally relevant product. This act is bolstered through Vicuña’s incorporation of multiple voices, as illustrated Palabra e Hilo wherein the interwoven quotes bolster Clark’s assertion of how weaving is inextricably linked to the processes of communication. In both Clark and Alvergue, the analysis falls predominantly on Vicuña’s poetry, focusing more on the final product versus the act of writing itself. Here we might reconsider the earlier quote that poetry’s “nature must be felt… but never apprehended.”⁠183 The use of language/s is pertinent to Vicuña’s practice as a transnational poet. But how does the act of writing interplay with both her metaphorical and literal deployment of the media surrounding textiles? Other analyses, like that of Juliet Lynd, tend to fall between those provided by Clark and Alvergue, paying attention to the qualities of rupture highlighted by Clark, alongside how a global cultural memory becomes constructed through poetry, seen in Alvergue.184 For Lynd, the appropriation of Indigenous objects makes that voice a palpable presence. However, within the broader schema, what does it mean to utilize objects around language and to give a voice to a population often disenfranchised? What does it mean to produce objects in an international sphere that speaks to the local situation of one’s home country? How do we arrive at such a transnational ear without understanding the historical and material specificity of the quipu and the lasting effects that colonization has played within the region? I would propose that without paying due attention to the effects of appropriation at a moment steeped in dictatorial control and against the backdrop of a Chilean vanguard movement, we miss how Vicuña sets herself up to 183 Vicuña, “QuiPOEM,” 55-54. 184 Juliet Lynd, “Precarious Resistance: Weaving Opposition in the Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña,” PMLA 120, 5 (Oct. 2005): 1588-1607. 96 push against acting hegemonies and assert a position as a vanguard while living and working in the international sphere. Appropriation in Vicuña’s work is as much about locating an Indigenous voice as it is about locating her presence as a woman of the Andes. Sources look to the artist’s complicated biography to further skew such connection to Indigenous communities. The focus on poetry is not to say that Vicuña’s artwork has gone ignored entirely, but a thorough analysis of objects and poetry together has yet to be undertaken, especially as the two operated and draw from specific artists and poetic contexts in Chile in the 1970s. With the renewed interest in fiber-based practices in the last few decades, two art historians have pursued Vicuña’s praxis that integrates language and textile. In a chapter in her most recent book Fray, Julia Bryan-Wilson notes how Vicuña integrates two lines of postwar practice, textiles and conceptual art. Through an exploration of the “in-betweenness” of textiles, Bryan-Wilson understands Vicuña’s work as political through the generative mode of handicraft. Although Vicuña focuses on the handmade, her fibers become fluid modes of disseminating information and ideas, particularly illustrated through the quipu – a mnemonic device. What Bryan-Wilson omits from her study is how, beyond the metaphorical inclusion of Indigenous knowledges, Vicuña also works alongside these communities through garnering public awareness of the ecological devastation that has both historically and currently affects areas throughout Chile. It is not enough to rely on an “expanded field” of textiles to consider Vicuña’s work. Like Canclini and Alvergue, Bryan-Wilson similarly places her within a global art context, drawing connections between the modernist inclusion of detritus seen in Picasso and Schwitter’s work to Vicuña’s precarios. A comparison made by Bryan-Wilson to the Western models of modernism only reifies a separation and validation of forms that emerge from Europe as forerunners to the works of the Global South. Finally, Bryan-Wilson makes mention that Vicuña has been left out 97 of the literature of the Chilean vanguard because of her self-made exile to London and then to Bogotá, Colombia. This is, of course, a true statement. However, while Vicuña’s work is often not directly cited in material related to the art scene within Chile, largely because she was not there during the dictatorship, her work has been recently exhibited in Chilean institutions in conjunction with what those artists and poets like Lotty Rosenfeld, Diamela Eltit, and Raúl Zurita. Therefore, I would argue that as Bryan-Wilson establishes Vicuña under a biographical analysis, the art historian focuses perhaps too heavily on the “global” nature of her practice. It is, I argue, just as important to acknowledge the ways in which Vicuña benefitted from operating outside the censorship and violence that befell many of her contemporaries in Chile, and created work that mirrored this perspective. ⁠185 Both Bryan-Wilson and de Zegher also omit Vicuña’s early palabrarmas, including the red thread manipulated into cursive words, in favor of works like the quipu series. Specifically, de Zegher focuses on the knots created in the quipus, employing a variety of theories to analyze their meaning, from the French theorists Deleuze and Guattari to Inuit hand games to Mayan weaving techniques. Such an analysis again reifies not only the global nature under which Vicuña works, but missteps to wash over the specificity under which certain textiles exist and their relationships to language. In establishing incongruous relationships between weaving practices, de Zegher explores Vicuña as an Andean artist without considering what such an identity might mean in relationship to the Mayan practices evoked. Like Bryan-Wilson, de Zegher situates Vicuña within a European lineage, looking to artists like Anni Albers’s 185 De Zegher also establishes a relationship to vanguard politics that were aligned in Allende’s Marxist politics. M Catherine de Zegher, The Precarious: The Art and Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2010). 98 inspiration of Andean weaving and again Kurt Schwitter’s merzbau. Undoubtedly the precarious nature in which artists like Schwitters and Vicuña might have found themselves in relationship to the ongoing political shifts of their times is comparable, but the links to a European legacy undermines the potency found in artists of the Southern hemisphere. Undoubtedly, the scholarship surrounding Vicuña points to the commonalities found in vanguard moments of rupture and how her harnessing of the potential of the textile ties into such a legacy. However, rather than draw on such theories that promote the handmade as powerful because of its “low” status in the twentieth-century art hierarchy, an idea that is perhaps best understood in the Western conception of the practice, I want to engage the political properties invested in the textile form, as seen in the quipu and the utilization of wool in the Andes, as well as the capacities in which these two forms are imbued with language. My argument moves beyond that of de Zegher and Bryan-Wilson in that I am more concerned with the local positioning of Vicuña, who first struggled with the disappearances of loved ones and family members during the Pinochet regime and then later worked against the notion of disappearance under colonization. The incorporation of wool within Vicuña’s early palabrarmas points to this activism as a way to mitigate cultural subjugation, as well as her quipu functioning as a methodology to encapsulate the performative body of language. Under these employments of text and textile, Vicuña employs Indigenous histories just as she advocates for such populations, and more importantly, points to multiple overlapping concerns that do not have a voice, like the disappeared and ongoing ecological debates. In integrating the threads of wool or cotton into her lines of poetry, Vicuña manifests a space of connectivity between text and textile. She also expands the potential to push against the hegemony of language, pointing to structures that exist outside of writing. The scholarship 99 surrounding her work has provided a space in which to interrogate the models of understanding the poetic nature of her praxis, yet in bringing to light autochthonous forms, an acknowledgement of those histories must be foregrounded as vital to understanding. To return to the question of the local versus the global is of great importance because there is a specificity to who is given access to Vicuña’s material, especially projects like El Vaso de leche and Quipu Menstrual. What is made apparent to the public has hidden layers of political turmoil and is expressed through Vicuña’s relationship and adoption of a broad Indigenous culture. Therefore, through these textual layers of understanding her writing, art making, and references to Andean Indigenous populations, the importance of Vicuña’s work can be further conveyed. 2.3 Upending democracy, erasing histories Vicuña’s earliest work emerged in the 1960s, as the United States fervently intervened and quelled any developments or forms of socialism within Latin America, and more specifically within the Southern Cone. The U.S. helped implement a coup d’état to eliminate then-President João Goulart in Brazil because of his left-leaning principles in 1964, but the American government had previously been a part of other overthrows throughout Latin America beginning in the 1950s.186 Salvador Allende’s presidency would be defined by American intervention, after many failed campaigns by the country in his nearly forty year political career.187 In 1958 and 186 The United States was behind many left-leaning, Socialist governments throughout Latin America. See Marc Becker, The FBI in Latin America, Durham: Duke University Press, 2017, that traces the American military’s interference beginning during World War II. In 1984, Group Material would release their Timeline: The Chronicle of US Intervention in Central and Latin America featured at MoMA P.S. 1 from January 22-March 18. The timeline cites more than 40 instances of US military intervention beginning in the nineteenth century. 187 The Popular Unity Party succeeded in forming despite US interventions throughout the 1960s that had kept in seat the more conservative Christian Democrat Party with the majority election 100 1964, Allende had run for President under the FRAP (Popular Action Front) Party - a coalition set up by the Socialist, Communist, Popular Socialist, and People’s Democratic Party.188 His unsuccessful attempts finally led to a secured candidacy with a newly formed coalition of the Popular Unity Party, a group that composed much of the Chilean left.189 Alongside those parties who participated in FRAP, the Unidad Popular [Popular Unity] added the Independent Popular Action and Movimiento de Acción Popular Unitario (MAPU).190 Allende’s election in 1970 was a momentous occasion and made clear that the country was ready for change, especially from the previous conservative governments.191 However, the Popular Unity Party was not without its own problems and pitfalls. While Allende favored ideologies centered on building the country up through economic and social justice policies, the economy gave sway just as it had throughout much of the Southern Cone. The price for copper fell in 1970 until 1972, and on top of it, the Chilean middle class were unwilling to submit to socialist policies that asked for a redistribution of wealth. Yet, despite such setbacks, Allende’s of Eduardo Frei Montalva in 1964, who would go on to argue that Allende’s intent was to establish a communist dictatorship over the country. The CIA’s attempt to avert Allende’s election cost the country between US$800,000 to US$1 million with campaigns that were meant to evoke fear if a socialist regime were implemented in Chile. The US government gave Frei 250,000 to bribe Chilean parliamentarians to vote against the confirmation. O’Shaugnessy writes about how groups of assailants with whom the CIA was covertly involved, tried to kidnap General Rene Schneider two days before Allende was due to be confirmed. Schneider was shot and died the next day, showcasing the desperation of the right and thus, sparking outrage and shock that would ensure Congress voted Allende in. Hugh O’Shaughnessy, Pinochet: The Politics of Torture (New York: New York University Press, 2010): 35. 188 Victor Figueroa Clark, Salvador Allende: Revolutionary Democrat, London: Pluto Press (2013): 60. 189 In 1947 Allende worked with the popular socialist party after the Socialist Party separated into two factions. 190 In 1971, the UP gained the Christian Left Party and in 1972, the MAPU Obrero Campesino (a splinter group) would also join the coalition. 191 His presidency came with a strong tradition of parliamentary democracies wherein only one singular military dictatorship from 1924-1931 took power in Chile. See Simon Collier and William Sater, A History of Chile, 1808-2002 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 101 economy grew over eight percent in 1971, and another 1.6 percent the following year. The working class immediately felt improvements, publications and the arts flourished, and every schoolchild was provided a daily glass of milk. 192 The collective group CADA [Colectivo Acciones de Arte/Art Actions Collective] and Vicuña would reference the last act in a series of art actions made in Santiago and Bogotá. September 11th is a day that Vicuña has lived through twice — first with the golpe that overtook the Allende government and then with the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City, where the artist had taken up residence. The dissolution of the Popular Unity, for Vicuña, was felt from abroad while the artist was living in London and it immediately affected her family. Her uncle, Carlos Godoy Lagarrigue, disappeared because of his associations with the Allende government, and Vicuña had not only actively supported the former president but met and spoke to him during a rally, a connection that was detrimental. The early years of the Pinochet government have been documented, especially the violent approaches taken by the government through the Caravan of Death and torture camps, like Villa Grimaldi.193 The attack on the presidential residence, Palacio de la Moneda, began in the early morning and ended when Allende died and Pinochet, along with three other generals, appointed themselves as a military 192 The Popular Unity promised to provide pensions to anyone over 60 who hadn’t been able to pay enough contributions to retire, and to include small and medium businesses into social security system. A ministry of family protection would be created, and free milk and breakfast would be provided to all children. Mother and child clinics and legal advice centers would be created in every neighborhood, and every neighborhood would be provided with electricity and clean water. Rent would be fixed at 10 per cent of family income and no more. Victor Figueroa Clark, Salvador Allende: Revolutionary Democrat (London: Pluto Press): 97 193 In the outskirts of Santiago in the La Reina neighborhood was Villa Grimaldi, the largest detainment and torture camp. The Caravan of Death was a Chilean Army death squad that began after the coup d’etat when Pinochet had the military fly around the country and round up dissidents in various provinces. More than 70 people were murdered in their custody. See Patricia Verdugo, Chile, Pinochet, and the Caravan of Death (Coral Gables, FL: North-South Center Press, University of Miami, 2001). 102 junta, dissolving the Constitution in the process. The days following the golpe would have tens of thousands Chileans detained by the military, many forced into the National Stadium to a certain death.194 The Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) [the Chilean secret police], was established by predominantly civilians who were intent to carry out atrocious acts to instill fear in the country’s citizens and political dissidents.195 No one was safe and the violent government only provided protection to those who wanted to inflict terror. Landowners took revenge on Mapuche populations, who had been supported by Allende, in the countryside. The Catholic Church, despite those who were in favor of the overthrow of Allende, found themselves in a difficult position as Pinochet maintained total control and priests were removed from posts. There was a massive exodus of Chilean intellectuals and artists: musicians, playwrights, filmmakers, painters, writers, and academics. The Pinochet regime went so far as to propagate stories of a supposed ‘golden exile’ in order to divide society further and create resentment, portraying the exiles (virtually all of whom were supporters of the Unidad Popular) as enjoying and benefitting from the policy of forced exile.196 The junta attacked all forms of art to benefit the regime when they announced a “clean up campaign” of Marxist cinema by importing only American films. This action necessitated a 194 A section of the stands remains empty, bearing the words “Un pueblo sin memoria es un pueblo sin futuro” – a people with no memory is a people with no future. Chile’s first democratically elected president, Patricio Aylwin chose the Estadio Nacional to deliver his highly symbolic speech marking the country’s return to civilian government. See Peter Read, Narrow but Endlessly Deep: the Struggle for Memorialisation in Chile since the Transition to Democracy (Acton, Australia: Australian National University, 2016). 195 In 1977, the DINA would be replaced by the CNI (National Information Center), but the sane functions would continue. The DINA was the Chilean Secret Police. 196 Unidad Popular was outlawed in 1973; others were suspended until 1977 when they were banned. Caterina Preda, “Dictators and Dictatorships: Art and Politics in Romania and Chile, 1974-89,” in Terror and the Arts, edited by Hyväinen and Musyznski (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008): 150. 103 tenfold increase in admission price to movie theatres, and what was once a popular form of recreation, movies were eliminated as a leisure option for workers.197 Chileans organized abroad, developing an active international solidarity campaign; the 1974 Venice Biennale included a tribute to the resistance against the dictator.198 The repressive policies put forward led to a direct action towards the dissolution between art and politics because of how entwined they had been in earlier years. The Ramona Parra Brigade, a mural collective that sprung up during early Communist campaigns in 1968, had nearly 50 factions in Santiago and 150 spread throughout the rest of Chile. Their goal was to spread slogans through mass political education. The initial actions by the group were simplistic murals composed of symbols in black, blue, and yellow paint, choices often dependent on the availability and cost of materials. Travelling brigades emerged with 12 to 15 members who averaged 17 to 25 years old and would visit isolated communities in order to provide puppet shows and political speeches, alongside their mural activity. Allende’s tenure as president only spurred more action from the brigades as they began to engage local communities, housing developments, and factories in order to further redirect the political thought of the masses. The murals reflected their changing ideas, as well as the state’s achievements under the cultural program, La Nueva Cultura [The New Culture], established by the Popular Unity. The original black and yellow images shifted to 197 Among other atrocities to the cultural sphere was when the government had an entire ballet troupe murdered. Murders committed in this capacity were to wipe out the effects of three years of left-wing government on the consciousness of the working class and the very poor. See J Patrice McSherry, “The Political Impact of Chilean New Song in Exile,” Latin American Perspectives 44, 5 (2017): 13-29. 198 Lotty Rosenfeld did her crosses in multiple places including Washington, D.C. and Berlin. In 1987, Rosenfeld, Richard, and Diamela Eltit came to Vancouver, B.C. for series of residences, exhibitions, and speaking engagements at VIVO. See Video Guide, issue 42, vol 9, n. 2, Fall, 1987. http://www.vivomediaarts.com/archive/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/VGUIDESno040small.pdf 104 mirror the colors in the Chilean flag—red, blue, and white—producing highly nationalistic images.199 In the days following the coup, the Ramona Parra Brigade (BRP) quickly dissolved into guerrilla-like actions as it was impossible to paint large murals for fear of being picked up by police.200 Murals, too, were quickly erased shortly after their creation. The small brigades resorted to painting the letter “R” ringed by a circle with a star next to it; the R stood for resistance, the circle a sign of unity, and the star standing in for the symbol of the BRP.201 The groups, despite being sought after by DINA, ultimately set the stage for emerging art activism through its connection to the public sphere; an approach that would be later mimicked by CADA’s ephemeral and collective demonstrations beginning in 1979 with the Para no morir de hambre en el arte projects [To not die of hunger in the arts], in which Vicuña participated at a distance.202 The government was quick to cover all murals, especially the famous Roberto Matta mural El primer gol de pueblo chileno [The first goal of the Chilean people] (1971) in La Granja, 199 The Ramona Parra Brigades who did the murals belonged to Communist Party; before the coup there were 50 in Santiago and 150 in all of Chile. Members had an average age of 17 and there were 12-15 members in each brigade. They transformed walls into a series of intertwined symbols much in the way that words are joined into sentences and sentences into paragraphs, with the primary function of the murals as a mass political education. Gideon Long, “The Chilean Muralists who Defied Pinochet,” 6 September 2013, BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-23970034 200 The Rio Mapocho mural was the most ambitious: painted on a stone wall by the river in a popular Santiago park, the mural began with a quotation from Pablo Neruda: “me has dado la patria como un nacimiento” (you have given me the fatherland as a new birth), as well as had displayed, “NO to Fascism.” Ibid. 201 Ibid. 202 These are contested accounts. CADA doesn’t locate Vicuña’s actions in Bogotá as associated with the collective, yet Vicuña argues she was involved in conversations. 105 the same city where CADA would pass out its half liter of milk to residents.203 Covering the mural in 16 layers of paint, stucco, lime, and spray, Pinochet’s government attempted to erase the memory of three years of left-wing government from the consciousness of the working class and very poor communities that the Allende government attempted to improve.204 The Pinochet government came into power with the economic situation in desolate conditions. Inflation was fluctuating between 500 and 650%, and despite Allende’s price controls meant to stabilize the cost of basic necessities for the poor, the policies that provided milk, the unions that protected workers, and the land reforms that helped the rural farmers, were all abolished. Yet by 1975, with the unemployment rate nearly triple since Allende’s government, the Milton Friedman, who was visiting the country, declared that he was satisfied with the state of the Chilean economy.205 This came largely from the mass profits being made by banks off loans, or the minority of people who had put money into stocks or land who then saw their wealthy multiply. This growth would amble through the 1980s, with a fall in the early 1980s to an “economic miracle” at the end of the decade. It was hardly a miracle for many and rather encouraged the largest gap between the rich and the poor in the country, a title previously held by Brazil. 203 CADA and the mural brigades both relied on collective execution; there was no individual genius. Furthermore, they each worked to close the gap between art and life and art and people during the most contentious moments on the Allende and Pinochet period. 204 See Eva Cockcroft, “The Death of a Mural Movement (1974)” in Readings in Latin American Art, edited by Patrick Frank, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. The mural would be uncovered in 2008 after three years of intense uncovering starting in 2005 when students of the university looked for it. It cost US$43,000 to uncover and is now a national monument and a part of the Matta Cultural Center. 205 O’Shaugnessy, Pinochet, 139. See Juan Gabriel Valdés, Pinochet’s Economists: The Chicago School in Chile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), and Richard Davies, “Why is Inequality Booming in Chile? Blame the Chicago Boys,” The Guardian, November 13, 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/13/why-is-inequality-booming-in-chile-blame-the-chicago-boys. 106 The Pinochet government soon cast the Mapuche populations aside, an action that can be seen as a continuation of historical precedents established with Spanish colonization. Undefeated by the Spanish soldiers from 1641-1825, the Mapuche were not provided recognized territorial autonomy by the Spanish crown until the late nineteenth century in the south-central region of Chile, between the Bío-Bío and Toltén Rivers.206 With the independence and creation of the new Republic of Chile, by the 1840s, the Mapuche were relegated to reducciones [reservations] and newly independent Chileans stole Indigenous land through violence and fraud at an alarming rate.207 Macarena Gómez-Barris analyzes how the rampant racism against the Mapuche coupled with the state’s concern of economic building exacerbated the hostile take-over of ancestral lands and impending extermination by the government. “Mapuches were depicted as wild and untameable,” writes Gómez-Barris, a common trope of “colonial settler societies that render Indigenous bodies through animalistic metonyms aimed at dehumanization.”208 The Pinochet regime continued the destruction of territory and culture through widespread human rights violations. A large contribution to the Mapuche’s treatment extended beyond racism, and it was their key role in electoral campaigns through the 1960s where the Christian Democrats vied for an alliance from Indigenous groups.209 A series of proposed land reforms took vast quantities of 206 Diana Haughney, “Defending Territory, Demanding Participation: Mapuche Struggles in Chile,” Latin American Perspectives 185, 39:4 (July 2012): 202; Macarena Gómez-Barris, “Mapuche Hunger Acts: Epistemology of the Decolonial,” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Culture Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1:3 (2012): 122. 207 Haughney, “Defending Territory,” 202. 208 Gómez-Barris, “Mapuche Hunger Acts,” 122. 209 President Eduardo Frei Montalva (who preceded Allende) proposed a law to eliminate the Mapuche reducciones and to solve the poverty of the Mapuche peasants by encouraging cooperatives. The Popular Unity supported cooperatives or state-owned agricultural enterprises because the land that many Mapuche lived on was too small to be sufficient for the families to 107 land from the wealthy elite (latifundios) that was worked by seasonal laborers, and divided it into expropriated limits of 80 hectares to be used by rural workers.210 In the ninth region, estates were often smaller than the limit, thus causing an issue for Mapuche laborers.211 The government did not enforce a redistribution of land in this area unless it was proved that the estate owner was not using the land appropriately; yet large estates were not only cared for by Mapuche seasonal workers but was also home to the largest ethnic Mapuche populations. Conflicts began to rise because the government withheld rights to Indigenous communities despite their inhabitation and working of the land. In 1970, Mapuche launched takeovers of nearly 300,000 hectares of states in the ninth region of Cautin - many were small enough to elide the Agrarian Reform Law.212 The coalition formed by the Popular Unity overlooked such actions and furthermore encouraged the Mapuche to expropriate cattle and farm machinery; in fact, the government endorsed that latifundios should not possess any reserve land and the Mapuche should be given back their usurped territory. Under the dictatorship, however, violence befell the populations and in the Ninth Region, over one hundred assassinations were carried out. Access to water and land rights became more contentious under Pinochet’s neoliberal economic policies. The state relinquished its control and restrictions over “common goods,” giving private citizens and corporations the right to export without restriction. Milk, and indeed live on. Diane Haughney, Neoliberal Economics, Democratic Transition, and Mapuche Demands for Rights in Chile (Miami: University Press of Florida, 2006): 48. 210 Antonio Bellisario, “The Chilean Agrarian Transformation: The Pre-Agrarian Reform Period (1955-1965)” Journal of Agrarian Change Vol 6, 2 (April 2006): 187. 211 Chile is divided into 16 regions, the 9th (Araucania) is located in the middle of the country extending from the Pacific Ocean to the border with Argentina. Araucania has the largest ethnic Mapuche population and is the poorest region in Chile where inequalities are the most extreme. See Flavio Rojas, “Poverty determinants of acute respiratory infections among Mapuche Indigenous peoples in Chile’s Ninth Region of Araucania, using GIS and spatial statistics to identify health disparities,” International Journal of Health Geographics 6, 26 (2007): 1-12. 212 Peasants had also seized land between 1969 and 1972. Haughney, Neoliberal Economics, 44. 108 even now uncontaminated water, was no longer a guaranteed right; instead the north of Chile first saw mining corporations pollute rivers and soil, concerns that would then affect the central and southern regions. What remained of the leftist coalition gained an even stronger following among rural Indigenous sectors, many who were affected directly by the new economic policies. In one such event, in order to quell this support, the military rounded up Mapuche agricultural cooperatives and filed them onto a hanging bridge over the Cautín River in Boroa. The soldiers opened fire and the bodies were washed downstream.213 Since the early twentieth century, the Mapuche have worked to fight against fraudulently obtained notarized contracts. Thought to be land rentals, the historical documents signed by the Mapuche gave ownership to different parties. Relationships have not improved post-Pinochet. The remnants of the Chicago Boys’ economic policies directly supported multinational forest companies to continue their actions without recognizing collective Indigenous land claims.214 Despite the ongoing oppression that continues to occur in Chile, with only 6.4% of their original territory recognized by the government, Mapuche cultural production has been at an all-time high, most notably seen in Vicuña’s publication of ül: Four Mapuche Poets. The project helped 213 The Chilean left had a strong following among rural Indigenous sectors because their peoples’ sense of community easily identifies with communist ideology, which professes work towards a common good, and as victims of oppression themselves Indians also relate well with working-class poor; “… Eusebio Pineal, a Mapuche from Coihue, one of the many incarcerated during the dictatorship, recalls that in Boroa there was a hanging bridge for pedestrians to cross the Cautin River. After the coup all those listed as organizers of Mapuche agricultural cooperatives were rounded up and filed onto the bridge, where soldiers opened fire; as the bodies fell into the Cautin they were washed downstream.” Gisela Norat, Marginalities: Diamela Eltit and the Subversion of Mainstream Literature (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002): 230, footnote 48. 214 Gómez-Barris, “Mapuche Hunger Acts,” 123. 109 spur a “palpable attempt…to dewesternize and reorient toward a Mapuche epistemology and sensibility of time, space, and the natural world.”215 2.4 Writing, hermeticism, and operating under censorship The Pinochet dictatorship and treatment of populations under his government helps situate how Vicuña concentrated much of work towards Indigenous and disenfranchised populations. Within Chile, many artists too reoriented their work to make visible the systems of power attempting to censor them, including members of the Escena de Avanzada, which emerged in 1977 as a group of artists and writers who utilized forms of art to name the political violence that befell the country. Because of the turn towards extensive writing and utilization of language as methods to garner resistance, many comparisons can be made between the Avanzada and Vicuña. The Escena de Avanzada’s formation was based on a shared experience and foe, especially in the aftermath of the golpe. While certainly “visible” during the most polemic years of the government, the Avanzada lost its effectiveness after a plebiscite refuted Pinochet’s authority and forced his resignation in 1991. In the aftermath, the Avanzada struggled to remain relevant under the continuing neoliberal government. Literary theorist Adriana Valdés articulates that the stronghold of the neoliberal market affected and shaped artists in different capacities than when there was a shared enemy. 216 Critical writing lost its place when galleries 215 Ibid. 216 See Adriana Valdés, “Servants to the World: Art and Writing in Chile,” in Copying Eden: Recent Art in Chile, edited by Gerardo Mosquera (Santiago: Puro Chile, 2006). The neoliberal approach to literature began with the purging and banning of books and select authors during the golpe. Bookstores would be driven to bankruptcy when a prohibitive tax of 20 percent for book publications was imposed. Thus, publishing houses had nothing to print and were forced to close, bookstores rarely had anything to sell and also had to shut their doors, and authors that survived the censorship could only use artisan-like modes of editing and distribution. 110 materialized, and the focus turned towards the artist and exhibition catalogue to promote the individual.217 Many in the literature and cultural spheres, as well as the broader population, found the Avanzada’s text difficult to process especially as the population wanted to quickly forget many of the atrocities and moved forward from the legacy of violence, under which the group emerged. Vicuña’s work, however, flourished as she found a critical voice against capitalism and economic exploitation of marginalized groups. While she continued to work outside the country, the Avanzada fell out of popularity, as there was no function for its radical writing under the democratic restructuring of the government who supported a new form of visual art. Rather, the works would later exemplify leftist political art and writing despite the Avanzada’s attempt to move against such ideological discourses. Yet, the establishment of the Avanzada is crucial to understanding Vicuña’s work. She relies on the apparatuses of language, writing, and poetry, and all three are established in historical precedents in Chile. Their influence can be seen within Vicuña art. The first is her formation and involvement with Tribu No, a group of friends who came together to support social programs by the Popular Unity coalition; the second, the establishment of the Escena de Avanzada, and artist collective CADA, that changed the way writing was employed under the dictatorship; and thirdly, the history and culture around poetry that holds a prestigious place within Chilean identity. Moreover, Vicuña’s proclivity to consider the Indigenous bodies, voices, and culture within the country calls up Nueva Canción, a formidable movement that relied on traditional folk music with social and political overtones. Nueva Canción originated in the mid-twentieth century when social conditions were at a decline. Individuals from Indigenous communities moved to city centers and merged distinct 217 Preda, “Dictators and Dictatorships,” 157. 111 musical traditions with those rooted in European culture, a combination supported by students and the middle class. Singer-songwriters, most notably Victor Jara and Violeta Parra, promoted the daily hardships and concerns facing the economically and politically marginalized populations through their musical styles that stressed native cultural roots by incorporating instruments from across South America.218 The music stressed social awareness and responsibility to rally audiences against sources of social inequality, using the traditional Hispanic poetic forms of the 10-line décima dense with metaphors and imagery drawn from rural life.219 Furthermore, it revived an interest in Chilean folklore lost under the oppression of Indigenous voices across the country. Jara, a playwright, musician, as well as a social activist, helped cultivate two Nueva Canción groups: Quilapayún and Inti-Illimani formed in 1965 and 1967.220 Parra preserved over 3,000 Chilean songs, recipes, traditions and proverbs and founded cultural centers (peñas) to provide training and performance opportunities and spaces for leftist political activism. But it was her distinctive voice and fabrication of arpilleras that gained her early notoriety.221 The Popular Unity party fostered a connection to Nueva Canción, and in the 218 The instruments include the quena (Andean flute), zampoñas (pan-pipes), and the ten-stringed charango. “La Nueva Canción: The New Song Movement in South America,” Soundscapes- Folkways, Smithsonian Institute. Accessed January 15, 2018. https://folkways.si.edu/la-nueva-cancion-new-song-movement-south-america/latin-world-struggle-protest/music/article/smithsonian 219 Gorlinski, Virginia. “Nueva Canción,” Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 25 September 2019: https://www.britannica.com/art/nueva-cancion 220 Ibid. Quilapayún comes from the Mapuche language meaning, “Three Beards.” Inti-Illimani is from the Aymara language and means Sun of the Illimani, which is the highest mountain in the Cordillera Real of western Bolivia. Quilapayún continues to be active and the members of Inti-Illimani retired in 2004. 221 Alexandra Naddaff and Julia Meedzan, “Nueva Canción in Chile: Before, During, and After the Pinochet Dictatorship,” Forging Memory, accessed February 21, 2018: https://www.forgingmemory.org/narrative/nueva-cancion-chile. Jara was kidnapped and tortured by the dictatorship, shot dead with his body left in a street in Santiago on September 12, 1973. Parra committed suicide in her home in 1967 and was survived by her children, two of whom 112 1970 election of Salvador Allende, a banner was displayed above his head with the words, “You can’t have a revolution without songs.” During the bombing of the Palacio de la Moneda in 1973, he would address the movement again in his last speech, saying, “I address the youth, those who sang and gave us their joy and their spirit of struggle.”222 Vicuña and her friends further illustrate such idealism of youth throughout the 1960s and the connection to Indigeneity when they formed Tribu No during their early university years. Brought together by a counterculture position, the group, who were from different faculties, focused on the “tradition of rupture,” looking to those who questioned modernity like Octavio Paz or André Breton. Tribu No pushed against dominant culture seen in capitalist or bourgeois culture and instead pledged their deference toward Indigenous models of thought (underlined in their creation of a “tribe”). The 1967 “No” Manifesto, written largely by Vicuña, illustrates this stance more specifically, “We undermine reality from within, that is why we are subversive and loving. Furthermore, we are so minor and unknown that we delight in our freedom.”223 Indeed, the group was a marginal coalition that moved against more visible forces, but they worked to establish themselves as ardent supporters of the Popular Unity project. Their presence was particularly felt when, in 1969, they distributed handwritten fliers to literary and government dignitaries as a protest to their lack of invitation to the International Writers Conference held in were also active in the Nueva Canción movement. The peñas set up by Parra and her children would reach far and wide, spanning to Los Angeles in the United States 222 Ibid. Nueva Canción recordings were seized, burned, and banned from the airwaves and record stores. In a period in Chilean history referred to as the Apagón Cultural—the Cultural Blackout, the military government exiled and imprisoned artists and went as far as to ban many traditional Andean instruments in order to suppress the Nueva Canción movement. Censorship faced the Nueva Canción as recordings were seized, burned, or banned from airwaves and record stores. 223 Cecilia Vicuña, “Performing Memory: An Autobiography,” in Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña, trans. Rose Alcalá (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Press, 2012): 58. 113 Santiago. “Long live poetry,” and “Long live the displaced,” were some of the quotes that mashed together material from established writers, both local and foreign, and the statements written by the members of Tribu No.224 Alongside the dissolution of the Popular Unity government and Vicuña’s departure to London in 1972, Tribu No ceased to exist. By contrast, Vicuña’s utilization of language and poetry only continued to flourish, especially under the dictatorship. Within Chile, too, the artistic panorama considered language and marginality in a new way, seeing their existence on the perimeters, careful to operate under the censorship without being co-opted by the government’s rhetoric, or as Juanjo Santos articulated, their works of art “stemmed from the margins, talked to the margin, and spread the margin.”225 By 1977, key groups cemented the Chilean artistic scene: the Escena de Avanzada, formed by Carlos Leppe, Carlos Altarmirano, Juan Dávila and Nelly Richard; the collective CADA with Diamela Eltit, Raúl Zurita, Lotty Rosenfeld, Juan Castillo, and Fernando Balcells; and finally Eugenio Dittborn, Catalina Parra, and Ronald Kay, three artists not within a group but who regularly exhibited and worked together.226 Nelly Richard, the most prominent scholar in the wake of the golpe and the one who formed the Escena de 224 Juliet Lynd, “Precarious Resistance,” 1590. 225 Juanjo Santos, “American Residues (The Revolt of Chilean Art of the 80s)” A*Desk: Critical Thinking, 10 April 2017: https://a-desk.org/en/magazine/american-residues-the-revolt-of/. Nelly Richard writes that art came out of the “tense logic of confrontation between its marginal status (and its will to marginality) and its various institutionalized manifestations.” 226 Nelly Richard was born in France and in 1970, after completed her studies at the Sorbonne, moved to Chile. She became the Visual Arts Coordinator at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago. She resigned from her post after Pinochet’s military coup. Margins and Institutions was published in 1986 for an exhibition in Australia centered on documents coming out of Chile. It was passed around as a photocopy until funds allowed it to be published. See Lucia Vodanovic, “The Art of Writing: Disguise and Recognition in Nelly Richard’s Avanzada,” Journal of Romance Studies, 15, 2 (2015): 94-108. Juanjo Santos also highlights that there was the less cohesive group of artists who were politically and socially motivated: Taller de Artes Visuales formed by Francisco Brugnoli, Virginia Errázuriz, Luz Donoso, Pedro Millar, and Elías Adasme. Santos, “American Residues.” 114 Avanzada, wrote about how artists and writers experimented with meaning while operating in a conceptual framework bound by theoretical parameters that were never meant to be easily processed. As the group attempted to work through the attempted erasure of culture, Richard articulated how the Avanzada homed in on memory, as it was “unconcerned with the linear restitution of a single history, particularly given that the substance of history [had] been irreversibly contaminated by the suspicion weighing on every act presuming to represent a totality of meaning.”227 Richard, who worked closely with CADA, described the group’s actions as ruptures and cuts tied to avant-garde principles: the fusion of art/life and the fusion of art/politics.228 CADA’s actions would begin in 1979 with Para no morir del hambre en el arte, a multi-part project that took art out into the streets of Santiago. On October 3, members of the group distributed one hundred liter bags of milk to residents of La Granja, a neighborhood particularly affected by the erasure of Allende’s socialist policies. Each bag of milk bore the label “1/2 liter of milk” - as the former Popular Unity government had guaranteed a half-liter of milk per Chilean child each day [Figure 2.4]. The mere presence of this printed phrase summoned the memory of Allende’s government.229 On a page in the popular magazine, Hoy [Today], CADA took a page and left it completely blank except for the text: “Imagine this page completely blank 227 Nelly Richard, The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural Transformation, and Poetics of the Crisis, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 6. 228 Ibid., 26. 229 In response to the performances in Bogota and Santiago, artist Eugenio Tellez drank a glass of milk in front of the Toronto City Hall in Canada. Scholar Robert Neustadt emphasised how as “a first world country, Canada benefitted from an excess of milk. In Colombia, children were dying of economic corrupt, poisoned milk. In Chile, the promise of milk and state-supported health had disappeared with the coup.” Deborah Cullen, editor, Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000, New York: El Museo del Barrio (2008): 47. 115 / imagine this blank page as white as milk for daily consumption / imagine all corners of Chile deprived of milk for daily consumption as blank pages to be filled.”230 CADA’s second “milk” action had members drive a caravan of ten milk trucks through Santiago and park in front of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. The line of milk trucks gave the immediate impression of an invasion of military tanks. Upon arriving at the museum, the artists covered the façade with an enormous white cloth and declared that the true museum was outside in the streets, an exercise Richard regarded as a “double act of censoring the institutional aspect of art” [Figure 2.5].231 Two years later in 1981, CADA fulfilled ¡Ay Sud America! [Ay, South America!] dropping 400,000 fliers from three airplanes over impoverished neighborhoods in Santiago and read: “The work of improving the accepted standard of living is the only valid project for art / the only exhibition / the only worthwhile artwork. Everyone who works, if only mentally, to expand the spaces in his or her life is an artist.”232 It was not only CADA’s acts that would influence Vicuña, but also the way they handled language, which was mirrored in her earlier work with Tribu No. For Vicuña, language is coded 230 Richard, Insubordination of Signs, 25. The project also had a text recorded in five languages that was read in front of the United Nations building in Santiago, situating Chile under the sign of its precarious and marginal condition within the international panorama. There was also an acrylic box sealed and placed at the art gallery, Centro Imagen. It contained bags of milk not distributed to the population, a copy of Hoy (popular Chilean newspaper), and a tape of the text read in front of the UN. The milk was meant to remain there until it decomposed with the message, “to remain here until our people are able to gain access to basic food for consumption. To remain as the symbolic inverse of the lacking, inverted, plural body.” Raúl Zurita talks about his memory of the art actions as those that were sanctioned but without ever really telling them what they would do. Daniel Borzutzky, “Written on the Sky: Interview with Raúl Zurita,” Poetry Foundation, 26 August, 2010: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69577/written-on-the-sky. 231 Cullen, Arte ≠ Vida, 47.., 167. 232 Richard, Insubordination of Signs, 26. 116 but also more open; for those in Chile, there were direct consequences if caught.233 Yet many parallels remain, especially how Vicuña approached and favored certain materials that related to language such as the quipu and poetry, rather than others in the aftermath of the golpe. In Nelly Richard’s book, The Insubordination of Signs, she examines the capacity of art towards the end of Pinochet’s presidency. The necessity of language, she writes, is still crucial: If we are to extract a lesson from the relearning of memory that bodies and languages had to practice in the Chile of forgetfulness (de la desmemoria, ‘disremembering’), it is knowing that the past is not a time irreversibly seized and frozen in recollection under the rubric of what already was, thus condemning memory to follow the dictum of obediently reestablishing its own continuity. Instead, the past is a field of citations, crisscrossed as much by continuity (the various forms of supposing or imposing an idea of succession) as by discontinuity (by cuts that interrupt the dependence of that succession on a predetermined chronology).234 Thus, under this rubric, Vicuña operates within the vanguard framework, pushing forward rupture via language and writing and emphasizing the process of memory; and as I will analyze in the following section, she uses threads and the notion of textiles as a way to establish new lineages of thought. 2.4.1 Word weapons Certainly, Vicuña was aware of those poets like Enrique Lihn and Raúl Zurita who used poetry to reconsider situations of marginality and the notion of belonging under a chaotic moment. Both Lihn and Zurita moved to New York City in the wake of the dictatorship, the 233 Forced disappearance was a tactic fully employed by the Pinochet government. Artists worked quickly to perform actions and to scatter into the crowd to avoid detection. 234 Richard, Insubordination of Signs, 2. 117 same place Vicuña would land in 1980.235 In his “Nunca Salí del Horroroso Chile,” Lihn wrote, “I never left horrible Chile /my travels that are not imaginary/ tardy yes - moments of a moment-/ they didn’t uproot me from the eriazo (barren land)/remote and presumptuous.”236 His poem, “I never left the Horrifying Chile” speaks to his inability to leave the country behind because of the imprint the golpe caused. Despite his move to the United States and loss of his mother tongue, Lihn is incapable of forgetting and leaving the country behind.237 Further, his poem addresses his peripheral and marginal positioning and his attempt to move beyond it. Zurita took another direction with his ‘poetry-actions.’ In 1982, he took to the sky with five planes over the Queens neighborhood, with delineated verses of La Vida Nueva appearing through the smoke in capital letters: “Mi Dios es hambre/ Mi Dios es cáncer/ Mi Dios es nieve/ Mi Dios es vacío/ Mi Dios es ghetto...” [Figure 2.6]238 The last verse culminates with “Ni pena ni miedo” or “No shame no 235 Zurita was in Valparaíso when the coup occurred; he was picked up and detained and tortured before being released. Valparaíso is the same city where the coup was planned and the military planes sent from. 236 I used Juanjo Santos’s translation of this line from the series of poems in “A Partir de Manhattan” written by Lihn while in Manhatten on a Guggenheim grant. The complete poem reads: “Nunca salí del horroroso Chile / mis viajes que no son imaginarios / tardíos sí—momentos de un momento—/ no me desarraigaron del eriazo remoto y presuntuoso / Nunca salí del habla que el Liceo Alemán / me infligió en sus dos patios como en un regimiento / mordiendo en ella el polvo de un exilio imposible / Otras lenguas me inspiran un sagrado rencor: / el miedo de perder con la lengua maternal / toda la realidad. Nunca salí de nada” (A partir de Manhattan). Santos, “American Residues.” 237 See Walter Hoefler Ebers, “El Viaje Chile-Europa en la Poesía Chilena: Un Inventario Preliminar,” Logos: Revista de Lingüística, Filosofía y Literatura, 21, 1 (2011): 53-71. Ebers discusses the role of “the trip” and travelling outside of the country by various Chilean poets. 238 “My god is hunger/ my god is cancer/ my god is snow/ my god is emptiness/ my god is ghetto”; the use of planes too calls up the bombing of the Palacio as well as CADA’s actions. Zurita writes, “I thought that the sky was that place where all have directed their gaze because they believed that they could see in it their destined hopes. I imagined that it was beautiful, and that same sky was a great page to write our pain and perhaps our hope on. The writings in the sky and in the desert are my most intimate poems, those that are most deeply engraved in me. They were conceived in the most desperate times of my life and in the darkest period of the Chilean dictatorship. To think of those phrases being written on the sky, or of the phrase ‘neither 118 fear” that he would inscribe in the Atacama Desert in 1993.239 Richard argued that such actions paralleled the avant-garde actions taken by the early Chilean poets, citing a “Zuritian gesture” that moved writing from the page to the sky or desert. 240 The gesture opened up a “space beyond” where past, present, and future became involved in a series of antagonisms and contradictions. I would extend this idea to the way Lihn speaks to his experience of the golpe and his relationship to Chile. Furthermore, it is the way where language as an eternal present can be used to “appropriate one’s own history in the double sense of an individual and the collective history.”241 In the integration of poetry in non-written forms information keeping like the quipu, Vicuña moves into this space beyond articulated by the Zuritian gesture where she locates the past, present, and future as engaged by historical and aesthetic devices in play. The Escena de Avanzada brought together the seemingly destroyed past to the “yet to be constructed” future through “patching together versions of continuity and totality.”242 This, for Richard, focused on the histories left unfinished — an acknowledgement of those who disappeared under the dictatorial regime. Vicuña’s articulation of those histories features her feelings towards displacement but ultimately move toward the displacement of Indigenous populations in the pain nor fear,’ in moments when the country could feel, for the most part, just pain and fear, was perhaps what made me not break. They weren’t aesthetic operations; they were acts of survival.” See, Nathalie Handal, Raúl Zurita, and David Shook, “Paradise in ‘Zurita’: An interview with Raúl Zurita,” Prairie Schooner87, 4 (Winter 2013) 75-83. 239 Borzutzky, “Written on the Sky.” 240 In Zurita’s work, we might consider the role of disappearance once again, as the dictatorship dropped bodies into the desert to avoid them being found. 241 Richard, Insubordination of Signs, 37. 242 Ibid., 44-46. 119 region.243 The concept of margin takes on precedence in Vicuña’s work as she further expands the possibilities of its definition, focusing both on Chilean populations and experiences after the coup, working with vanguard approaches, but finally, locating her subject position as a woman outside of the country during its most violent years.244 Her projects and decisions in mediums, especially the move away from painting after living in London, exemplifies her interest in the interstitial actions seen in CADA, along with a nod to the populism and Indigenous identity found in the Nueva Canción. With language a dangerous commodity, it had to be camouflaged or coded in double entendres to communicate what was not to be said.245 Using installations, performances, and insertions into the public sphere, many within the Avanzada, specifically CADA, were able to circumvent censorship. Vicuña, too, utilized these devices. From 1977 onward, Vicuña produced the Palabrarmas (“word weapons”), or what she called a multidimensional form of poetry.246 The language-based works were sculptural in that they utilized thread and string to form words in cursive print to be hung on walls or draped from the ceiling; other forms are completed via screen printing. In a book similarly titled, Vicuña writes, “The words wanted to speak/ and 243 She aligns herself with Lihn’s poem and the inability to forget her roots, especially when she highlights how she had to return to South America and got as close as she could to Santiago, living in Bogotá. 244 Indeed Vicuña’s experience of living outside the country was not the same as those working inside. 245 During the years under authoritarian rule, language became a precious as well as dangerous commodity, often coded, camouflaged in double entendres to communicate what could not be said directly. Chilean critic Guillermo García Corales articulates that this led to a collective aphasia that in intellectual circles was called the cultural blackout. Norat, Marginalities, 29. 246 Vicuña says she started the Palabrarmas in 1966 and produced many after her tour in the Amazon in 1977-78. Mary L. Coyne, “Interview: Cecilia Vicuña’s ‘PALABRArmas’ at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago,” Mousse Magazine, accessed July 5, 2018: http://moussemagazine.it/cecilia-Vicuña-palabrarmas-at-neubauer-collegium-for-culture-and-society-at-the-university-of-chicago-2018/ 120 listening to them was the first work.”247 The Palabrarmas exemplified how words shift and morph into meanings beyond what they might immediately signify. Often, the words have within them compounded fragments of words as exemplified in their title: “palabra” “pala” “arma” “labrar” and “mas.”248 The posters that feature the screen-printed palabrarmas tie Vicuña to her roots in support of the Unidad Popular government, as one shows the word, “venceremos,” or “We will overcome,” a term used famously by Victor Jara in his song of support for Allende. The bright use of reds and blues signal the propagandistic color scheme supported by muralist movements in the 1960s [Figure 2.7]. Another installation uses yarn and inscribes “verdad” [truth] into the ground [Figure 2.8]. The letters are seemingly fastened by the threads that stretch up to the ceiling and tie the word to the floor as if questioning the matter of truth in a moment fettered with lies and uncertainty. But when reshuffled, “verdad” can read “dad ver” [to give sight], a connection to tactics the Avanzada engaged through their work. However, for Vicuña, it is the red string that calls up a violent polemic within the country through the intertwined nature of language and text. Vicuña identifies such incorporation of language, text, and thread as a rupture in the public sphere.249 The same alternative tactics were employed by artists in Brazil and Argentina and would be enacted by her colleagues, Diamela Eltit in her performance Zona de Dolor, and Lotty Rosenfeld, in One Mile of Crosses on the Pavement. Richard defined such actions and approaches as “the body we must keep afloat, then, as a hybrid recollection” through the “shreds 247 “Las palabras deseaban hablar/y escucharlas fue la primera labor.” Cecilia Vicuña, Palabramas (Santiago de Chile: El Imaginerio, 2005): 53. 248 Translates to: word, shovel, armor, work, and more. 249 Mary L. Coyne, “Interview: Cecilia Vicuña’s ‘PALABRArmas’ at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago,” Mousse Magazine, accessed July 5, 2018: http://moussemagazine.it/cecilia-Vicuña-palabrarmas-at-neubauer-collegium-for-culture-and-society-at-the-university-of-chicago-2018/ 121 of newspapers, fragments of extermination, syllables of death, passes of untruth, commercial phrases, names of the deceased that contaminated us through a ‘deep crisis of language, a disarticulation of all ideologies.’”250 Eltit’s performance was based on a novel she had written that made comparisons between the golpe and a fictional society affected by oppression. In the text, she employed various types of language, which created a coded and obscure discourse.251 For Rosenfeld, the mile of crosses were augmented traffic lines in which she added a perpendicular line and referenced those whose lives were ended prematurely under Pinochet [Figure 2.9]. Vicuña, too, underscores the inability to say the truth or to make evident the atrocities that occurred. When the artist produced the artist book Sabor a mí in 1973, it operated under the guise of an almost personal entry against authoritarianism through its smallness, handwritten aspects, and delicate nature [Figure 2.10]. Vicuña conveys her sadness and shock towards the overthrow of Allende on these pages, as they are filled with places to uncover her feelings in envelopes that request the reader to intrude. In the translator’s explanation on the opening cover, Felipe Ehrenberg writes: Appearing as it does two months after Chile was carefully raped by starry striped militarists, Saborami [sic] is the very first howl of pain to emerge from the rubble under which Chile’s conscience lies stunned. This book is sheer irony; the result 250 Richard, The Insubordination of Signs, 6. 251 Eltit reminds us that in a Chile under dictatorship, government and self-imposed censorship shaped new ways of ‘how to say things and what to say.’ at the time, ‘all literary production was altered’ the author points out as she further explains the difference in the then emerging generation of writers, one rooted in the ‘tortuous manner of naming the reality of daily life’ during those years when the ‘tremendously repressive’ nature of the novel in Chile paralleled political circumstance. In order to break away from the standard structure of the national novel - symbolically subverting the political status quo as well, Eltit borrowed from different genres (something she had already explored in E. Luminata) and incorporated various types of languages which together composes a coded and often obscure, discourse reflective of the communicative needs of a society affected by oppression. Norat, Marginalities, 108. 122 of converging chance happenings: it collects nearly ten years of work by Cecilia and was planned as a celebration. Now it symbolizes the contained fury and the sorrow of her country’s present.252 In the pages that follow are small snippets of poems and reproductions of Vicuña’s artwork. One image features a stylized heart with a cord knotted around it, as the following text is typewritten at the bottom, “Fear and uncertainty after the attempted coup form a: ‘knot in my heart.’” The subsequent page features a reproduced photograph of a small doll made by wrapping white material around it with a cord around its neck, swaying from an unseen source [Figure 2.11]. This momio alludes to the day Allende was elected, and the only people who did not dance in the streets were conservative populations.253 Vicuña’s poetry and images provide a rich internal message that would then morph into the quipu. Together, here materials propose a kind of embodied and performed understanding of the new government in the same capacity as Eltit whose acts of self-mutilation in Zona de Dolor and clandestinely written novels generated, recorded, and transmitted knowledge in the way women’s bodies were deployed and made into the acceptable Chilean body after the coup. In the next section, I underscore this ability made by Vicuña where she integrates fiber and aspects of the quipu to speak for lost languages, marginalized voices, and disappeared populations. However, it begins in her early works with language and is located in the deployment of the red string seen in the Palabrarma “verdad.” Her practice aligns with how Richard discusses the role of disremembering, in that there is a co-option of the quipu or the fiber and its relation to Indigenous practices, but signals how those voices are both lost or ignored. The recollection of 252 Cecilia Vicuña, Sabor a mi (London: Beau Geste Press, 1973): 1. 253 Momio is a Chilean term to refer to supporters of the conservative right. With the election of Allende, the Left cried “Los momios al paredón”, or “the mummies to the execution wall,” to mean the rich or the momios were to be executed and the women raped. 123 historical events and objects occurs as a way to contend with the tragedy of colonization. Richard writes, “texts of the new Chilean discourse assembled and disassembled knowledge systems with the help of the citation, and its quality of ‘cutting in.’”254 It is that insertion, or that gash, which was asserted with the Avanzada, finds its way into Vicuña’s art. For example, in the break up of the Palabrarmas, such a manipulation of words evokes a kind of metaphorical wound that constantly references the shattering of language under dictatorship. In using the strings of thread, Vicuña bridges her utilization of the quipu (the historically Indigenous device) in its various iterations to further initiate those direct associations/disassociations and combinations elicited by Richard. She is constantly imbuing her work with several layers of meaning. Even the momio, with its allusion to Allende’s government, functions similarly to CADA’s action of distributing milk to the outskirts of Santiago. It is in memory, or even the disremembering, where Vicuña operates as she alludes to the failed government and how Indigenous populations were treated under the new regime. 2.5 Locating the Quipu The events that unfolded during the Allende presidency and in the moments following its end were pertinent to the emergence of the quipu in Vicuña’s practice. There are two ways in which the quipu becomes important to Vicuña’s work: through its relationship to Indigenous histories, as well as her own identity. In QUIPOem, she writes, “The quipu that remembers nothing, an empty cord is the core, the heart of memory, the earth, listening to us.”255 Thread, which was originally a part of Vicuña’s pracarios objects, slowly transformed to reference the 254 Richard, The Insubordination of Signs, 53. 255 Vicuña, QUIPOem, 45. 124 Incan tradition of the quipu. The statement she makes considers the position of non-existence in its “empty cord” and how she too felt when away from Chile. Importantly, Vicuña’s first quipu had no physical existence and thus, she deployed a metaphorical nature that can further connect to her own identity, as she locates a constant, yet invisible, Indigenous presence, a parallel to her feelings of being an Andean woman. The quipu is not a textile but rather a series of long cords that radiate out from one central thread with an average length of 85 centimeters and are often associated with the Inkan empire (c. 1438-1533) [Figure 2.12]. It typically features fibers that are twisted and knotted at certain intervals and in specific directions to elicit information or records concerning events, stories, or to administrative archives. The cords were used and read by specific members of the Incan community called quipucamayoqs [knot makers/organizers/animators], and while the Spanish first saw them as useful in maintaining their colonial records, they quickly disband their value when usurping power in the area.256 In its basic form, scholar Gary Urton describes the quipu, a word drawn from Quechua, the lingua franca and language of administration of the Inca empire (ca. 1450-1532), as: knotted-string devices … used for recording both statistical and narrative information, most notably by the Inka but also by other peoples of the central Andes from pre-Inkan times, through the colonial and republican eras, and even-in a considerably transformed and attenuated form—down to the present day.257 Although this system employing a binary number technique has never been completely deciphered, it has often been characterized as a “system of mnemonics,” though it may have also 256 Gary Urton, Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003): 1-2. 257 Ibid. 125 constituted a coherent system of writing.258 The quipu has specific resonance to the Andean countries of Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, and Peru, acting as a mnemonic device and carrier of knowledge, an idiosyncrasy often applied to textiles. Thus, while not a de facto textile, quipus operate within a history of fiber and thread that relate to notions of perceived identity in the region. These artifacts are not colonial objects but have always been native to South America. As much as the quipu operated under the Incan empire, for Vicuña, it has seemingly become a broad marker of the Indigenous cultures of the Quechua and Aymara. However, in many of her performances and poems, she incorporates Mapuche aspects, linking them under a broad understanding of Indigeneity.259 Undoubtedly, a large part of the culture, especially in Chile, is based on cloth, textiles, and threads, all which hold symbolic weight and meaning or are the embodiment of identity or long-held traditions. While the Mapuche never utilized the quipu, textiles within the group were largely utilitarian and, through color, design, and symbols, they conveyed meaning related to myth and cosmology, status and lineage. Social identities expressed in the textiles did not remain static, but evolved through the long struggles of the Mapuche populations to resist the Spanish crown and later the Chilean state, as evidenced in the sixteenth century epic poem by Alonso de Ercilla titled, La Araucana.260 In highlighting the importance placed on the intersection between Indigenous history and textiles, Vicuña’s art showcases her interest in re-utilizing the quipu as a link to memory and the past as well as the connection between history and Mother Nature. When she writes, “The quipu that remembers nothing,” she speaks to the history of colonialism. It 258 Ibid., 3. 259 The Mapuche is the most visible group in Chile and Vicuña has incorporated words, songs, and anecdotes from the nation. 260 Carol Hutchinson, ed. The Chile Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013): 72. 126 remembers nothing; not because of the inability to “read” these threads without Incan instruction, but that there is ‘nothing’ to read; that is, forms of colonialism have enacted an erasure. When living in London during the golpe, Vicuña navigated her duress through various projects that would connect her to Chile and to the resistance against the acting government. One such project, Sabor a mi, which I have discussed briefly, spoke directly to the pain she felt upon learning the news. 261 The struggle of power and fear of a possibly coup were realities in Chile and known by the general public, and thus Vicuña used artwork and writing to quell such anxiety. What emerged was a book filled with her reproduced poetry and paintings, alongside notes and letters, as a way to make sense of the ongoing events.262 Its smallness, handwritten notes that feature the envelopes they were sent in, vellum paper with pressed leaves, and the pen and ink drawings lend a feeling that the book is more like a diary or intimate object. Indeed, even the title evokes this relationship – Sabor a mi [Taste of me] - highlights the personal relationship with its author, as it spans Vicuña’s work from 1966-1973. So too does Vicuña provide the viewer with an attachment to the book, showcasing the ephemeral actions and precarious sculptures as they turn the pages in the unstable construction. She provides a space in the pages and in the action for the viewer to feel the same apprehension she had felt in this moment of time. After Sabor a mi, Vicuña turned to her Journal of Objects for the Chilean Resistance, where objects such as writing on a piece of red silk, the London quipu, and Paño e’ sangre 261 Beau Geste Press published an edition of 250 with the first 30 signed by the artist. Beau Geste Press was established David Mayor, Martha Hellian, and Felipe Ehrenberg and saw themselves as a collective press. 262 The book became a platform to analyze her paintings of key political figures such as Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, as well as resolve her fears about an impending coup d’état that would happen in Chile while she was away. 127 (alternatively titled Venda/Bandage) were featured in a solo exhibition at the Arts Meeting Place in 1974 [Figure 2.13].263 The quipu, for Vicuña, had at that moment, been imagined only a handful of times, but the London quipu shows a deconstructed piece of bark or stick material with draping strings and twisted twine at varying lengths. The Venda/Bandage mimicked such perilous construction and was composed of two stick materials, one much larger than the other, connected through roping, with a red delicate and gauze-like material hanging from it. Her intention was to bring them under the banner of resistance, but Vicuña’s reference to the quipu metaphorically bridges the Indigenous resistance and of keeping alive the traditions and insertions established by the Allende government, two aspects that disappeared with colonization and the golpe. Beyond the idea of Indigenous resistance, the quipu, has other many visible and invisible associations for Vicuña. Made typically from wool, the quipu draws on to the Andean camelids native to the region. The sourcing of material from the local highlights how intrinsic the land continues to be for Indigenous communities, and ultimately bridges environmental concerns with human rights. She never distinctly locates the quipu as related to an individual group, rather she underscores their status as Indigenous objects, and thus, such lack of specificity allows for a projection of many creation myths, histories, and languages onto the quipu. Thus, it is never about the individual but more focused on the inclusion of the multiplicitous connection, a pertinent characteristic for how the quipu can operate so broadly within her work. The threads and fiber occur alongside the poetry and writing enacted by the artist in response to the Pinochet regime and its treatment of Mapuche people. Disappearance did not just 263 “Timeline,” Cecilia Vicuña, accessed January 12, 2015: http://www.ceciliaVicuña.com/timeline. 128 begin with the wake of the golpe; rather, the Mapuche have long been mistreated under both the Spanish crown and the Chilean state. Thus, this notion of disappearance extends to instantiations of colonization happening since the arrival of the conquistadores, the dissolution of the Incan empire, and consistent attacks on the Mapuche in the southern region, all survived in a history of epic poetry. Vicuña calls attention to this history in the metaphorical employment of the red string. It is evocative of the history of peoples who have suffered under multiple regimes of power, specifically a history deeply entrenched in Chilean cultural forms within the poem La Araucana and later in the Nueva Canción movement. Through an analysis of the textual layers existing within Vicuña’s fiber art, from those seemingly banal strands used in her installations and performances to their integration into her lines of poetry featuring the Mapuche language Mapudungún, the work connects to the local situation in Chile. The message also extends beyond the country and the present moment. In most recent years, Vicuña has employed the quipu extensively. For example, in 2014, Vicuña paid direct homage to Allende through both a quipu and an interactive installation. With long thick strands of wool hung from the ceiling, the gauzy material featured milky white and cream colours with deep grey strands peppered throughout. They were placed near a window and the light danced around the wool creating a somber environment, one that fit the venue of the Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos, a museum in Santiago de Chile dedicated to commemorating the victims of human rights violations. Titled Quipu de los Lamentos [Quipu of Regrets], the installation takes on new meaning as the darker colored strands punctuate against their lighter counterparts — a reminder of those lives ended prematurely and made to disappear 129 under the government [Figure 2.14].264 Included near the quipu were other participatory aspects that connected the visitor more deeply to the space. The quipu became a sonic-spatial work as the disappeared are heard with the voice carrying through the room, “Caress the sounds/hear the unheard/the suffering/of the disappeared.” Near to the quipu, visitors could then see portraits of Allende painted by Vicuña; some were without the eyes, allowing viewers to see through his perspective the atrocities committed by his successor. 2.6 Pulling at threads: Vicuña’s precarious acts An overarching concern for Vicuña is precariousness. Defined as “the state of being dangerously likely to fall or collapse,” precariousness encapsulates how Vicuña addresses the insecure nature of fiber and language, and, more broadly, the existence of certain populations.265 The word also ties into the short lived moment of Allende’s presidency, a socialist government that teetered on the edge as the United States helped employ covert force to fell his vision. The term, precarios, emerged in her practice in the 1960s, before Allende was president, but the term played an essential component in the early objects that would transform as her career developed. It offered a path to considering the unpredictable nature, or even future, of not only the thread or small sculptures of natural detritus, but became a larger metaphorical tie to those who are 264 Exhibition was also featured at Museo de Bellas Artes and was part of the presentation of her archive in relationship to the Artists for Democracy. See Adriana Goñi, “Cecilia Vicuña, El Quipu de los Lamentos: ‘Oír lo no oído/el sufrimiento de los desaparecidos,” Comunicaciones y Reseñas memoria, 12 Febuary 2014: https://comunicacionesantropologia.wordpress.com/2014/02/12/cecilia-Vicuña-el-quipu-de-los-lamentos-oir-lo-no-oido-el-sufrimiento-de-los-desaparecidos/#:~:text=Cecilia%20Vicu%C3%B1a%20lleva%20cuarenta%20a%C3%B1os,cuelgan%20retratos%20de%20detenidos%20desaparecidos. 265 “Precarious,” Merriam Webster, accessed June 3, 2019: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/precarious 130 ignored or who go unsupported by the status quo. And, indeed the artist has always seen the value in bringing attention to marginalized communities. In an action that coincided with CADA’s Para no morir del hambre en los artes, Vicuña spilled a glass of milk. Under a blue sky on September 26, 1979, while living in Bogotá, Colombia, she sat outside the Quinta Simon Bolívar, the former home of the nineteenth century revolutionary leader of South America. With a red cord tied around the middle of a glass vessel, Vicuña, seated on the ground, pulled the string from a short distance to unleash an opaque white liquid composed of intensely pigmented water [Figure 2.15]. Her action responded to el crimen lechero, the “milkman crime” that left nearly 2,000 children gravely ill or deceased from contaminated milk produced and sold through the country, a result of corporate cost-cutting measures. Twelve people were present for the performance that concluded with the artist scrawling in chalk across the roadway the following poem: “The cow is the continent whose milk (blood) is being spilled / What are we doing to our lives?”266 Before her El vaso de leche performance, Vicuña had been concerned with the lives of those living in the margins of society. In Bogotá, she looked to children whose right to live was denied by capitalism, but also toward Chile, to bridge her actions to those who continued the memory of the Popular Unity who fought for social programs. In each of these projects, there is a sense of displacement of being in the inside and the outside. Her arrival in Bogotá specifically spoke to her yearning to return to Chile, to return to the continent. She notes the way the name “Vicuña” signals her belonging to the Andes, and the precarious nature of her existence with the inability to return to her country. Vicuñas are small camelids native to the Andean region and known historically as being the producers of soft wool, worn only by Incan royalty. In 266 Vicuña, QUIPOem, 55-54. 131 highlighting her name, Vicuña maintains a sense of nationalism in her practice; she is tied to the geographical and historical region in more ways than one, despite the political turmoil. Starting in 1966, she explored her connection and relationship to the land through a series titled Precarios. The earliest photographs capturing these works focus on strings of thread, thin and wavering, hanging directly among riverbeds or in the sand. Some of the threads are propped up by sticks and drape loosely over the natural detritus with emblems incorporated by Vicuña, such as spirals drawn in the terrain [Figure 2.16]. In one such image, Con-Con, she presents a modified landscape of sandy terrain, short shrubbery that sees sticks planted into the ground at various intervals.267 In turn, they create a natural border between the sand and the greenery, but with its small size, could be easily overlooked. Near the division two circles exist traced into the sand; one has only the border and is smooth in its center, while the other becomes a series of circles creating a spiral. Nestled between the two circles are feathery materials that shoot from it, and more lines are drawn to create non-naturally occurring patterns [Figure 2.17]. Despite such work put toward its creation, the installation can be easily wiped away. These small objects were almost entirely composed of found material and were made in the environment she found herself in, a practice that would garner its title as land art; but her approach warrants the question: How does precariousness lend itself to Vicuña’s practice and why does it become enacted through thread? Beyond the strings and threads that pepper the riverbanks and fields or were involved on the beaches through her precarious projects, such materials found themselves tied to glasses of “milk” navigating beyond environmental concerns towards the upending of democracy. Her precarious objects act as an early form of poetic intervention. Their existence would merge more 267 Concón is a coastal city in central Chile. 132 fully in her poetry as she dealt with the ongoing fallout and feelings towards changes in Chile. The cord becomes a reoccurring theme because of its mutability and transmedial operations. From the banks of the rivers, to the glass of milk, to the later poetry books wrapped by thread; all feature this relationship to text and textile in some relationship. The quipu further heightens this understanding in its very intrinsic connection to language made unavailable outside a cultural group, one that no longer exists because of colonization. The fiber enacts Vicuña’s sentiments of Chile being on the bridge of collapse or existing in a delicate nature. The red thread announced in early precarios projects, and even into the palabrarmas, would wind its way and make up the quipu because language and wordplay are deeply intertwined and can speak to one concern while referencing another. Lucy Lippard has written that Vicuña’s precarios objects are visual poems or “metaphors in space.”268 The question, then, to consider is how exactly do these precarios connect to language or evoke relationships beyond the space where they are found? For Alvergue, the precarios and palabrarmas provide an undoing of the dominant language, an idea supported by Diana Taylor’s argument between the operations of the repertoire versus the archive. The notion of precariousness arises in consideration of fiber and thread through the historical lens of how the materials connected to the golpe in 1973. Following the end of democracy, women began to piece together objects known as arpilleras to tell of the unspoken atrocities happening within Chile. The arpilleras were originally yarn-based tapestries and presented images of daily activities and cultural representations along with religious motifs prominent within the folk tradition, made famous outside the country by Violeta Parra. They morphed to then present the 268 Lucy Lippard, “Spinning the Common Thread,” in The Precarious: The Art and Poetry of Cecilia Vicuña (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1997): 10. 133 horrific lived experiences many faced during the dictatorship, such as the rounding up of men, women, and children by the DINA, or the firing squads and forced disappearances [Figure 2.18]. On a small piece of accompanying paper would the maker provide a simple explanation of what the image exemplified. The textiles were sent clandestinely and included notes from those who made them, describing the events they witnessed and increasingly became incredibly important to families and friends who were forced into exile for political reasons. Some served as small fundraising materials to help provide relief and aid to those who had to remain in Chile.269 Their fiber-based status, as the long strings are delicately woven in to create shapes, would continue even as makers shifted to the faster mode of making in the appliqué method. The body depicted in the arpilleras as well as the invisible body imbued in the threads and fibers of Vicuña’s work co-exist under dictatorship. The quipu, the strings, the scenes of violence, all serve as mnemonic devices that are manipulated, deployed, provide information, and become the personal effects of a specific history. The body in all its capacity must be under consideration and becomes evident when she writes that the viewer must “join in to complete the poem” as much as “the knot [in the khipu] is witness to the exchange.”270 Through the historical precedent of the Nueva Canción and its connection to arpilleras, what becomes clear is how each were marked by comparative interests in incorporating Indigenous language and thread-based materials. Vicuña seemingly turns to the idea of a Chilean vernacular under a moment of duress, looking to how language, thread, and Indigenous histories 269 For a more comprehensive view of the arpilleras, see Jacqueline Adams, Art Against Dictatorship: Making and Exporting Arpilleras Under Pinochet (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013). 270 Cecilia Vicuña and Ernesto Livon-Grosman, editors, The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009): xxv. 134 have been employed to bring together the people.271 Ephemerality and precariousness only mark this moment as even more volatile, just as the cords in her work or the words of her poetry, mark that meaning is ever fleeting. 2.7 Conclusion Vicuña’s work weaves together a complicated story, one that includes both her own biography as well as significant political and historical events that shaped present-day Chile. Ultimately, the arrival of the quipu came with the demise of Allende’s government when Vicuña was faced with the inability to return home. The employment of precariousness would continue throughout her career as she used forms available to her, first on the beaches of Chile and then later in the streets of London. Vicuña’s artwork and poetry stems from a schism, from which the country remains unable to heal; the dictatorship caused such deep divides between families and communities that continue to be felt beyond the historical moment. Even today, within Chile, younger generations protest against the rising cost of living and the struggle that many pensioners face in making ends meet, while those within government and political positions continue to thrive. The civil protests that took place from October 2019 to March 2020, that imposed a curfew and forced the military police onto the streets, reignited the memory of protests in the 1970s and 80s against the acting political parties and the events that resulted, with military action again occurring towards peaceful protesters. Such events highlight Vicuña’s poignancy, both historically and currently. It is not merely an attempt to speak for a specific population, but in utilizing textiles and threads within her poetry, she provides an alternative 271 McSherry, “The Political Impact of Chilean New Song in Exile,” 25. The money raised from concerts of the Nueva Canción abroad was sent back to help Chilean families. 135 approach to invisible knowledge, experiences, and the capacity to remember people and cultures that underwent violence at the hands of the government and through colonialism. Her employment of knotted strings attempts to hold space for the Mapuche and other Indigenous groups native to Chile, to recall the extensive colonization, and its ongoing role in the country. The interest in recognition further complicates what is instilled in such a loaded term like Los Desaparecidos, perhaps asking us to understand it as both a political disappearance and one that happened (and continues to happen) through ecological devastation. Tying her work together is the reliance on thread within art and poetry; thus critiquing how voices were silenced during colonization and perceived political dissidence. Questions around identity and knowledges thus ran throughout this chapter, especially concerning the ephemeral and precarious nature of the thread utilized in Vicuña’s work. The intrinsic prevalence to the spiritual in Vicuña’s poetry and thread-based production was always in danger of being stripped, destroyed either from the elements of the weather or from ongoing censorship. Considering, too, that Vicuña’s work is often connected to Mapuche and Indigenous cultures of Chile, her embodiment of the hardships becomes manifest through her performances and words, connecting to ideas around knowledge and place as suggested by Taylor: “If performance did not transmit knowledge, only the literate and powerful could claim social memory and identity.”272 There is a complicated entanglement between Vicuña’s performances and her fiber work occurring between the political, Indigenous and thread-based realms focused on knowledge, culture, and identity. Vicuña’s projects focus on the performative nature of identity as much they speak to disappearance as the two go hand in hand. 272 Diana Taylor, “Who, When, What, Why,” in The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003): xvii. 136 In looking to the complicated history in Chile and around the Indigenous peoples, the desaparecidos and Vicuña’s praxis, the complexities of identity can be further entangled. The work pertains to Mapuche culture, the most extensive Indigenous culture in Chile, alongside the disappeared who went missing because of military brutality towards those who spoke against the government. Both issues are related to the oppression Vicuña experienced and built on the relationship of personhood to the state. Again recalling her political action with QUIPOem and the more recent performance discussed in the introduction, Quipu Menstrual (2004), there is an expression of those silenced voices and an encouragement to acknowledge Indigenous knowledges and connections to the land, particularly with the ongoing transitions toward neoliberalism that shift sacred spaces into sites of capital. Vicuña’s work exists between a Chilean/Andean/Indigenous identity, all of which could be tied together to manifest her own space; yet, it is through these paths that she arrives at a constantly shifting notion of self. That is to say, her voice and her activism are never stagnant and work in tandem with multiple languages and subsequently, she provokes the multiplicity of identity that exists within Chile. The use of the entwined thread, reverberating throughout Vicuña’s work in both her text and art, continually calls up the idea of the quipu. The string that makes its appearance through the early precarios comes alive again in El vaso de leche, only to find its way to Vicuña’s work again in the 1990s onwards. The quipu takes on a loaded meaning via knowledge and knowing in the Andean region, as does the role of wool and its reference to textile making. The string becomes a stand-in for the metaphor of the umbilical cord that is used to connect weaving and textiles to Indigenous groups that she evokes, just as each of these manifestations of quipu draws connections to the political issues facing the broader Latin American region. 137 This notion of identity and knowledge also informs the relationship between Vicuña’s work and its ephemeral and precarious nature. When discussing her works, there is an intrinsic connection to the spiritual, but also the danger that awaits Vicuña’s sculptures as they can be destroyed swiftly. If we are to consider Vicuña’s connection with Mapuche culture, it seems that she attempts to interpret and embodies their hardship through her own experiences and artwork. Such an action could be seen as a problematic form of appropriation, yet Vicuña has also utilized her transnational connections to draw attention to events occurring within the Chilean borders as not isolated events. Her work continues to shed light on the abuses faced by many populations when she works with site-specific events to contextualize her work. Vicuña’s entanglement with the political, with Indigeneity, and with text(iles) highlights cultural identities in flux, made evident in the performative. Vicuña’s understanding of identity is complex. It is wrapped up in layers of historical events that culminate in the thread as the performative action of the repertoire, moving through the archival history made apparent in her textural poetry. 138 Chapter 3 Conceptual forms under Censorship: Locating legibility in Mirtha Dermisache’s asemic writing 3.1 Introduction One day, I felt a sort of knot coming undone in me, the beginning of a process that I could not yet really make out. Sitting in a patio three days later, I started to make scribbles on a piece of kraft paper, like tangles of wool, but with titles and distinct paragraphs. Then letters in earnest. Then I decided [those pages] had to be in a book with arbitrary—though deliberately chosen—size and volume… I wanted them to be pages of a book, an object with front and back cover, bound on one side and open on the other. If someone wanted to stick one of the pages to the wall, they would have to break it, to perform the act of tearing a page out of a book and putting it elsewhere. —Mirtha Dermisache273 In 1965, Argentinean Mirtha Dermisache began the process of completing what would become a five-hundred page book. Publishers rejected the manuscript because of its length, so she reduced the tome and split it into two separate volumes.274 Two years later, Libro n. 1 and Libro n. 2 were finished [Figure 3.1]. The project was not only unique due to its length but also for the contents inside, for Dermisache had filled the pages with various methods of handwriting that took on glyphic states, or appeared as scrawls and scratches across the pristine paper. The writing, in fact, was indecipherable, or asemic, and thus, possessed no meaning. The concept of illegible writing, or what two visual poets, Tim Gaze and Jim Leftwich named in 1998 as asemic writing, was not a practice unfamiliar to Dermisache.275 As illustrated in the 1970 interview with Panorama magazine, Dermisache saw her graphisms as letters, albeit unintelligible ones—“like tangles of wool.” As Tim Gaze explained the term, “a seme is a unit of 273 Edgardo Cozarinsky, “Un grado cero de la escritura,” Panorama magazine, Buenos Aires, VII, 156 (April 1970): 51. 274 The third iteration of the book was unpublished and unbound and kept in her private archive. 275 See Peter Swenger, Asemic: The Art of Writing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 1. He mentions that the term asemic appears in Roland Barthes’s The Rustle of Language and in Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination. 139 meaning, or the smallest unit of meaning…An asemic text, then, might be involved with units of language for reasons other than that of producing meaning. As such, the asemic text would seem to be an ideal, an impossibility, but possibly worth pursuing for just that reason.” He continues to further define it as “anything which looks like writing, but in which the person viewing can’t read any words.”276 Given Dermisache’s practice that explored books but also included letters, texts, and sentences, it is clear that her graphisms might be established as asemic, where the focus was moved from an expected message to the focus on the material configurations on the page.277 The term, too, has dominated the discourse surrounding her praxis after she corresponded with Roland Barthes from 1971 to 1974. He wrote on how struck he was by: …The remarkable visual quality of your lines…but also—indeed mostly—by the extreme intelligence of the theoretical problems around writing that your work tackles. You have managed to produce a certain number of forms that are neither figurative nor abstract, forms that could be called illegible writing, which leads readers to formulate something that is neither a specific message nor a contingent form of expression but, rather, the idea, the essence, of writing.278 Barthes came into contact with Dermisache’s work in 1971, through the filmmaker Hugo Santiago, who had traveled to Paris and subsequently provided Barthes with a book. Thus, from that point on, Dermisache more explicity named her practice as illegible writing despite working with the form previously. Prior to working with graphic writing, Dermisache grew up outside Buenos Aires and had attended the art schools Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Manuel Belgrano and Escuela 276 Ibid., 2. 277 Ibid. Schwenger articulates this as a definition for asemic writing, pulling from Gaze and Leftwich. 278 Letter from Roland Barthes, Paris, March 28, 1971. “Artist,” Legado Mirtha Dermisache, Accessed November 6, 2020. http://mirthadermisache.com/. 140 Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón, where she received a degree in art education.279 Her pursuit in art education continued with her enrolment at the Instituto Nere-Echea, where pedagogy focused on “learning by doing.”280 Dermisache worked at the Institute where she developed murals based on student interests as well as mosaics that reutilized recycled tiles. She never abandoned asemic writing as her principal practice and later produced what she titled “legible” texts and “work events,” a proto-participatory project that was connected to the Jornadas del Color y de la Forma [Intensive Work Sessions in Color and Form]. These workshops developed by Dermisache occurred throughout Buenos Aires and surrounding areas beginning in 1971, and offered informal art classes to artists and non-artists alike. Outside of the Jornadas, she exhibited work at the Instituto Torcuato di Tella [Torcuato di Tella Institute] (ITDT) and at the Centro de Arte y Comunicación [Center of Art and Communication] (CAYC), and would continue to be active in both institutions throughout her career. Dermisache’s 1965 illegible books were not the first instantiations of asemic writing to emerge in the Argentine art world. In 1963, artist León Ferrari exhibited his Letter to a General that showed overly ornate and cursive-based script that obfuscated any political dissent directed at the acting government [Figure 3.2]. Indeed, only three years later, the country would see the first of two violent dictatorships that took hold of the country. The first military junta took place from 1966 to 1973 and the second, notably named la guerra sucía [The Dirty War], from 1976 to 1983. Like Ferrari, Dermisache produced much of her illegible writing during these two moments, and given the small art circles that ran in Buenos Aires, it is likely she came across 279 Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón is now the Departamento de Artes Visuales of the Universidad Nacional de las Artes (UNA) in Buenos Aires. 280 “Artist,” Legado Mirtha Dermisache, Accessed November 6, 2020. http://mirthadermisache.com/. 141 these scrawls on a page. Ferrari would soon abandon writing to produce politically confrontational sculpture and paintings, like his nearly two-meter installation, The Western Christian Civilization (1965), showed a sculpture of Jesus Christ crucified to a fighter jet [Figure 3.3]. The political response to his work forced him to leave Argentina for Brazil under the second dictatorship, when his son was among those who were made to “disappear.” Dermisache, by contrast, maintained her praxis devoted to graphic writing. Although she was interrogated and watched by the military junta, she managed to not antagonize the government.281 The ITDT and CAYC opened in 1958 and in 1969 and would become the two institutes highly influential to not only Dermisache’s practice but to many other Argentine artists, even shaping the art historical discourse. However, unlike many of her contemporaries who moved through these two centers, prior to the most recent retrospective of her work in the Museo de Arte Latinoamerico de Buenos Aires in 2017, her texts, books, and other written work had been, and remained, understudied, both within Argentina and throughout South America. For example, her prolific practice exceeded her 500-page book, and she produced her graphisms in vast quantities that would be recognized later in her career. Indeed, she articulated that it was more about publishing than it was about exhibitions, because the end goal was to have her viewers “read” her work. She wrote, “I would exhibit the original [books] and the audience would be able to touch them (the pages were protected)… It was important that people be able to touch and handle the artwork. I don’t really care about the shows as much as about publishing the work.”282 Perhaps because of this interest in publishing and later, art education, Dermisache did not 281 Lucia Cañada, “Intensive Work Sessions in Color and Form (1975-1981): Art as Vital Praxis,” in Mirtha Dermisache: Porque Yo Escribo! (Buenos Aires: MALBA, 2018): 51. 282 Annalisa Rimmaudo and Giulia Lamoni, “Entrevista a Mirtha Dermisache,” in Mirtha Dermisache, Publicaciones y dispositivos editoriales (exhibition catalogue), (Buenos Aires: Pabellón de las Bellas Artes de la Pontificia Universad Católica Argentina, 2011): 10-11. 142 become a household name in Argentina during her lifetime. In this chapter, I will articulate how Dermisache’s praxis intervened at a pivotal political moment in Argentina and held the potential to decenter in a virtually invisible capacity as it moved beyond periods of censorship by the government. Not only does Dermisache take text beyond its legible capacity and structure, but she mimics the devices of journals, books, and lectures to situate herself into the history of writing as both an art form as well as providing information. In his book, Lines: A Brief History, anthropologist Tim Ingold examines the capabilities and capacities proposed through the use of lines. He distinguishes two classes of lines, thread and traces, which operate as the beginning stages of various avenues such as language and writing to information and weaving. Threads are “a filament of some kind, which may be entangled with other threads or suspended between points in a three-dimensional space.”283 While threads are never drawn onto a surface, rather they might create their own through lateral displacement and integration to manifest two-dimensional planes, traces are either additive or reductive “enduring marks left in or on a solid surface by a continuous movement.”284 Ingold thus makes a case that writing can be differentiated from “drawing lines” because the former is technological, a form of notation, as well as linear. Writing an unfamiliar script, or in the case of Dermisache’s asemic writing, situates the act between drawing and writing, as meaning cannot necessarily be gleaned by the viewer. With both reading and writing, the gesture is what guides and enacts both processes. Dermisache’s gesture alludes to the concept of textility, where through the genesis and construction of the asemic scribbles, writing comes into being. 285 283 Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge, 2007): 41. 284 Ibid., 43. 285 Ibid., 51 143 The gesture of drawing and writing or the production of these graphisms has an immediate connection, for Ingold, to acts of knitting, writing, and embroidery. Such material practices manipulate the trace and the thread that further binds them, despite their inherent difference in mediums. Ingold writes, “threads may be transformed into traces, and traces into threads. It is through the transformation of threads into traces...that surfaces are brought into being. And conversely, it is through the transformation of traces into threads that surfaces are dissolved.”286 Examples like body painting, where shamans dissolve the surface of the body through the use of new lines, or embroidery where the surface of the material is transformed through the additive use of thread. To further convey connections that emerge between text and textile and the additive nature of threads, Ingold turns to the weaving of text into tapestries. As the weaver controls the shuttle, so does the writer control the pen, each manifesting lines of text with constituent threads: [the line of text] emerges through the progressive lengthwise displacement of the letter-line as it oscillates up and down within a determinate ‘bandwidth’, in much the same way that the woven stripe is built up through the longitudinal displacement of the west as it oscillates transversely between selected warp lines.287 In the fifteenth century, such an incorporation between text and textile, texture and textual, was known as textura, because of its resemblances to woven blankets. The text-line, however, did not exist as a visible trace nor as a thread but oscillated up down between the warp-lines. Dermisache’s practice operates as the writer’s practice, where traces are produced, no longer 286 Ibid., 52. 287 Ibid., 70. 144 woven but “pieced together from discrete graphic elements.”288 Yet, in their illegibility these scribbles resemble, as she notes, “tangles of wool.”289 While chapters one and two examined the interrelated nature of textiles and notion of Indigeneity through the practices of Lygia Pape and Cecilia Vicuña, this chapter will focus on the ongoing forms of colonialism and historical backlash endured by Indigenous populations in Argentina. For what was most specific about Argentina as compared to other countries in the Southern Cone during this period, was the degree to which Indigenous populations were overtly elided by the nation’s European-facing discourses.290 While Indigenous textile forms and practices were help up by artists in Brazil and Chile, in Argentina after World War II, they were mostly overlooked by the country’s artistic community. In this context, then, Indigeniety and textiles were almost fully subsumed by colonial and authoritarian systems of power. Thus if Dermisache sought to evade or counter the repressive regimes through her “tangles of wool,” her version of textility also erased any connection to the autochthonous communities; material threads dissolved into traces. Dermisache’s graphisms instead responded to the hegemonic discourse that shaped the country – politically and artistically – through a method that figuratively presented absence, or absented presence. Drawing on the legacies of abstraction as she moved into more conceptual practices that evoke discussions of dematerialization and art information systems, what Dermisache’s asemic writing foregrounded was the very system of 288 Ibid. 289 Cozarinsky, “Un grado cero de la escritura,” 51. 290 See Carolyne R. Larson, The Conquest of the Desert: Argentina’s Indigenous Peoples and the Battle for History, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020. She articulates how Argentina has shaped their nation’s history and present through events of the 19th century, like the Conquest of the Desert. The ‘Golden Age’ of Argentina focused on progress and modernity and made Indigenous populations nearly invisible. 145 colonialism and its genocide of cultural forms. We might say her asemic writing performed this disappearance in a “tangle of [written] wool.” Chapter three will thus position Dermisache’s work within the historical context of abstraction and the engagement of art within Argentina, through an analysis of how the country arrived at their development of conceptualism. Under the dictatorial government, Dermisache worked in a medium that avoided the censorship of the government and allowed her to remain seemingly apolitical. Her conceptual approach to writing was mired in the tensions of the country that sought to remove the legacy of abstraction from an autochthonous past, as seen more prolifically in Brazil and Chile. Therefore, questions that recognize her relationship to the artistic sphere in which she operated will be addressed, such as: in what capacities does Dermisache tackle the nature of conceptual art through asemic text, considering the systematic flow of information from the dictatorship that controlled its dissemination. How, too, does Dermisache work both in and against the theories of conceptual art that appeared towards the end of the Sixties and would find an Argentine iteration through the advent of the Art Information Systems group in which she was peripherally affiliated? And finally, how does Dermisache’s work echo, either consciously or unconsciously the treatment of Indigenous populations both under the regime but also historically? What did asemic writing provide under the burgeoning explorations of conceptualism that ignored and erased Indigenous cultures? 3.2 Argentina’s art milieu The lack of character of these South American peoples is only apparent, for underneath the European veneer our own character lies dormant. The problem is that the former does not allow the latter to thrive. —Joaquín Torres García, “The New Art of America”291 291 Joaquín Torres García, “The New Art of America,” in Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea, eds, (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004), 475. 146 Over the span of four decades beginning in the 1920s, Argentine artists grappled with the concepts and developments of abstraction. It took various avenues that coincided with autochthonous histories, incorporated Indigenous forms, and finally, conceded to a European understanding that would continue to gain influence in the Cold War period.292 In order to situate Dermisache’s practice within the legacy and developments of modernism, especially as the artistic milieu in the country struggled to legitimize their approach to the canvas in the early twentieth century, this section draws out the tangled networks that would ultimately lead to the adoption of European ideas and forms in lieu of looking inward to their own histories. Additionally, the establishment of institutions like the di Tella was based in this push to collect and exhibit the “modern masters” from abroad. The Argentine vanguard emerged amidst the circulation of journals and magazines, mediums that provided the wide circulation of ideas both within the southern continent and beyond. Two influential magazines that emerged during this period in Argentina were Martín Fierro and Amauta. First published in 1919, then from 1924 to 1927, Martín Fierro was named after an epic poem by José Hernández that detailed the events of a gaucho who fought for his independence from Spanish rule. The nineteenth-century poem spotlighted the pampas region and its rural economy through the gaucho’s search for personal transcendence, and ultimately aligned him with the mindset of the European colonizer. That is, the gaucho was a skilled horseman, individualistic, and often nomadic, and despite his often mestizo identity, his Indigenous heritage was never signaled by the author. He was the true Argentine who fought against the Indigenous populations. By the arrival of Peronism in the 1940s, the gaucho was 292 See Monica Amor, “At Painting’s Edge: Arte Concreto Invención, 1944-46,” in Theories of the Nonobject, where she exclusively discusses the embrace of European concrete art. 147 marked as backward and out of touch with the modernizing nation, but he would never receive the same detrimental treatment that befell Indigenous communities in the country and today, the gaucho is still marked with nostalgic romanticism.293 The literary magazine continued in this vein and remained fairly conservative in a moment that saw widespread abandon of European influence, particularly exemplified in manifestos like Oswald de Andrade’s Brazilian counterpart that pushed against the colonial encounter. Rather, the Martínfierristas endorsed European forms and styles, advocated a return to a perceived European cultural authenticity and order, especially in the wake of the Great War. Those involved favoured historical class stratifications and supported the cultural elite. Unlike other countries in Latin America who were confronting the challenges inherited from colonialism through radical ruptures in art and politics, Argentina, especially seen in Martín Fierro, chose to ignore the local realities and rekindled hierarchies inherited from abroad.294 As Martín Fierro supported ideas and artists developing in Italy, Spain, and France, the journal Amauta, which ran from 1926 to 1930, sought to engage the political and artistic discussions first in South America, although it would gain an international influence. First launched by José Carlos Mariátegui, Amauta (a Quechua term evoking both a wise man and teacher) began in Lima, Peru, but its influence would reach artists, writers, and other intellectuals in Argentina, especially painters Emilio Pettoruti and Xul Solar, among others.295 Where Amauta and Martín Fierro differ immensely was in their consideration of the local. Through the 293 Peronism refers to the period from 1946 to 1955 when Juan Perón was president of Argentina. 294 See Iliano Cepero, “Martín Fierro, Argentine Nationalism, and the Return to Order,” Modernism/modernity 26, 1, (January 2019): 111-140. 295 Pettoruti and Mariátegui had a personal relationship, established when the two were in Paris. See Roberto Amigo, “Modern Encounters: José Sabogal in Buenos Aires, 1928,” in The Avant-Garde Networks of Amauta: Argentina, Mexico, and Peru in the 1920s, Beverly Adams and Natalia Majluf, eds., (Austin: Blanton Museum of Art, 2019), 166. 148 dissemination of Amauta, the visual language surrounding Indigenous populations transformed. The artists of Amauta, especially Peruvian painters José Sabogal and Camilo Blas, invented graphic Indigenism and brought together the pre-Columbian references that surrounded many other modernist projects of Latin America with the modern Indigenous person, thus situating Amauta as both the “ancient Inca and a contemporary Indian.”296 Artists in Buenos Aires did not fully incorporate the graphic Indigenism but considerations of the local condition were seen in Pettoruti’s El Quinteto (1927), where the artist depicted five musicians playing tango music, as noted by the inclusion of the bandoneón, a small accordion-like instrument [Figure 3.4]. At the same time, the image utilized the pictorial language found in Cubism. On the other hand, Solar’s paintings examined the mystical elements of Indigenous creation stories, seen in Nana Watzin (1923), a play on the Nahautl god, Nanahuatzin, who was pivotal in the creation of the sun [Figure 3.5]. Although also framed in the fractured picture plane carried over by Cubism, Solar’s approach to the canvas served to reconsider histories that necessitated depiction.297 The reframing of Indigenous histories would carry over in the next decade as the Uruguayan artist, Joaquín Torres García, left Spain as it fell into the early years of civil war.298 In 1934, upon his homecoming, he established the Association of Constructive Art and by 1943, the Taller Torres García, and put into practice the program he titled Universal Constructivism with those who never had formal art training. His approaches differed from the graphic Indigenism of 296 Natalia Majluf, “Indigenism as Avant-Garde: The Graphic Arts,” in The Avant-Garde Networks of Amauta, 141. 297 Xul Solar studied various esoteric systems that included Theosophy, the Cabala, Sinology, astrology and pre-Columbian mythology. Solar changed his name from Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari to pay homage to the importance of light and sun. Xul is an anagram of Lux, Solar is Spanish for “sun.” 298 The artist was born in Uruguay but left when his father, who was a Catalan emigrant, moved the family back to Catalonia, Spain, when Torres García was a teenager. He benefitted from his time in Europe, visiting Paris and then later New York, before returning to Montevideo in 1932. 149 Amauta, in that Torres García’s messages moved away from the depiction of the population and rather incorporated the legacy of Abstraction gleaned from Europe into the autochthonous forms and symbols. An ambitious project on his part, Constructivism replaced the figurative style that artists in Argentina and Uruguay continued to emulate from Mexican muralism, and rather infused a pre-Columbian and modernist style with geometry as both subject and form. His early constructive compositions employed muted color palettes that would then explode into primary colors and forms through triangles, squares, and diagonal lines, still exhibiting the De Stijl influence via Theo van Doesburg. In some compositions, he utilized a compartment system, showcasing various universal forms in each square. Objects such as masks, temples, clocks, ladders, fish, and crude human figures pointed to three elements he saw as essential to the unity and balance of the individual [Figure 3.6]. They also referenced various aspects of Indigenous cultures in South America, largely what he saw as repressed Andean forms of abstraction. Yet the most significant image that arrived from Torres García’s reconstitution of art forms was the Inverted Map of America [Figure 3.7]. The map functioned as a counter-colonial reminder and served in the academic and artistic discourse as a visual expression of Latin American identity.299 Furthermore, the map destabilized the marginalizing restrictions of the Global North. In his manifesto, The School of the South, he wrote: We do not forget we are in the southern hemisphere. We have inverted map, and the top of America points toward our North Star, our goal. While these lands once had their own Indigenous tradition, today they find themselves in a new reality about which we cannot and will not be indifferent.300 299 Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Inversions: The School of the South,” Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea, eds, (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004), 75. 300 Joaquín Torres García, “The School of the South.” 1935. El Taller Torres-García: The School of the South and its Legacy, Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea, eds. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992) 53-57. He continues, “A great School of Art ought to arise here 150 The map was exactly as he articulated, the southernmost tip of South American continent stretched to the top of the composition, flipped upside down, and sandwiched between crude renderings of a sun and a moon, two symbols that stood in for the Inca sun god Father Inti and the Inca moon goddess, Mama Quilla. In doing so, Torres García encouraged his students to seek their inspiration locally rather than globally, but at the same time established an autonomous artistic tradition within the continent. He contributed to this new restructuring of the dialogue through lectures, radio broadcasts, and publications. The importance of Torres García is twofold for Argentina. First of all, his introduction of Universal Constructivism would lead to the publication of the Argentine-based avant-garde journal, Arturo (1944), because despite his Uruguayan nationality, Torres García became exceedingly popular among the porteño vanguard artists. The group connected with Torres García to establish a publication that examined verses, poetry, prints, and other experimental examples of new approach to art making in the 1940s. But most importantly, out of Arturo, two avenues of abstraction in Argentina emerged through the Grupo Madí and Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención. The approach made by Torres García indeed married geometric abstraction of European import with an elevation of Indo-American discourses, an example of hybridity that mirrored the mestizaje identity of many throughout the continent. He recognized and exaggerated in our country… I have said School of the South; because in reality, our North is the South. There should be no North for us, except in opposition to our South. That is why we now turn the map upside down.”⁠ Torres García’s quote echoes concerns made by Andreas Huyssen in “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World.” New German Critique No. 100 (Winter 2007): 189-207. Huyssen writes, “To de-Westernize notions such as modernity and modernism, we need a lot more theoretically informed descriptive work about modernisms at large, their interaction or non-interaction with Western modernism, their relationship to different forms of colonialism (different in Latin America from South Asia and again from Africa), their codings of the role of art and culture in relation to state and nationhood” (200). 151 the connections to Indigeneity in his concepts and writings, and many others would follow in this vein. The origins of AACI and Madí were linked to the local, but were quickly retooled as they favored an anti-romantic, rational, and geometric art, abandoning the once championed Indigenous forms and the individual mark encouraged by Torres García in Universal Constructivism.301 In María Amalia García’s book concerning concrete art in Argentina, such connections go ignored in favor of the canonized avant-garde, only briefly mentioning the initial influence on Arturo artists by Torres García, thus ignoring how Indigenous references would have been at the forethought of their approach to abstraction and invention.302 Any remnants of the handmade were obliterated for an emphasis on the mathematical, scientific, and mechanical appearance of flat, high-keyed colors. For Torres García, South America had no need to be beholden to neither North America nor Europe, rather it was equal to both. He wrote: So we are untouched by the values and qualities of European art (which we have studied so devotedly. May Cézanne and Picasso, Matisse and Renoir stay over there. May Cubism and Neo-Plasticism stay over there. And even the masters of all the other schools. And why not Egypt and Greece, and Byzantium, since we have an art that is just as strong and profound as theirs? It is more important that we study our own art in order to penetrate its essence.303 But what arrived from the break with Universal Constructivism was not so much an imitation but a deep concern to establish Argentine art in an international light. In these events, it is clear how 301 See Alexander Alberro, “Concrete Art and Invention,” in Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth-Century Latin American Art, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017): 15-66. In this chapter, Alberro lays out the relationships that would develop with the break from Torres García, noting the vanguard abstraction artists saw his work as parochial in the changing conversations around concrete art in Argentina. Alberro points to the European ideas that filtered into the country and how such articulations cemented the Madí and AACI’s approaches to the picture plane. 302 See María Amalia García, El arte abstracto: intercambios culturales entre Argentina y Brasil (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno, 2011). 303 Torres García, “The New Art of America,” in Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, 474-5. 152 the art world continued to situate itself in relationship to Europe, divorcing any notion of Indigenous histories or primordial design. Anything that existed to speak to the pre-Columbian period was erased, a tactic not left only to the artistic discourse, but would be seen in the sociopolitical sphere as well. In the Cold War period, the legacy of European modernism, especially that of the French style, became more complicated. The developments made by Grupo Madí to consider the incorporation of movement into painting, sculpture, and architecture transformed the following decade. Artists not affiliated with the group, like Martha Boto and Julio Le Parc, continued to work in a kinetic mode, and like many who fled unstable political situations, ended up abroad in Paris. At the same time, in 1955, the Galerie Denise René in Paris exhibited Le Mouvement, showcasing the developments of kinetic art that included Latin American artists. Not only did the show announce France’s artistic advancements, but also their technological progress. Connections between France and their “Latin” neighbours was a paramount exercise not only as the United States had “stole[n] abstract art,” but against American imperialism that had left most of Western Europe in debt to the U.S. and saw Argentina move from First to Third World status, begun through Marshall Plan trade sanctions which continued because of tense relationships between the U.S. and President Juan Perón.304 While some artists continued to pursue their 304 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Additionally, the U.S. saw that Argentina paid the price for decisions to remain neutral during the Second World War and later under Perón, during the Cold War. The Marshall Plan forbade European trade with Argentina. Tensions between Truman and Perón led to a falter for Argentina’s continual economic rise seen in the first half of the twentieth century, specifically as exports fell sharply. See Carlos Escudé, “The US Destabilization and Economic Boycott of Argentina of the 1940s, revisited,” Journal of Applied Economics 323 (July, 2006): 1-17. 153 careers in Paris, others returned to Argentina and worked to further a broad international presence by exporting their art abroad. Most famously, Marta Minujín destroyed all of her work with the help of audiences after her three-year period of study in France from 1960 to 1963, and then returned to Buenos Aires [Figure 3.8]. The artworks featured in this interactive and outdoor exhibition consisted of mattresses collected from a hospital, splattered in paint, with pillows attached and then hung on frames, while the performance space was the same lot notably used by Niki de Saint Phalle two years prior as the site for her first Tirs series (1961). Minujín evoked the language of the Nouveaux Réalistes in Paris, who pushed to integrate the everyday and antagonize the commodity fetish surrounding the art object. Upon her return to Argentina, she was celebrated and warmly welcomed, especially by the art historian and critic Jorge Romero Brest, who saw the return of students and expats as a crucial element in the internationalizing of the Argentine art world. Rather than simply export, he wanted the country to showcase their work from the inside. Minujín and Romero Brest kicked off a period of experimentation in the country, one that demanded more from its viewer under moments of political turmoil and upheaval. Romero Brest played a pivotal role in the direction modern art would take in Argentina. Not only did he establish the journal Ver y Estimar, which “aspired to establish values through theory, history, and aesthetics, without neglecting sensitivity,” but served as the director for various institutions like the Fine Arts Museum and at the Center for Visual Art of the di Tella Institute. 305 Andrea Giunta’s acclaimed text, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentina in the 1960s, details these developments occurring throughout the decade, and 305 Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties (Durham: Duke University Press 2007), 49. 154 chronicles how the relationship between critics and the wealthy elite were central in bringing Argentine art to light for those in (namely) New York. Collectors seeking to invest in the “modern” European masters funded the establishment of various institutions, especially the Torcuato di Tella Institute. Giunta establishes that only with the guidance of Romero Brest was Argentine art pushed into the international art scene, and artists made their entrance into biennials, galleries, and collections. This is made evident in 1952, when Romero Brest articulates his frustration at the lack of representation by Argentina at the São Paulo Biennial, recommending a possibility in establishing more art exhibitions within Buenos Aires and throughout the interior of the country. Her account focuses on the relationship between the United States and Argentina, especially in corralling the United States to address Latin American production in the early period of the Cold War. This was a necessity in providing a step towards legitimization, especially for those like Romero Brest. The breadth of her research defines the politics of the moment and their integration into the work more forcefully, situating the production of the Sixties as avant-garde. The direction of modern art was indeed shaped by the formation and modifications made to art institutions such as the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and the Museo de Arte Moderno in the middle of the twentieth century, especially in the election of Jorge Romero Brest and Rafael Squirru to directorships at the museums. Modern art’s momentum would continue into the 1960s, when the Torcuato Di Tella Foundation, founded in 1958, used their capital to establish a research center – the Center for the Visual Arts (CAV). CAV was the main support for national cultural projects such as the public gallery to showcase the Di Tella collection; it also organized annual competitions for Argentine artists, and exhibited the work of international avant-garde 155 artists in Buenos Aires.306 The Instituto Torcuato Di Tella and the CAV served as vital components to continue the advancement that Romero Brest had begun the decade before and would influence the arrival of other venues. Even as the anti-institutionalism that would beset the end of the 1960s would bring challenges to ITDT, it saw many Argentine artists through its doors, including Mirtha Dermisache.307 In 1965, she participated in a performance work that moved between a happening into dance and theater. Titled Ultra Zum!!, 15 hechos en un solo acto [Ultra Zum!! 15 happenings in one act], the play illustrated the experimental work of the institute that Dermisache highlighted was some of her favorite aspects. During the establishment of a new dictatorial power in 1966, artists moved their focus from merely participatory artworks into overtly political ones. Rather than Marta Minujín’s Happening-style events that centered on overwhelming the senses and bringing Argentine artists closer to the object than ever before, artists like Oscar Bony zeroed in on labor unions, as seen in his La Familia Obrera [The Working Class Family] (1968). Featured in the exhibition Experiencias ‘68 at the ITDT, Bony’s and Roberto Plate’s installations were censored because of their anti-government sentiments.308 In the first example, Bony paid a working-class family 306 Ibid., 102. 307 Giunta stresses the challenges that befell the Argentine art scene by the end of the 1960s. The end of the decade saw a revolution occurring where artists saw it necessary to convert art into arms, and while institutional spaces had once been spaces for these conversations, artists took to the streets. See Giunta’s conclusion in Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics, where she addresses the moment in which artists and institutions were mired. 308 Oscar Masotta argued that Argentina was “not a country of Happenistas,” despite being called such by Allan Kaprow. Rather participatory and performance based work was indeed a focus for many. Experiencias 68 was a controversial exhibition curated by Jorge Romero Brest at the Insituto Torcuato di Tella. The works by Oscar Bony, Delia Cancela, Roberto Plate, and Roberto Jacoby would challenge the Onganía government, leading it to be censored. Artists withdrew and destroyed their work in the streets as a protest. See Patricia Rizzo, Instituto de Tella: Experiencias ‘68 (Buenos Aires: PROA Fundación, 1998). Rizzo’s book was published in tandem with the 1998 exhibit by the PROA Fundación and titled the same name. 156 (mother, father and son) to occupy a plinth in the gallery for eight hours, earning more than what they would have under their current employment [Figure 3.9]. Plate’s work set up makeshift restrooms, where viewers had the privacy to write offensive statements about the acting government, which were then made available for anyone visiting the exhibition to see. Giunta’s final chapter follows these developments as struggles of the artists to find their voice among the larger international 1968 movements but remains focused on the relationships that Romero Brest cultivated through his directorships and presence in the art world with artists he positioned as antagonizing the hegemony of New York, rather than the avant-garde nature of projects like Tucumán arde. Giunta’s approach to the changing art scene omits many events not specific to Romero Brest, which in turn, has provided a detailed analysis and seemingly canonization of specific art practices over others. In outlining the art historical survey of Argentina, my goal is to elucidate three important characteristics. The first is the explicit establishment of a European art practice, as well as an identity, which negates the second concern surrounding Indigenous narratives that were nearly always cast aside. For example, Madí and AACI dismissed the parochial inclusion of Torres García’s autochthonous forms, thus bifurcating the two avenues of abstraction between Europe and Indigenous America. With Argentina, as I will illustrate, there is a focus on maintaining a specific relationship to Europe, both within the population’s imaginary as they have historically constructed themselves as more European than their neighbors, but also through their approaches to the internationalization of artistic forms in the push by Romero Brest. Thirdly, the role of journals, and moreover, writing became increasingly important to the country. Artist and writer Luis Camnitzer details the longstanding influence that poetry and literature have held in Latin 157 America, particularly on the development of conceptual art.309 Camnitzer draws on other such famous figures like Jorge Luis Borges, the famed magical realism writer, who also linked literature to an art form; thus, further citing how such forms have led to “a heterodox crossing of visual and textual arts.”310 Therefore, with her tomes of illegible writing, Dermisache was ultimately at odds, but quite within, the history of writing in Argentina. That is, her work did not address the country through metaphorical or humanist values espoused in the legacy of literature, but rather evoked the atrocities around harsh censorships laws that would occur during the two military dictatorships. In 2017, Agustín Pérez Rubio, artistic director of the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), curated a posthumous retrospective of Dermisache’s work, the first solo exhibition of the artist’s oeuvre, titled “Mirtha Dermisache: Because I write!” The catalogue, under the same title, published texts by the curator, as well as from writer and poet Belén Gache, editor and publisher Guy Schraenen with whom Dermisache had a close relationship, and scholar Lucía Cañada. Dermisache’s detailed biographical chronicle was provided by her archive and the catalogue was a comprehensive approach to Dermisache’s work, covering the lineage of asemic writing, Dermisache’s interest in poststructural writings by Roland Barthes, and her reasoning behind implementing the Jornadas del Color y Forma for the general public. While the catalogue provides a long awaited text on the artist and her practice and celebrates the longevity of her career, nowhere does it examine how the abstracted nature of her illegible writing pertains to the larger artistic scene and the specific Argentine context. Rather, the interpretive focus rests on an alignment with Barthes’ interest in writing. The 309 Luis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (Austin: University of Texas Press): 40. 310 Ibid., 125. 158 catalogue omits the longer established histories that would lead Dermisache to work with asemic text, and a deeper engagement of the tactics employed to work against the dictatorial governments. In the following sections, I will articulate why Dermisache might have chosen to turn to asemic writing as she was integrated into the categories of Conceptual art and the information systems that would emerge in the 1970s. Through examining the establishment of the modern and avant-garde art scenes, I will situate her development and ultimate arrival to asemic text in three ways. First, there was a concern in addressing aesthetic developments outside of a European modernism, secondly, the artistic and academic elite pushed the boundaries of acceptance for the considerations of “art” beginning in the 1960s, and finally, upon the arrival of violent governments, artists found ways to avoid censorship, which was coupled with the examination of information systems that flourished under a authoritarian gaze. 3.3 Not European, not Indigenous, but Argentinean In 1961, critic and then director of the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, Rafael Squiru announced: We belong to Western Culture, even if the books don’t say so; even if we are different (we hope to be at least subtly different)… For us London or Edinburg, Paris or Madrid, Florence or Rome, are not exotic places; they were built by our ancestors and we claim them as part of ourselves. Not to understand this means refusing to understand our art.311 Such a statement made in Britain against the backdrop of an exhibition opening of Argentine art positions the country within a European legacy, focusing on Argentina as a country of European immigrants rather than a number of Indigenous groups that suffered under colonial rule. Indeed, the city of Buenos Aires is often referred to as the Paris of the South with its wide boulevards, 311 Schneider, Appropriation as Practice: Art and Identity in Argentina (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 42. 159 classical architecture, and the small restaurants selling café con leche and medialunas that mimic flakey, French croissants. The impression that Argentina, and more specifically Buenos Aires, was more European than the rest of South America has its roots in the nineteenth century. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, European influences extended beyond territories in order to further heighten colonial power. Beyond their formal possessions, Germany, France, and England, battled to extend and secure their national authority, but in the case for France, rather than turn to economic policies, they utilized their cultural power. Because of such “Latin” connections, France extended its influence into Argentina through the arrival of French politicians, artists, and travelers into the country. French culture, predominantly for porteños [those living in Buenos Aires], was heralded as a civilizing force and such ideas and tastes were quickly adopted, more than in some of the Gallic colonial territories. Paris, in the global imaginary, but especially in Argentina, was the capital of the civilized world and the Haussmanization of the city would become the example for the transformation to a ‘modern’ Buenos Aires. Indeed, throughout the 1880s the government employed French architects and designers to make the city on the Rio de la Plata reminiscent of Paris on the Seine.312 In Argentina, the European was considered exotic because it was imported from further away and alien to the country.313 Immigration during the early-twentieth century did, ultimately, shape the country in vastly different ways than other South American nations, but as noted by Arnd Schneider, “not everybody ‘melted’ in the same way” and selective immigration of the French in the nineteenth century helped push Argentina towards their first notion of modern 312 See J.P. Daughton, “When Argentina was ‘French’: Rethinking Cultural Politics and European Imperialism in Belle-Époque Buenos Aires,” The Journal of Modern History 80, 4, (December 2008): 831-864. 313 Schneider, Appropriation as Practice: Art and Identity in Argentina, 7. 160 progress.314 After massive, mainly European, migration between 1880 and 1930, and once more after World War II until the early 1950s, Argentina was seen as a European immigrant nation.315 It received more immigrants than Canada and Australia, and was second only to the United States in the volume of immigration of European origin. But the melting pot was not always egalitarian; it rather tended to establish hierarchical distinctions among those immigrant, mixed, and Indigenous populations who were perceived as more or less desired.316 Schneider discusses the terms used to classify populations, starting with Creole. He writes, “In the first, ‘egalitarian,’ sense of its meaning in Argentine usage, Criollo denotes anybody…supposed to be of mixed Spanish and Indigenous origin, and from the interior provinces less influenced by recent European immigration, as opposed to the littoral. Descendants of Europeans and other recent immigrants who constitute the majority of the population in the littoral use of the term in a depreciative way, implying backwardness, rural habits, and little education as opposed to their own supposedly more sophisticated way of life.”317 Furthermore, the government was quick to dismiss Indigenous populations, especially those on the border, as belonging to other countries and not ever connected to an Argentine history. As the country demonstrated their lineages to Europe, it simultaneously denounced an Indigenous heritage. Like in Brazil and Chile, Indigenous peoples experienced various forms of violence under the guise of modernization, beginning with Spanish colonization in the sixteenth century. The colonial policies enacted throughout the nineteenth century, particularly tied to the 314 Ibid., 9. 315 Between 1870 and 1930, 13 million Europeans migrated to Latin America. See Bianca Sánchez-Alonso, “The age of mass migration in Latin America,” The Economic History Review, 72, 1 (2019): 3-31; and Nicola Foote, Immigration and National Identities in Latin America (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2014). 316 Schneider, Appropriation as Practice: Art and Identity in Argentina, 11. 317 Ibid. 161 independence of Argentina in 1818, saw wars that annexed vast areas of land that impinged on native territories.318 Most Indigenous groups were cleared out of the temperate middle zone of Argentina known as the Pampas, the region where a majority of the population lived as it housed the capital city, Buenos Aires. From 1878 to 1884, the military launched violent campaigns on southern areas of Patagonia and the northern provinces in their Campañas del Desierto or the Conquest of the Desert.319 During these campaigns, the killing of Indigenous people on the “battlefield” or their extermination was a constant possibility as a consequence of the “state of exception” that enabled the armed forces to execute prisoners and families in the name of the “rights of civilization.”320 Not only was the ethnocide well documented by the military, but it was celebrated as a necessary act carried out by their “glorious” armies.321 When the rise of dictatorial governments in the twentieth century, the Mapuche, Toba, Kola, and Wichi — the groups consisting of the largest percentage of Indigenous populations in the country—were cast as subversive and unpatriotic enemies by the governments that arose in 1966 and then again in 1976.322 Their homelands became contentious areas wherein state policies would force them to vacate in order to develop and create infrastructure to support overseas 318 Throughout the nineteenth century, Argentina would go to war and annex areas of land in the north — including Formosa, a small province that has a large number of Wichi populations — in 1876. 319 Northern provinces buttress Bolivia and Paraguay while the Patagonian provinces share a border with Chile. Héctor Hugo Trinchero, “The genocide of indigenous peoples in the formation of the Argentine Nation-State,” Journal of Genocide Research, 8:2, (2004): 127. 320 Walter Delrio, et. al. “Discussing Indigenous Genocide in Argentina: Past, Present, and Consequences of Argentinean State Policies toward Native Peoples,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 5, 2 (August 2010): 7. 321 Trinchero, “The genocide of indigenous peoples in the formation of the Argentine Nation-State,” 127. 322 Roughly just over 600,000 people consider themselves as belonging to an Indigenous group, which is a mere 1.49% of Argentina’s population. Ibid., 133. 162 markets and economies.323 In fact, part of the rhetoric by the dictatorships was to further alienate and disavow populations through saying, “The Mapuches are not Argentinean, they are Chilean; the Wichis and Kollas are Bolivian; the Guanines are Paraguayan,” etc.324 These campaigns have most recently been compared to the same kind of state terrorism carried out by the military dictatorship of 1976. The systemic incarceration, torture, and murder enacted upon vast populations was based in the extermination of Indigenous bodies through genocidal and forced removal.325 Under the dictatorial regime, the Indigenous body was not only shut out of political policies, but through an enforced rhetoric by the governing bodies was stressed as unpatriotic with a tendency towards violence and war. Axel Lazzari and Diana Lenton underscore how Indigenous activism was tooled through discursive images and wording that situated the indio político [‘the Indian’ as political activist or militante], the indio politizado [politicised Indian], or the indio-que-hace-política [‘the Indian’ doing politics]; “these latter figurations convey a sense of symbolic ‘dirtiness’ casting suspicion upon the legitimacy of indigenous subjectivities taking up the political word and acting in public.”326 Further, the juxtaposition between “Indian” and “politics” created “tensions in epistemic, moral, and political orders” within Argentina.327 Any Indigenous activism that did occur in the 1970s was understood as extremist in that it ignited the 323 The disappearance of Maldonado becomes even more contentious when considering how he was working with an Indigenous group against the Italian corporation Benetton when he was “disappeared” by the government in 2017. Furthermore, the military officers who pillaged these areas would be awarded territorial concessions. Ibid, 125. 324 Ibid., 133. 325 See Andrew C. Racja, Dissensual Subjects: Memory, Human rights, and Postdictatorship in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018). 326 Axel Lazzari and Diana Lenton, “‘The Indian’ and ‘Politics’: Transgressive Indigeneities in Political Activism before and after State Terrorism in Argentina,” Journal of Intercultural Studies, 40:6 (2019): 682. 327 Ibid. 163 questions of land claims, a concern since the nineteenth century. Statements made by Indigenous leader were quickly linked to terrorist activities against the State (despite the irony). When the recognition of the atrocities committed during the Guerra Sucía occurred in 1983, reports signaled the pregnant women, families, invalids, religious personnel, journalists and trade unionists as the victims. The Nunca Más [Never Again] report was a complete summary by the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (1983) created by President Raúl Alfonsín that investigated the desaparecidos under the military dictatorship of 1976-1983. The report helped bring those who spearheaded such campaigns to trial. Nowhere in the Nunca Más reports were Indigenous populations fully recognized. Individuals were identified as “Argentine” and many were not acknowledged as Indigenous; in so doing, the government continued to deny their heritage even in attempts at reconciliation.328 Forced disappearance was something only Argentines endured under the periods of tyrannical governments, never were Indigenous populations awarded such concern despite the violent legacy employed by colonization. Where Argentina differs from Brazil and Chile is how artists actively or unconsciously ignored the histories of the native populations; such autochthonous forms were rarely, if ever, evoked in artworks of the 1960s and 70s. Not only had Argentina virtually erased its Indigenous populations through widespread cultural genocide, but with the onslaught of military dictatorships in the 1960s and 1970s, the artists in the country turned their attention to the political violence happening around them, especially with the disappearances of their friends and relatives. There was no concern for those Indigenous groups who had endured erasure under the long histories of colonization. 328 See Lazzari and Lenton, “‘The Indian’ and ‘Politics’: Transgressive Indigeneities in Political Activism before and after State Terrorism in Argentina,” 688-689 164 3.4 Graphisms and information dissemination It is difficult to categorize Dermisache’s specific approach to the page. For example, the books published in 1967 explore variations of writing and color in diverse patterns and positions on the page. While she begins with a very plain meandering of black pen, later pages showcase green, red, blue, and other colored inks that are used to give depth to the lines by creating shadows [Figures 3.10 and 3.11]. In many instances, Dermisache holds true to the demarcated space, keeping the drawings close to the center, bleeding to the edges on rare occasion. As the pages progress, the line gains more movement and mimics script or completely breaks from the notion of writing altogether. Frenzied and vibrating lines move around the pages like dancers across a stage [Figure 3.12]. The dense, closely composed letters become more and more sprawled out and gain not only size but energy as they are composed, with peaks and valleys climbing across the page. Just as soon as momentum seems to be at its height, the page moves back to sparse decoration, calling attention to the minimal marks made and the fine, airly qualities manifested through more finely tipped pens. Her employment of the graphic trace aesthetically resembled crude musical scores, textile designs, even landscapes through her slanted gestures [Figure 3.13]. Dermisache experimented with sound translations of some graphisms later at the Instituto di Tella in 1971, where she employed a graphic converter to translate her graphisms into sound. However, before touching on her involvement with more experimental forms, I will showcase how Dermisache’s earliest explorations in 1965 echo the dissolution of political systems that led to the 1966 coup d’etat and instatement of General Juan Carlos Onganía. She would be a part of the larger dialogue of artists who engaged with issues of 165 censorship that took over the public and artistic sphere. Her asemic writing highlights such concerns around the controls of information. While I focused earlier on such unique oppositions towards the Onganía government by illustrating Oscar Bony and Roberto Plate’s work at the ITDT in 1968, many other artists worked in consideration of the instability leading up to the 1966 establishment of a dictatorship. For instance, Leon Ferrari produced his Letter to a General in 1963, but while the obfuscated text was a scathing critique of the government, later written works moved into descriptions of paintings or were titled as musical scores. In Cuadro Escrito [Written Painting](1964), Ferrari moves away from the political realm to interrogate the burgeoning conceptual movement by writing out the details of a painting that would never come to fruition [Figure 3.14]. Dermisache, however, maintained her practice of the graphism that obfuscated meaning, in line with artists Roberto Jacoby, Raúl Escary, and Eduardo Costa. In 1966, the three produced their imaginary Happening para un jabalí difunto [Happening for a dead boar], wherein the group reported details on a happening that supposedly took place and featured photographs as evidence. The hoax was published not by one, but by three magazines, before the project was found out to be a farce. In this intervention, the artists addressed the idea of the work as mere information, at the same time highlighting mechanisms for the construction of reality that urged those involved to consider the veracity of mass media and informational structures, especially under the control of repressive governments. The idea, in all three works, is around the dissemination and inability to fully capture the intended meaning but rather to focus on the gleaning of information as something that cannot be undertaken in moments of controlled existence. By 1968, artists became involved with the large student movements that ushered in a radical exchange with the government. New laws were passed that made the propagation of 166 communism illegal and allowed for the federal police to conduct raids and arrests, with only the existence of “convincing proof of guilt.”329 Clashes in Córdoba between the military on one side and university students and radicalized union workers on the other would leave sixty civilians wounded and over one hundred arrested.330 Other similar events would continue throughout the country, most famously in the province of Tucumán, provoking the art world to respond. The project, Tucumán arde [Tucumán is Burning], considered similar questions around the control of information systems and the lack of verity found within informational ephemera of newspapers, radios, and journals. Artists traveled from Buenos Aires to the Tucumán province to record testimonies of those working in the sugar mills (a main source of employment in the area) that were being forcibly closed by the Onganía government. Before leaving, however, they called for a press conference at the Museo de Bellas Artes in the capital city to give the truthful account to the media before the police shut down their actions. In their statement, they wrote: “We artists must contribute to the development of a true grassroots information and communication network opposed to the system’s distribution network.”331 The exhibition that went forward utilized the trade union hall in Tucumán, had the names of the sugar mill owners covering the floors to exemplify the interest of political powers, and used films, audiovisuals, and photographs to further represent the ongoing situation. Bitter coffee was served during the exhibition as a 329 Deborah L. Norden, Military Rebellion in Argentina: Between Coups and Consolidation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996): 27. 330 This event became known as “El Cordobazo” and links to the events of Tucumán arde. The violent riots shocked the city of Córdoba, known for its conservatism. The army repressed the riots, wounding sixty civilians and making at least one hundred arrests. Agustín Tosco, “The Cordobazo” in The Argentina Reader, edited by Gabriela Nouzeilles and Graciela Montaldo (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002): 364. 331 “Tucumán is Burning: Buenos Aires Statement,” in Listen Here Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde, edited by Inés Katzenstein (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004): 323. 167 testimony to the closing sugar mills, while the lights were switched off every two minutes to demonstrate the average time it took a child to die in the province. Its plans to travel to Santa Fe and Córdoba never materialized because the government quickly put an end to the exhibition. Artists circled around the utilization of mass media as their medium in order to question its role and power in society, but also to push the audience’s imagination in “the spectacle of their own deceived conscience.”332 Jacoby argued that it was up to artists to be aware of how information systems were controlled and how their own messages will be understood. He reflected on the moment under which Happening of a dead boar occurred: “we know full well that mass communications media are essential to controlling a society and are therefore implemented —no less than was writing, in other times— by the groups in power today.”333 In their Media Art Manifesto (1966), Costa, Escari, and Jacoby engage with Marshall McLuhan’s theories highlighting how the message would vary depending on the material characteristics of the transmitting channel because “the medium is the message.”334 It is clear that with the development of the role of communication, mass media, and its ultimate manipulation, as made clear in various happenings, that the notion of writing or any kind of document became an increasingly political object. In consideration of the activation of information, even when no such object was present, as seen with Happening of a dead boar, there was a potentiality in 332 Roberto Jacoby, “Against the Happening,” in Listen Here Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde, edited by Inés Katzenstein (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004): 229. 333 Ibid., 231. 334 This was no doubt inspired by Marshal McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extension of Man (1964) and set out to question issues around truth and invention in the media and took the ideological operations of the mass media as its principal focus. This text was written in Buenos Aires in July 1966, and published in Oscar Masotta, ed., Happenings (Buenos Aires: Jorge Alvarez, 1967), pp. 119–122. Translated by Trilce Navarrete, this is its first publication in English. 168 writing and its dissemination. As for Tucumán arde, information was crucial to showcasing the ongoing deceit of the government and the control it maintained over means of communication. In a reflection on her practice, Dermisache wrote: What does my works with graphisms consist of? It is not easy for me to provide an explanation based on them. While I began developing graphisms some eight years ago, they were not expressed or produced as such until 1967. At that point, a hard-to-imagine process of evolution and projection set in on an aesthetic, but also on a conceptual, level. Important to my graphisms are not only their continuity, development, relationship, and dynamic, but also their forms and, in some cases, their colors. My work, then bears relation to graphic arts, visual arts, linguistics, and writing, in terms of the elements that make up the object of my creation as such.335 Dermisache would continue to exhibit her work more regularly in the following decade and become more part of the artistic communities. However, in this discussion on her work as functioning as both linguistics and writing, among graphic and visual arts, as early at 1965, she positions herself as an artist knowledgeable of the ongoing conversations happening. In the same reflection, she continues on the use of the graphism as purposeful, stating, “I seek to further expressive capacity, their ability to generate other types of visual and/or audible manifestations.”336 The unintelligible writing that she performs in the book projects alongside various letters contributed to the onslaught of information that asked the viewer to consider what they were reading and how they chose to engage with the information. 335 Mirtha Dermisache’s application for the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 1971. Her application included letters from Roland Barthes and Jorge Romero Brest, although she did not receive the fellowship. “Artist,” Legado Mirtha Dermisache, Accessed November 6, 2020. http://mirthadermisache.com/. 336 Ibid. 169 3.5 CAYC, Censorship, and Conceptual Art But my God, don’t you realize that I write.337 —Mirtha Dermisache Across the top of a white paper are various black rectilinear blocks composed of thickly drawn lines. They are not uniform but rather dip at various lengths, creating patterns of lines of assorted widths and stretches. Compiled together in this way, the marks mirror the erasure or censorship of the message underneath. The thicker ink sequences betray a possible headline with their intense focus, while underneath are five rows of similar approaches to line making. While some of these paragraphs are more coherent in their sizing, Dermisache draws thinner and thicker lines in some areas and sometimes removes any breaks from the lines within the others. The result is a cacophony of various shapes that mimic the headlines, columns, and photographs mapped out in a newspaper. Spaces are carved out for various notices and news reports, all featured under the larger, more centralized headlines. Yet everything is either censored or made to disappear under the black washes of color, and its meaning is given over to the viewer’s imagination to fill in the blanks [Figure 3.15]. This project, Diario N1 Año 1 (1972) reflects similar propositions that she produced the polemical and shifting governments, but also was a direct reaction to a massacre of leftist and Peronist political prisoners on a military base near Trelew, Argentina. Dermisache noted that the column on the left on the last page alluded to those killed. Although Onganía’s regime would be ousted the following year as democratically held elections put former President Juan Perón back into office, accounts of this period detail that it was beginning with the Trelew massacre that the 337 Agustín Pérez Rubio, “Methodology for Free Expression,” in Mirtha Dermisache: Porque Yo Escribo! (Buenos Aires: MALBA, 2018), 70. 170 country began to change and ready itself for the violence of La Guerra Sucia.338 The event that unfolded was a group of political prisoners absconded to Chile via airplane, seeking political asylum under Allende’s socialist government. However, the group was forced to return and immediately gunned down by the Argentine military, yet the incident was covered up by the argument that the prisoners had attempted another escape. In the years that followed, protests by Leftist parties were staged around the unlawful murder of the political prisoners, although it was quickly forgotten as Argentina underwent a period of instability with four presidents in a period of three years. Perón, who had been living in exile since 1955, returned to Argentina and won over sixty percent of the vote, the only president elected by popular vote in two decades.339 His death less than a year later saw his third wife, Isabel Martínez de Perón take office. She provided little political experience, and instead appointed military leaders into office including General Jorge Rafael Videla, a key leader in the 1976 coup. The militarization of the state began much earlier than 1976’s golpe and installment of a military junta. Under the earlier dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía, censorship prohibited any images that went against the notion of family and marriage and those that portrayed adultery, abortion, prostitution, or “sexual perversions.” Instead, the government supported materials that defended the moral values of Argentine identity, using the Catholic Church to aid in normalization.340 Beyond the church, the film industry focused its projects on “the national self that praise the spiritual, moral, Christian, and historical values that solidify the ideas of 338 See James Dunkerley, “The Civilized Detective: Tomás Eloy Martínez and the Massacre of Trelew,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 31, 4 (2012): 445-459. 339 Norden, Military Rebellion in Argentina, 45. 340 Maria Soledad Catoggio, “The Last Military Dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983): The Mechanism of State Terror,” Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, published 5 July 2010: https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/last-military-dictatorship-argentina-1976-1983-mechanism-state-terrorism. 171 nationality, family, order, and work.”341 The Dirty War continued such promotion of these ideals through a state of terror and violence. Students, who had seen Perón’s return as a possible move towards democracy, were made to disappear, whole families were picked off the streets and never seen again, pregnant women were kept alive long enough to deliver babies who were then given to military families. Military schools, like Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada, were set up as clandestine torture camps where few left alive. Repression and disappearance intensified more so than any previous iteration with nearly eight thousand disappeared and two thousand killed in confrontations in 1976 and 1977 alone.342 Yet such depictions of death and tragedy were not a part of the visual field. Newspapers reported numbers but did not show photographs; and in the art world, the topic was broached through non-mimetic elements.343 Many were unable and unwilling to perform critiques through body art when bodies were thrown from planes into the Rio de la Plata.344 Political events certainly shifted the ideological aims of various exhibitions at the CAYC, and it was during the early part of the decade where Dermisache saw her work flourish and be shown more widely; it was also the same moment where she engaged in letters with Roland Barthes. Diario N1 Año 1 was shown at the Centro de Arte y Comunicación, as part of the 341 See Débora D’Antonio, “State, Filmmaking, and Sexuality during the Military Dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983)” in The Argentine Dictatorship and its Legacy, 147-172, edited by Juan Grigera and Luciana Zorzoli, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2020. 342 Norden provides a table outlining the casualties of the Dirty War in Argentina. Between 1976-77, over 7,000 people “disappeared” by the military. Ibid., 59. 343 Andrea Giunta, “Pintura en los ’70: Inventario y realidad,” in Arte y poder: Jornadas de Teoría e Historia de las Artes (Buenos Aires: Centro Argentino Investigadores en Artes, 1993): 221. 344 See Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's “Dirty War” (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). Taylor’s book discusses how the military’s representations of itself as the model of national authenticity established the parameters of the conflict in the 70s and 80s, feminized the enemy, and positioned the public—limiting its ability to respond. 172 intervention, Escenas de la vida cotidiana o La gran orquesta [Scenes from Daily Life or the The Great Orchestra] by artist Mederico Faivre, installed on a bus.345 Her time with CAYC saw the artist experiment more widely especially as it had opened as a pivotal space to engage with science and technology, especially computers. For theorist and founder Jorge Glusburg, Argentine artists turned to “pre-existing communicative structures such as advertising posters, comic strips and fashion designs… [taking] their materials from the language of daily life.”346 Indeed in 1971, Dermisache along with Ricardo Ferrero, the director of programmers, engineers, and analysts at the CAYC, exposed her graphisms to the processor of an IBM 1130-16K computer and a Cal comp plotter. This act translated the graphisms into computerized graphisms that could then be printed to increase her production, allowing for the public to engage more widely with her “writing.”347 Questions around the veracity of information proposed in the Sixties continued in the following decade, although shifted to reconsider the materialization of such systems and the artist’s role. These concerns can be understood in the statement of the Grupo de los Trece: The artist is the link in a chain which is extended above the concentric waves of man’s daily life. The powers which he manipulates maintain him in a position in which he can mold everyday reality, create new environments, humanize society and assume responsibility for the materialization of cultural phenomena, through action and thought, introducing his imagination, his 345 “Artist,” Legado Mirtha Dermisache, Accessed November 6, 2020. http://mirthadermisache.com/. 346 Jorge Glusberg, Art in Argentina (Milan: Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1986): 13. Glusberg was determined on sending exhibitions to all areas of the country, much in line with Romero Brest’s interests in establishing multiple art centers in order to internationalize Argentine art. In less than ten years, CAYC had more than one hundred exhibitions in Buenos Aires, nearly fifty exhibitions in the provinces, and more than eighty in other Latin American countries, Europe, and the United States. (23) 347 “Artist,” Legado Mirtha Dermisache, Accessed November 6, 2020. http://mirthadermisache.com/. 173 designs and his desires in relation to the social context.348 The Group of Thirteen included Dermisache, although it remains unclear whether she officially joined the group, but never officially declined an invitation either. In a letter from 1971, she articulates she is unsure if she is right for the group, but would remain.349 During this period, the artist produced a new project that aligned itself with visual communication and art through informational bulletins. Investigación y creación de grafismos y su aplicación interdisciplinaria [Investigation and Creation of Graphisms and Their Interdisciplinary Application] was among the textos legibles [legible texts], páginas [pages], páginas escritas [written pages], páginas de un libro [pages of a book], and the six books she produced from 1972 to 1973. The former, like Diario N1 Año 1 were written directly on CAYC letterhead.350 The postcards, newspapers, pamphlets, and books that arrived in this decade, differed from her contemporaries, as they were focused on the page, or the handheld object — the everyday ephemera that could connect the viewer to the personal aspect of her work but is predominantly unreadable. Yet, even in her plans for exhibitions, Dermisache invited gallery visitors to sit on benches, open and “read” the newspaper. The papers were set up around tables, bringing those who ventured in to spend time “reading” amidst strangers. Books were set out to look through, providing a tactile quality to the incomprehensible text. “Anyone can read it as 348 Glusberg, “Art in Argentina,” 32. 349 “No sé cómo debe ser este grupo. no sé qué objetivos deba tener. no sé porque lo integro. si sé que estoy en el en condición espectante. en caso de que los demaás integrantes no acepten mi participación en estos términos, es decir que de alguna manera sea un elemento que tenga un rol negativo para el desarrollo del grupo. creo que sería conveniente retirarme. en caso contrario continuare entusiasta sentir o no mi incorporación [unclear] activa [unclear] del grupo.” Handwritten letter by Dermisache to the Grupo de los Trece, December 1971, Archivo Mirtha Dermisache, reprinted in Agustín Pérez Rubio, “Methodology for Free Expression,” 71. 350 “Artist,” Legado Mirtha Dermisache, Accessed November 6, 2020. http://mirthadermisache.com/. 174 well as anyone,” she wrote. For Dermisache, it was not the dearth of meaning implicit in the writing, but rather the visual aspect that radiated from her work. Her focus in the latter provided the texts the space to act as participatory projects, objects to be used and manipulated rather than simply observed and contemplated. The physical line that she draws, too, become activated, just as much as with “true” words, despite the inability to actually decipher anything on the page. It is just as much an exploration in the act of writing as much as it is in the participatory aspect of making meaning and inferring the information and her path evolves from two approaches towards “dematerialization” taken up by American and Argentinean curators and scholars Lucy Lippard and Oscar Masotta. The dematerialized trace arrives for Dermisache in her placement at the periphery of the cybernetic turn in art occurring in Argentina with Jorge Glusberg and the de-emphasis on material aspects, seen specifically in the lack of tactile thread and use of graphic filament. Her work then functioned to question the ongoing rhetorics of both tyrannical governments, especially at the time of censorship and erasure of not only people, but language. Ostensibly, Dermisache’s postcards, newspapers, and other paperworks could be folded down and transported quite easily. While there is little in her archive that demonstrates she considered this an important factor, she was concerned with sharing her work. Further, the nature of the medium provokes deeper consideration given that in December 1970, Lippard organized ‘2,972,453’ — a suitcase exhibition—for the Centro de Arte y Comunicación. The exhibition mimicked Lippard’s Numbers shows she had curated earlier in the year in Seattle, Washington, and Vancouver, British Columbia, and was titled to reflect the population of that particular city. Forty-three 4x6 notecards made up Argentina’s version, ‘2,972,453’ and included texts by the 175 artists featured, Jorge Glusberg, as well as Lippard.351 Glusberg adamantly supported the discussion of Conceptual art as a vehicle and system of information transmission — a kind of ‘objectivised’ information that forced the viewer into participation and did away with the original.352 However, rather than making the trip again to Buenos Aires, as Lippard had visited in 1968 and found herself radicalized by the works of the collective Tucumán arde, she relied on the CAYC to install the show. The artists who were exhibited also did not travel—their works, which in previous iterations had included instructions to be carried out, seemed to be completely dematerialized.353 The art focused on informational or descriptive actions, concepts or situations and were put on display in their descriptive forms. While Dermisache may have visited the “dematerialized” exhibition, Lippard’s display was not entirely affective within the Argentine artistic milieu, who as I have demonstrated were more deeply concerned with the political shifts occurring in their home country at the time. For many, ‘2,972,453’ did not even register on the art radar and perhaps was only exhibited to further prop up the push for internationalization held by Glusberg. Furthermore, anti-US sentiments were strongly projected by many, even if not always prominently displayed. Because of the American curator behind ‘2,972,453,’ the exhibition might have just gone ignored. 351 The catalogues for the numbers shows were each a set of index cards. 352 Pip Day, “Locating ‘2,972,453’: Lucy R. Lippard in Argentina,” in From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969-74, edited by Cornelia Butler (London: Afterall Books, 2012): 94. Lippard also went on to claim that Glusberg took over a lot of the production and she’s not aware of how much she was showcased as the curator. 353 “‘2,972,453 Buenos Aires,’” in From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969-74, 183. The full works included Eleanor Antin, Siah Armajani, David Askevold, Stanley Brown, Victor Burgin, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Don Celender, James Collins, Christopher Cook, Gilbert & George, Ira Joel Haber, and Richards Jarden. The exhibition was on display from 4-23 December 1970. 176 The unique feature of Dermisache’s employment of asemic writing is understood through the dematerialization of the text through its re-materialization as a “tangle of wool,” rather than relying on merely the obfuscation of meaning. There is a political action in providing meaningless writing at a time where all forms were contentious in some capacity or another. In probing the possibilities afforded in asemic text, she reflects the commitments to underscore the concern of language and writing as it passes into the realm of the visual. Such concerns are discussed in Masotta’s “After pop, we dematerialize,” where he argues that the realm of art relies on fusing together the contents and the media used to convey them; this in part led to dematerialization that relied on “anti-optical, anti-visual aesthetic: the idea of constituting ‘object’ but with the goal of speaking not to the eyes, but to the mind.”354 Therefore, the integration of a participatory aspect showcased how her works engaged the political in their capacity to be utilized; much like writing and information was used in the Media Art Group and by radicalized collectives like Tucumán arde. Indeed, Masotta continues to grapple with the influx of media, stating, “the ‘material’ (‘immaterial,’ ‘invisible’) with which informational works of this type are made is none other than the processes, the results, the facts, and/or the phenomena of information set off by the mass information media.”355 Not only does Dermisache bridge inclusions of newspapers, magazines, the comic strip and other media disclosed in Masotta’s statement, but the integration of the viewer showcases Dermisache’s awareness of the popular texts by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and their writing on phenomenology under consideration amidst the art milieu. While not abiding by any specific principles like Husserl or 354 Oscar Masotta, “After Pop, We Dematerialize (1967),” in Listen Here Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde, edited by Inés Katzenstein (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004): 209. 355 Ibid. 177 Merleau-Ponty, Dermisache’s mere encouragement of her viewers to manipulate the pages was unlike the previous writing projects by someone like Ferrari that remained stagnant on the wall. In Argentina, dematerialization was deeply rooted in the computer-heavy rhetoric that focused on information versus material form.356 An evocative connection emerges between the employment and dissemination of information more broadly in Argentina’s art systems and what Dermisache provides to her viewers. With the move towards computers and cybernetics, information systems were now not only a part of the political situation but existed as binary codes, with zeroes and ones in place of letters. Dermisache then offers a retooling of how we rely on language. It becomes a question of old and new media, a question rendered topical in both the shift of governments but also art forms and content. The management or even the arrival of the surface plane and what it conveys becomes even more crucial when moving between the computer/analog divide, which in the 1960s was faced with controversial opinions on what it might provide for meaning and understanding. A concern heightened by the very political and hot collectives of Media Art Group and Tucumán arde that were then followed by the cool “Art and Cybernetics” exhibitions at the CAYC. Even Dermisache conveyed her interest in the delivery of information, arguing, “All my works create some tension between the communication formats offering a stable framework and the act of writing, which profiles the unstable dimension.”357 Dermisache’s increasingly intensified the multiple dimensions under which writing operated. Her turn to asemic writing, which that was made not only into musical scores 356 See Johanna Drucker, “The Crux of Conceptualism: Conceptual Art, the Idea of Idea, and the Information Paradigm,” in Conceptual art: theory, myth, practice, ed. Michael Corris (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 251-268. 357 Swenger, Asemic: The Art of Writing, 10. 178 and computational data, functioned amidst a milieu that favoured the computation and cybernetics integration of information systems. 3.6 Potentiality and Asemic Writing By 1975, the “unstable” dimensions of Dermisache’s graphisms were tangled in the increasingly volatile political sphere. The artist, in this moment, turned towards two avenues of making: an increased production that portrayed her graphisms as newspapers and post cards (in line with mail art) and a divergent practice that produced the mirror and glass books [Figures 3.16, 3.17, 3.18 and 3.19]. The latter two objects were shown in exhibitions at CAYC, Arte en cambio 76 [Art in change 76] and ¿Hay vanguardia en Latinoamerica? Respuesta Argentina [Is there a vanguard in Latin America? Argentine Answer]. The surface, in the case of the mirror and glass books, disrupted the signifier typically held by the gesture; it erased the traces and threads that composed her prior work. If dematerialization first occurred through her “texts” as they divorced the linguistic and material aspects gestured through “writing,” then the mirror and glass obliterated such qualities completely. Dermisache’s involvement with CAYC and with Glusberg put her into conversation with artists and ideas centered on Conceptual art as a vehicle and system of information transmission. As the artist moved from the various forms of asemic writing, she landed on the book that ultimately had no trace, rather the material literally reflected the reader and their environment. In this sense, we might return to Ingold who articulates how aspects of Computer Assisted Design (CAD) disrupted and removed all gesture in that it allowed for no movement but just instantaneous form. Because it produces no trace (unlike drawing, writing, or weaving), CAD does not involve any embodied history as it is completely erased by the machine. Clearly such 179 approaches for Glusberg were in line with the ‘objectivist’ form of information, and so too, for Dermisache, does she experiment with such avenues. But, even when her material reflects these relationships established in Argentina during the turn to computational systems and their integration with information does the artist continue to represent the surrounding environment. That is, the mediums she turns to that ultimately deny the signifier, reflect and show not only the viewer, but their surroundings. In the case of glass, the reader can look through the medium, while the mirrored harnessed an actual reflective power to place the reader in their site. Dermisache called attention to this when she explained, “The cover [of the glass book] was made of translucent glass, and when people opened it they would find that each page was transparent. And, upon opening the mirror book, the reader would see himself, [and], the setting… in that second book I…enable[d] the reader to provide everything.”358 Information and context can never be divorced from Dermisache’s work, no matter how asemic it might become. However, I would like to return to the gesture of writing conceived in Dermisache’s graphisms, before the mirror and glass books, to locate her practice at the time of the dictatorship as well as the developing avenues of art that occurred. Ingold’s consideration of textility is the understanding of the power held in the processes of formation against the final iteration of a project, harnessed by the idea that the verb texere [to weave] is what underlies all forms of making. “Weaving,” he writes, “continues for as long as life goes on – punctuated but not terminated by the appearances of the pieces that it successively brings into being.”359 Dermisache’s approach to illegibility is not about the absence of meaning, but more in line with 358 “Artist,” Legado Mirtha Dermisache, Accessed November 6, 2020. http://mirthadermisache.com/. 359 Tim Ingold, “Making culture and weaving the world,” in Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, Paul Graves-Brown, ed, (London: Routledge: 2012), 69. 180 the processes of various languages that are evoked through the gesture and marks left on the surface. The communication devices she employs such as the books, the texts, the postcards, hold onto linearity, even when her lines are anything but. Self-described “communicologist” Vilém Flusser articulated that surfaces incorporate concepts in the same capacity that asemic writing does: “[asemic writing] replaces the familiar signs of the alphabet with its own enigmatic signs, but preserves the linear organization of conventional writing.”360 As participants in the asemic writing, we are asked to conceptualize what we are seeing because we are no longer tied to “reading” it. We are actually freed from the structure of lines of thought despite still seeing those lines occur. A cognitive dissonance occurs when the writing is evoked because we are ultimately estranged from it. That cognitive dissonance severs us from the instrumentality of writing as it restores elements obliterated in the technology of the alphabet.361 To consider Ingold and Flusser, Dermisache’s lines are indecipherable even as they maintain organization, and are unstructured even as they contend with instruments of control. The potential of the lines is bound up in the tensions, made more powerful through the contentious moment out of which they were born. Asemic writing thus functioned in the two spheres of art and politics. Dermisache’s practice moved against the cooption of language by the acting governments. She addressed such control of information systems by denying intelligible writing. Her asemic writing is reminiscent of strategies that came with the refusal to incorporate modernist forms. In favoring gestures, glyphs, and lines, Dermisache provided agency to the viewer to authorize their own understanding of writing, one that might have gone against governmentally sanctioned forms of 360 Schwenger, Asemic, 7. 361 Ibid., 14. 181 information. But Dermisache’s context did not allow her to extend such tactics to engage populations or forms as seen in Joaquín Torres García. She had to contend with the immediate context that placed her within the institutions and systems that favored those connections to Europe as much as violent policies and forced disappearance that concerned only the Argentine population, one who was not connected to the Indigenous communities relegated to the margins of society. This latter fact also drew on the long histories of establishing who was Argentinean and who was not. Dermisache frustrates the apolitical reading of her work when information was increasingly made political, and she simultaneously employs such gestures of “writing” that oppose many of the emergent art forms of the moment, especially the latter digital systems with CAYC. The potentiality of asemic writing lies in not being bound to specific meaning; the text, while incomprehensible, can be read through its aesthetic capacity as much as through the sociopolitical context. In fact, it is precisely through both encounters where the viewer is given an avenue to understand, and without the reader, little can be discerned. The gesture in Dermisache’s writing is open and available beyond the simple act of moving pen across paper, especially as the lines become an extra dimension to shape and provide a textural exploration of the surface. Her gesture is what generates the object — the postcard, the newspaper, the letter. When Dermisache crafts a new object from a pen and paper, writing goes beyond the very gesture to become the very act of manifesting meaning and understanding. The motive behind the gesture is to imbue a participatory function for the reader then Dermisache’s work operates in a different perspective that creates a tension in the indecipherability. In repeating Dermisache’s idea of an “unstable dimension” evoked in her work, I am highlighting how despite the idea that we know how to read a text, the writing itself limits the meaning if we are to follow the 182 framework established by the European model, in which Argentina has inscribed itself. So to open up the idea of text as something more fluid, focusing on the ideas of reading and writing in the area prior to colonialism, Dermisache’s texts provide us with new approaches to information systems. Theorists Deleuze and Guattari tackle the process of “becoming” in A Thousand Plateaus, a text grappling with issues such as rhizomatic philosophy and striated space. Becoming connects with Ingold’s proposition about process; becoming is a generative new way of being based not in imitation, resemblances or analogy, but in influences. To consider Dermisache’s writing beyond meaningless scrawl, the act of writing needs to be comprehended beyond its traditional concept and Deleuze and Guattari provide the means to do just that. Coupled with Ingold, becoming and potential are bound up to elicit the heterogeneous nature of her work’s origin. Dermisache’s approach then, works within a distinctly Argentine context that functions deeply within first a hierarchy of identity, as much as it does within a hierarchy of forms. To allude to any Indigenous histories within the acts of writing would be detrimental in terms of its reception by Argentine art audiences. Schneider questions such a concern in his book, Appropriation as Practice, asking, “how then can we develop a concept of appropriation that comprehends the process linking artists, artefacts (and their original producers), and the new artworks resulting from the appropriative process?”362 In his focus on a more contemporary outlook of artwork within the country, he grapples with how Indigenous identity had long been denied within discussions developing around Argentine art production seen in institutionalized spaces. With the historical emphasis and impetus to reclaim modernism (within a European base) 362 Schneider, Appropriation as Practice, 27. 183 and Romero Brest’s interest in internationalizing Argentina, Dermisache’s writing reflects the sociopolitical circumstances. The country, quick to hold onto the mythos of a European immigrant past, coupled with the interests of the ITDT and CAYC to push both Argentine art into the larger artistic sphere, as much as bringing in as much European art as possible, pose an interesting dynamic given Dermisache’s approach to writing, as well as how she has been positioned. 3.7 Conclusion By 1974, Dermisache abandoned her artistic practice to focus on the Jornadas del Color y Forma, or the Intensive Work Sessions in Color and Form. These workshops would uphold the mandate of participation seen in her postcards and on her newspapers; however, they explicitly lacked any political connection given the burgeoning military government and as a way to maintain a safe space for both her and her participants.363 The weekly sessions offered a space for those to escape the ongoing violence and persecution that was relentless under the military junta. It was not easy to hold those public work sessions in political contexts of censorship, of crackdown on social expression, and of repression. If anything against the dictatorship, anything in any way related to politics appeared on those walls, the group quickly painted over it. A number of different testimonies have stated that the SIDE, the Argentine Secretariat of Intelligence, had a list of the names of the coordinators; Dermisache herself was interrogated before the last edition of the work sessions. Play, freedom, and expression became the antidote to the constant state of control that galvanized the 1970s. Given that children had schools that 363 Lucia Cañada, “Intensive Work Sessions in Color and Form (1975-1981): Art as Vital Praxis,” 51. 184 offered them places of respite, the Jornadas focused on adult learning, never citing a distinction between the artist/non artist and rather encouraged a communal and collective approach to making. Such a proposal stemmed from Dermisache’s long career as an art teacher who moved throughout the community working in grade schools and who had founded the Taller de Acciones Creativas in 1971, a space for adults to experiment and take pleasure in making rather than focusing on technical skill.364 From 1974’s pilot experience to the final iteration in November 1981, the Jornadas would appear seven times in various cultural spaces in Buenos Aires, received no public funding, and relied solely on private donations. The concern of finding a space for a public interaction with art was of profound interest to Dermisache, seen especially in the Jornadas where participants could play with the expectations around form and content. The same interest occurred within her asemic writing experiments when she wrote: From the beginning, I intended to create books. My first job was as a bookmaker… [As a book], the work is accessible to anyone who wants to buy it, or might be in a library where anyone can look through it. That’s important to me. For that reason, printing is essential - it keeps it from being isolated as a unique work of art. It’s important to enabling the work to go everywhere… What matters is that it reach people who wouldn’t be able to buy the original.365 Like the Jornadas, Dermisache used her writing to connect with those who perhaps moved in spaces outside of “official” art institutions. The library acted as a space for the artist to meet her viewers in a capacity that provided agency, just as she did in the galleries exhibiting her work alongside areas to sit and “read” the newspapers and books she produced. Her actions encouraged a pedagogical undertaking, discerning meaning from forms and linking to the 364 Ibid., 52. 365 Annalisa Rimmaudo and Giulia Lamoni, “Entrevista a Mirtha Dermisache,” in Mirtha Dermisache, Publicaciones y dispositivos editoriales (exhibition catalogue), (Buenos Aires: Pabellón de las Bellas Artes de la Pontificia Universad Católica Argentina, 2011): 16. 185 political and informational schemata on which her contemporaries capitalized at the ITDT and the CAYC. This chapter aimed to draw out the multiplicitous function and capacity that Dermisache’s writing provided in Argentina under the dictatorship. The moment was indeed complicated, with various governments coming into action, art institutions vying for a seat at the international table, and Argentine forms moving from performance, to participation, to purely data in order to reflect the fluctuating circumstances that surrounded them. Furthermore, given the larger scope of this dissertation, Dermisache’s asemic writing and the formal characteristics that it embodied confronted a broader interest with dematerialization in conceptual art. With its loaded meaning, dematerialization operated both in South and North America, taking on a political endeavor that we saw through a possible boycott of Lippard’s exhibition in Buenos Aires and the support for broadly moving against the hegemony that the United States symbolized. Writing and dematerialization took on additional importance when considering it within the local lens of ongoing persecution and neo-colonialism propagated by the Argentine government. Like Chile and Brazil, Indigenous groups were understood as working against the industrialization and progression of the country, yet were so infrequently named or even personified, rather relegated as belonging to other countries. And this narrative continued from the establishment of the nation-state throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with Indigenous groups only gaining liminal rights in the late twentieth century. When analyzing the history of writing and its importance within the Argentine imaginary, Dermisache’s “meaningless” writing functions to unpack narratives and provides spaces to undo the colonial rhetoric by not only adhering to the structure of writing, but asking more of the viewer to “read” 186 the text. Furthermore, with the connection to threads, traces, and surfaces, the act of writing and the graphic filament connect more fully to the processes of textile manufacture. What Dermisache’s work provided was an amorphous space that cleaved open a history — one that was not so ardently set on a political action through the body, or data subsets seen in the Information Systems. It worked in the interstices between these two artistic developments that would be documented as the Argentine art forms from the 1960s to the 1970s. It dematerialized the thread, wherein text and textile were evoked in abstract and conceptual qualities. And yet, her work continued to assert European forms and ideas. Indigenous histories and the forms celebrated by those like Joaquín Torres García were usurped and erased in the popular imaginary through the developments of geometric abstraction. Her writing presents an opportunity to understand the capacity in which these forms were present but made to be invisible through the developments of art history in the country. In the absence of meaning, Dermisache’s asemic writing evoked the openness one must undertake in order to understand the politics of language and to “read” the work because she did, as she makes clear, write. 187 Conclusion When Vicuña decided to carry her quipu up Cerro El Plomo in 2006, the events that surrounded her decision were based in the environmental and political policies that allowed mining to happen despite the negative consequences of affecting runoff water for surrounding communities. The quipu, here, functioned as a tie to the local space in the Andean Mountains, operating not only as an aesthetic device but a written plea and physical reminder of the populations who are impacted by these laws, not only presently, but historically. Since Vicuña carried those strands in protest, little around the environmental policies has been altered in the South American continent. Over the twenty-first century, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile have contended with the election of politically conservative officials who have played a role in the environmental policies affecting socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, which often include Indigenous populations who have been pushed onto reservations. It was not only Vicuña’s performance that begged for better action on behalf of governments, but news articles have been recurring about the treatment of Indigenous populations and the economically disenfranchised who have paid dearly for mining, controlled burning of land, and the encroachment on ancestral territories. Those thick strands of red wool, which open and close this study, exemplify how artists have contended with the ongoing realities of colonialism in South America. Yet, so too, does the quipu operate as a mnemonic device to exemplify an enactment of textility and the relationships around writing, information, and the textile. For Vicuña, the push to recognize the colonial continuity affecting not only her country of birth, but moreover a worldwide disenfranchisement, continues to play a significant part of the artist’s practice. Most recently in 2017, Vicuña was featured in Documenta 14, where her deeply pigmented red quipoem titled Quipu Womb (The Story of the Red Thread, Athens), made of 188 locally-sourced unspun wool, were featured alongside a piece of writing titled “Language is Migrant.” [Figure 4.1] She connects to the power held in text, citing a myriad of writers including Octavio Paz who wrote, “Words are acts.” As she continues, Vicuña further displays the connectivity the quipu has to text, articulating, “Not seeing the seeing in words, we numb our senses,” and she again calls up the use of the palabrarmas when she says, “I see the invention of such verbs as true poetry, as a possible path of a way out of the destruction we are causing.”366 In its entirety, the project responded to the influx of immigrants to Europe and the backlash many faced upon their arrival, as well as the struggles imposed on the self. Her work operates as a consideration of the disruption upon lives that continues to be present, and even prescient. In 2019, Chile erupted in violent protests against an economic model introduced during the Pinochet era. Vicuña responded, discussing the inequality facing fellow citizens and the pressure on the art community to use the tools available to them to spread awareness and illuminate widespread injustice.367 What began as a strike against rising metro fares in Santiago became a one yearlong implosion against the government of President Sebastián Piñera, who utilized the military to establish curfews and lockdowns. The city was thrust into its historical memory where police filled the streets and hundreds of protesters were injured or killed while demonstrating against social inequalities, high healthcare costs, and poor funding for 366 Cecilia Vicuña, “Language is migrant,” Documenta 14, accessed September 21, 2020: https://www.documenta14.de/en/south/904_language_is_migrant 367 Alex Greenberger, “Artist Cecilia Vicuña on Chile Protests: ‘It May Be a Preview of What Awaits People Around the World,” Art News, published on November 12, 2019: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/cecilia-vicuna-chile-protests-statement-13557/ 189 education.368 In October 2020, the Chilean government agreed on a constitutional referendum, the first since the dictatorship.369 Yet such events are not isolated to Chile. Both Brazil and Argentina have faced their own election of officials who have become reminders of political pasts. The October 2018 election of far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has accelerated the devastation of the Amazon rain forest. During his campaigns, he promised to open the Amazon to more commercial development, including mining and large-scale farming, stating, “Where there is Indigenous land, there is wealth underneath it.”370 Bolsonaro’s glib and dismissive statements of Indigenous people as a drag on Brazil’s potential have encouraged farmers who typically faced large fines when encroaching on protected Indigenous land, to threaten such communities with violent acts, leaving seven Indigenous leaders dead in 2019.371 The encroachment on lands was furthered through the burning of the Amazon forest by farmers and loggers clearing land, aided by the ongoing dismantling of environmental protection laws and agencies. While Brazil’s government pushes to extend the development of the Amazon in a similar capacity in the 1960s, Argentina has also felt echoes of the past with the most recent election of Alberto Fernández and his vice president (and Peronista) Cristina Kirchner, who previously was 368 Amanda Taub, “‘Chile Woke Up’: Dictatorship’s Legacy of Inequality Triggers Mass Protests,” The New York Times, published November 3, 2019: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/03/world/americas/chile-protests.html 369 Rachelle Krygier, “Chile is preparing to rewrite its constitution. Why are people still protesting?” The Washington Post, published February 1, 2020: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/chile-is-preparing-to-rewrite-its-constitution-why-are-people-still-protesting/2020/02/01/eb7ee6b2-43cc-11ea-99c7-1dfd4241a2fe_story.html 370 Ernesto Londoño and Letícia Casado, “As Bolsonaro Keeps Amazon Vows, Brazil’s Indigenous Fear ‘Ethnocide,’” The New York Times, published April 19, 2020: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/19/world/americas/bolsonaro-brazil-amazon-indigenous.html 371 Ibid. 190 the second woman to hold the presidency from 2007-2015 after her husband’s tenure. The late 2019 election came as Argentina fell into economic disarray after an early bought of success by President Mauricio Macri. The former and current presidencies, beyond their economic policies, have faced numerous concerns around the ongoing treatment of Indigenous and working class communities. When a child from the Qom Indigenous nation in the Argentine province of Chaco died in 2015, questions around living conditions of Indigenous populations in the country surfaced. The boy, whose death was first ruled due to malnutrition, became a topic for debate as many argued that he had congenital diseases that contributed to his illness and subsequent death. Yet, only a year before, another boy in the region had also died from severe malnutrition, leading to questions around the possibility for medical access and care for those in Argentina’s Indigenous communities.372 Other ongoing issues faced by various Indigenous groups have been the lack of bilingual support and education, and Argentina’s government has frequently criminalized Indigenous populations who speak out about their rights to land. In 2017, for example, a series of protests broke out against the clothing company Benetton, which owns land for wool production in Patagonia, an area that was deemed ancestral territory for the Mapuche community. Activist Santiago Maldonado took part in a roadblock but later went missing; two months later, his body was found in a river. The event called up those who disappeared during the military junta from 1976-83, predominately young activists and students. Although coroners 372 “Commotion in Argentina over the death of an indigenous Qom child,” MercoPress., published September 11, 2015: https://en.mercopress.com/2015/09/11/commotion-in-argentina-over-the-death-of-an-indigenous-qom-child 191 first deemed the death aggravated by hypothermia, the autopsy also proved it was a case of a violent death.373 In pointing to these events, I intend to address how the issues surrounding disappearance and the treatment of marginalized communities is far from being solved in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. The questions my dissertation posed considered the metaphorical capabilities provided by the utilization of text and textile, in various capacities, within three countries of South America. Bringing together Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, my intention was to examine how these countries contended with similar artistic developments and were mired in dictatorial governments that shaped such production. The textile took on a metaphorical potential through textility, becoming not just a material endeavour but a potent reaction against dominant hegemonies within sociopolitical spheres and operating against European modernism. Textility provides a methodology to elucidate how artists functioned within these three landscapes to produce, augment, and connect to the art sphere. What is at stake in my reconsideration of the employment of textility is to forge another layer of interpretation to the reactions to European modernism and the concrete art movement. It is also about interrogating how text and textile might inform historical and present discourses, providing another avenue to understand positions made by artists in South America who worked through these two mediums. Here, in evaluating my own contribution to the established discourse on Latin American art, I am arguing that it is necessary to complicate an understanding of the 1960s and 70s as well as the employment of 373 See Daniel Gutman, “Argentina’s Indigenous People Fight for Land Rights,” Inter Press Service, accessed March 2, 2020: http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/01/argentinas-Indigenous-people-fight-land-rights/, and Ligimit Perez, “Two Years on, the Death of Santiago Maldonado Opens Old Wounds for Argentina,” Front Line Defenders, 1 August 2019: https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/blog/post/two-years-death-santiago-maldonado-opens-old-wounds-argentina 192 textility, the visual arguments put forth by different artists and critics need to be considered relationally and contextually, and not cordoned off in a separate and exclusive aesthetic realm. In this dissertation, I have examined a period in history, specifically the three moments mired in authoritarian regimes and the effect this had on the development of three artists’s work. While the chapters analyze very specific contexts and artistic movements, they each contend with a violent history that would shape not only writing but the plastic arts. The notion of disappearance, a very real tactic made by governments, is further conveyed through ongoing neo-colonial policies that have furthered exploitation of land and people. As such, artists like Lygia Pape, Cecilia Vicuña, and Mirtha Dermisache, each contributed to the artistic development of the country that was affected not only by dictatorial regimes but were embroiled in the laws that have historically and contemporarily enforced Indigenous communities to the margins. Indeed, each of these artists are affected differently because of the country’s relationship to Indigeneity, but what I showcased, is how these three artists operated under various guises of textility within their work. Further, such employment of textility bridges text and textile to elicit connections to the socio-political sphere. Therefore, in each chapter, I have outlined how artists contended with the mass censorship of the arts, the concerns around disappearance and dictatorship, and finally through the rubric of textility. In each case study, comparisons and differences arise. Vicuña’s practice continues to address ongoing Indigenous activism similarly to how Indigenous aesthetics and issues emerged at various points in Pape’s oeuvre. The turn to Indigenous histories and marginalized positions was an important aspect to her work, and indeed, was reflected in the larger interests of the avant-garde milieu in Brazil who sought to foreground those ignored within the white cube. For Dermisache, the significance of the textual approach with the 193 graphism was of paramount importance and she worked through the various forms of language similarly to Vicuña, who took language beyond text to consider alternative mediums to elicit language. Both, nonetheless, established meaning where none might otherwise be found. Yet where Dermisache might diverge in my study is the commitment to grappling with the representative absence wherein Indigeneity never appears. Instead, we find in her work the ways in which asemic writing is not erasure but more so an inability to recognize and address such communities, more than the other two countries. Argentina’s identity is closely tied to the immigration waves from Europe and the global image of Buenos Aires as the “Paris of the South.” These have shaped not only the ways in which the country is understood but how they have constructed their artwork, especially in the centres such as the capital city, as I illustrated. Thus, while the three have many important overlaps, it is necessary to be mindful of the historical, as well as ongoing considerations that are made for Indigenous and more marginal communities. Each of these artists contend not only textility in various ways, but also manifest different relationships towards Indigeneity and the conditions of colonialism that is shaped by where they live. However, what ties each of these artists together is the integration of writing and textiles that emerge in a moment wherein disappearance is happening at multiple levels - both through the violent suppression of those against the military governments as much as through the silencing of Indigenous groups since the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese. In each instance, the question around presence and absence plays a role. For Vicuña, the relationship to Indigenous communities is palpable not only based in her lineage but in her materials and use of language. For Pape, the relationship to Indigeneity and Afro-Brazilian communities is complicated through the longstanding celebration of autochthonous histories in the creation of a 194 new Brazilian art form, yet one that devoured only what it deemed worthy. Her works showcase an innate concern towards perhaps that falsified idea of miscegenation, or perhaps was played up to further elucidate the complicated history Brazil had with its various communities. Tropicália and the Escena de Avanzada in each of the countries maintained their leverage against the acting governments, but within Argentina, there was never such a direct and lasting counter to the violence that befell the population. Considering how the art world responded to the dictatorship, we might see how Dermisache turned toward the ambivalences within conceptualism and information systems rather than the relationship with marginalized communities. For Dermisache, the relationships made with Indigenous communities are far from present in her work. Her asemic writing often spoke directly to the hegemonic art forms that dominated Argentina. However, it is important to note that asemic writing is not erasure, rather Dermisache toys with the presence and absence of language and writing, which can be further acknowledged in how the country was so quick to evade any ties to its own Indigenous communities both historically, as well as presently. “Disappearing threads,” the title of this dissertation, takes on the notion of textility to confront the multiple capacities that text and textile take up in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile after 1955. Pape, Vicuña, and Dermisache were faced with myriad developments—from Concrete and Neo-concrete art to the forced disappearances and voluntary exiles. What binds them is a concern for the capacity of text and textile in various forms, from graphisms, to woodblock prints, to installations of wool, all speak to how the employment of textility provides them with an available space to make interjections into the realm of art and politics alike. 195 Figures Figure 0.1 Cecilia Vicuña, Quipu Menstrual, 2006; photograph; Artist’s collection. Figure 0.1 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows Vicuña and crowds carrying a red quipu across rocks. Figure 0.2 Outstretched cords of Quipu Menstrual; photograph; Artist’s collection. Figure 0.2 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows the cords of he quipu across a rocky landscape with El Plomo mountain in background. http://www.quipumenstrual.cl/exhibicion.html Figure 1.1: Pape, Tecelar, 1956; woodcut on Japanese paper; 32.5 x 44.5 cm; Projeto Lygia Pape. Figure 1.1 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a print of a series of triangles on a lined and black expanse. Figure 1.2: Pape, Ttéia Parque Lage, c. 1978; photograph; Projeto Lygia Pape. Figure 1.2 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Images show people moving between white ropes in a forest. Figure 1.3: Kaiabi basket design Figure 1.3 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows ten examples of Kaiabi basket design. Figure 1.4: Tarsila do Amaral, Abaporu, 1928; oil on canvas, 85 x 73 cm; Private collection Figure 1.4 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows painting with a large body, sun, and cactus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abaporu Figure 1.5: Lygia Pape, Tecelar, 1957; woodcut on Japanese paper; 23.4 x 48.7 cm; Projeto Lygia Pape. Figure 1.5 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a print with wood grain appearing in the black space. Figure 1.6: Lygia Pape, Ballet Neoconcreto, 1958; film still; Projeto Lygia Pape. Figure 1.6 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows dancer moving among cylinders and rectangular forms. Figure 1.7: Lygia Pape, O Ovo, 1967; vintage photograph; 18.2 x 24 cm; Projeto Lygia Pape. Figure 1.7 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows Pape emerging out of a white cube on beach. Figure 1.8: Lygia Pape, Divisor, 1968; vintage photograph; Projeto Lygia Pape. Figure 1.8 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows aerial view of children’s heads emerging through a white sheet. 196 Figure 1.9: Lygia Pape, Roda dos Prazeres, 1968; photograph; Projeto Lygia Pape. Figure 1.9 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a plinth with various colored liquids in bowls placed in a circle. Figure 1.10: Max Bill, Tripartite Unity, 1948-49; stainless steel; 47 x 34 x 38 in; Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo Figure 1.10 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a metal sculpture in a Moebius strip formation. Figure 1.11: Helio Oiticica, Parangolés, 1964-72; acrylic on canvas, fabric, nylon, rope and plastic, 93 x 160 x 10 cm; MAM Rio Collection Figure 1.11 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows Oiticica dancing in a various strips of cloth on his body. https://smarthistory.org/helio-oiticica-parangoles/ Figure 1.12: Lygia Pape, Objeto-Poema (Rompe), 1957; collage on paper; 21 x 43.5 cm; Projeto Lygia Pape. Figure 1.12 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image features white paper cut into concentric circles on the left and various words on the right. Figure 1.13: Lygia Pape, Objeto-Poema (Em/Vão), 1956-57; tempera and collage on cardboard; 21.5 x 21.5cm; Projeto Lygia Pape. Figure 1.13 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows two pieces of paper in orange and yellow with their shadow reflecting in the background. Figure 1.14: Lygia Pape, Desenho, 1961; ink on paper; 93 x 61.5 cm; Projeto Lygia Pape. Figure 1.14 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows parallel lines on a white background with other lines breaking its formation. Figure 1.15: Augusto de Campos, Olho por Olho, 1964; photograph Figure 1.15 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows various photocollaged eyes placed into a pyramid. http://ubu-mirror.ch/papers/correa-decampos/fig1.html Figure 1.16: Lygia Pape, Trio do embalo maluco, 1967; vintage photograph; Projeto Lygia Pape. Figure 1.16 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a black and white photograph of three cubes with people emerging out of them. Figure 1.17: Diagram-map of Rio de Janeiro; artist’s papers; Projeto Lygia Pape. Figure 1.17 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows Madureira, Bonsucesso, Vargem Grade and Leblon, drawn by Pape. Figure 1.18: Pape, Ttéia Parque Lage, c.1978; photograph; Projeto Lygia Pape. Figure 1.18 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a woman moving through ropes strung around trees. 197 Figure 1.19: Lygia Pape, Ttéia Parque Lage, c. 1978; photograph; Projeto Lygia Pape. Figure 1.19 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a photograph of rope in a circle and a man tying a rope around a tree. Figure 1.20: Pape, Ttéia 1A, 1979; photograph; Projeto Lygia Pape. Figure 1.20 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows wires framing a corner. Figure 2.1: Cecilia Vicuña, Palabra e hilo, 1996; 22 pages, 8.5 x 8.5 in; Artist’s collection. Figure 2.1 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image features a photograph of Vicuña’s book with a piece of string puncturing the cover. http://www.ceciliavicuna.com/poetry/uu736haxpcvo5o946a9e1pq4f6mcxm Figure 2.2: Cecilia Vicuña, La Realidad es un línea, 1994; artist’s book; 500 copies, 10 x 3in; Artist’s collection. Figure 2.2 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image features a photograph of a piece of paper that has been folded accordion style with a string in the center. http://www.ceciliavicuna.com/poetry/vr101zuxlouybjzo5cpassg3tyt4i4 Figure 2.3: Cecilia Vicuña, Hilur, 1997; 35 copies; box containing a scroll; 9 x 2.5 x 2.5 in; Artist’s collection. Figure 2.3 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a photograph of white rolled up paper with a red string in the center. http://www.ceciliavicuna.com/poetry/6fxtapmdeqj5gcuzm41z2vxt51ic1z Figure 2.4: Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA), Para no morir de hambre en el arte, 1979; video, multimedia, documentary; video still; Hemispheric Institute Figure 2.4 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows two stills with a woman receiving a ½ liter of milk and a group receiving a bag of milk. Figure 2.5: CADA, Para no morir de hambre en el arte, 1979; performance outside Museo de las Bellas Artes; video, multimedia, documentary; video still; Hemispheric Institute Figure 2.5 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a film still of various trucks in front of a museum with a white sheet in front of the entrance. Figure 2.6: Raúl Zurita, Escritura en el cielo (La vida nueva), 1982; film still, 7:06; video; Hemispheric Institute Figure 2.6 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It shows poem written with five airplanes and white smoke in the New York (poetry action). Figure 2.7: Cecilia Vicuña, Palabrarmas, begun in 1977; photograph, Artist’s collection. Figure 2.7 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a gallery installation of the Palabrarmas and various photographs of the artist. 198 Figure 2.8: Cecilia Vicuña, Palabrarmas, begun in 1977; vintage photograph, Artist’s collection. Figure 2.8 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a photography of an installation on wood floor that spells out VERDAD. Figure 2.9: Lotty Rosenfeld, Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento [a mile of crosses on the pavement], 1979-84; film, 4:29; MALBA Buenos Aires Figure 2.9 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a photograph of people installing white perpendicular lines to road separations. https://hammer.ucla.edu/radical-women/art/art/una-milla-de-cruces-sobre-el-pavimento-a-mile-of-crosses-on-the-pavement Figure 2.10: Cecilia Vicuña, cover of Sabor a mi, 1973; 152 pages, 8 x 6.5 in. Artist’s collection. Figure 2.10 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows the front cover of Saborami. http://www.ceciliavicuna.com/poetry/5crtkg55vlchhtcmi97z9ezo66zqog Figure 2.11: Cecilia Vicuña, Sabor a mi, 1973; 152 pages, 8 x 6.5 in. Artist’s collection. Figure 2.11 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows mummy-like dolls hanging by nooses. Figure 2.12: Narrative quipu, 1400-1532; Reportedly found at the site of Ancon, Central Coast, Peru; Cotton, camelid fiber; 33 x 94 cm, Brooklyn Museum Figure 2.12 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a photograph of a quipu with multiple strands coming off the center strand. https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/46687 Figure 2.13: Cecilia Vicuña, Journal of Objects of the Chilean Resistance, 1973-1974; mixed media, stick, cord, thread, cloth; Artist’s collection. Figure 2.13 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Images show a photograph of pieces of wood that have wool and string dangling from them. Figure 2.14: Cecilia Vicuña, Quipu de Lamentos, 2014; installation at the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos; Artist’s collection Figure 2.14 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows an installation view with grey, white, and cream strands of felted wool hanging from the ceiling. http://www.ceciliavicuna.com/quipus/h22erblloz3kug8jfyuchwsx2a8zsb Figure 2.15: Cecilia Vicuña, El Vaso de Leche, 1979; performed in Bogotá, Colombia; mixed media; Artist’s collection. Figure 2.15 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a photograph of Vicuña pulling a string with white liquid coming out of cup. http://www.ceciliavicuna.com/performances/y45hc30ohimwjvd6u8ijiypw0oo0eu 199 Figure 2.16: Cecilia Vicuña, Debajo o Encima del Agua, n.d.; vintage photograph; Artist’s collection. Figure 2.16 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a photograph of cords across a riverbank. Figure 2.17: Cecilia Vicuña, Con-Con, 1966; vintage photograph; Artist’s collection. Figure 2.17 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a black and white photograph of circles drawn in the sand. Figure 2.18: Arpillera featuring the scene of a community undergoing a random search by DINA, 1976; embroidered textile; 15 x 19.5 in.; Museum of Latin America Art, Long Beach, California Figure 2.18 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a colourful applique textile with figures holding their hands up in fear. Figure 3.1: pages from Mirtha Dermisache, Libro n1 and Libro n2, 1967; colored ink on paper; 25 x 20 cm; Archive Mirtha Dermisache. Figure 3.1 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Images show photographs of two books opened to pages with purple scrawl on the pages. Figure 3.2: Leon Ferrari, Letter to a General, 1963; pen and black ink on paper; 48 x 31 cm; Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari, Buenos Aires. Figure 3.2 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a white piece of paper with black script across it. Figure 3.3: Leon Ferrari, Western Christian Civilization, 1965; plaster, wood, oil; 198 x 122 cm; Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari, Buenos Aires. Figure 3.3 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows an installation of Christ crucified to a fighter jet. https://postwar.hausderkunst.de/en/artworks-artists/artworks/la-civilizacion-occidental-y-cristiana-the-western-christian-civilization Figure 3.4: Emilio Pettoruti, El Quinteto, 1927; oil on canvas; 149 x 131 cm; private collection, Buenos Aires. Figure 3.4 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a painting of a quintet playing Argentine instruments. https://www.wikiart.org/en/pettoruti/el-quinteto Figure 3.5: Xul Solar, Nana Watzin, 1923; watercolor on paper pasted on cardboard; 25 x 31 cm; Galería Vermeer (Buenos Aires). Figure 3.5 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a painting with the central figure surrounded by various words in Spanish and Nahuatl. Figure 3.6: Joaquín Torres-García, Composición, 1931; oil on canvas; 28 x 19cm; Museum of Modern Art Figure 3.6 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a painting with various symbols broken up by parallel and perpendicular lines. 200 Figure 3.7: Joaquín Torres Garcia, Inverted Map of America, 1943; ink on paper; 22 x 16 cm; Fundación Torres García, Montevideo. Figure 3.7 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a drawing of South America flipped upside down flanked by a sun and stars. https://smarthistory.org/torres-garcia-inverted-america/ Figure 3.8: Marta Minujin, La Destrucción, 1963; photographs; Artist’s private collection Figure 3.8 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a photograph of Marta Minujín setting her artwork ablaze with onlookers. Figure 3.9: Oscar Bony, La Familia Obrera, 1968; gelatin silver print; 50 x 48 in; Museum of Modern Art Figure 3.9 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a photograph of a family of a mother, father, and son, sitting on a gallery plinth. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/187729 Figure 3.10: Mirtha Dermisache, pages from Libro n.2, 1967; colored ink on paper; 27 x 20 cm; Archive Mirtha Dermisache. Figure 3.10 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a photograph of a book with airy pencil lines scratched across the right side. Figure 3.11: Mirtha Dermisache, pages from Libro n.3, 1968; pencil and colored marker on paper; 28 x 23 cm; Archive Mirtha Dermisache. Figure 3.11 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a photograph of a book with green and blue marker lines across both pages. Figure 3.12: Mirtha Dermisache, pages from Untitled book, 1968-1979; colored ink on paper; 23 x 21 cm; Archive Mirtha Dermisache. Figure 3.12 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a photograph of a book with purple ink marks across both pages. Figure 3.13: Mirtha Dermisache, Untitled [public reading], 2009; ink and graphite on paper; 70 x 100 cm; Archive Mirtha Dermisache. Figure 3.13 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a photograph of a book with ink lines that resemble a landscape. Archive Mirtha Dermisache. Figure 3.14: Leon Ferrari, Cuadro Escrito, 1964; ink on paper; 66 x 48 cm; Colección Eduardo F. Constantini, MALBA Figure 3.14 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a white piece of paper with cursive letters tightly filling the whole page. https://coleccion.malba.org.ar/cuadro-escrito/ Figure 3.15: Mirtha Dermisache, Diario n1 Año 1 (interior), 1972; offset print on paper; 47 x 36 cm; Private collection, Buenos Aires. Figure 3.15 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a photograph of two pieces of paper with thick marker lines that emphasize the idea of censorship. 201 Figure 3.16: Mirtha Dermisache, Boletín informative [Informational bulletin], 1974; ink on paper; 59 x 86; Archive Mirtha Dermisache. Figure 3.16 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a photograph of two pieces of paper with various approaches to lines across both. Figure 3.17: Mirtha Dermisache, Untitled (postcard), c. 1975; ink on paper; 10.5 x 14.7 cm; Archive Mirtha Dermisache. Figure 3.17 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image features a blank postcard with scribbled black lines across it. Figure 3.18: Mirtha Dermisache, Libro de espejo, 1975; mirror, glue; 28 x 23 cm; Private collection, Buenos Aires. Figure 3.18 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a person opening a book made entirely from mirrors. Figure 3.19: Mirtha Dermisache, Libro de vidrio, 1975; glass, glue; 28 x 24 cm; Private collection, Buenos Aires. Figure 3.19 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Image shows a person opening a book made entirely from glass. Figure 4.1: Cecilia Vicuña, Quipu Womb (The Story of the Red Thread, Athens), 2017; photograph, Artist’s collection. Figure 4.1 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. It featured a red quipu installation against a white background. https://www.documenta14.de/en/artists/13557/cecilia-vicuna 202 Bibliography “‘2,972,453 Buenos Aires.’” In From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969-74. Edited by Cornelia Butler. London: Afterall Books, 2012. Adams, Jacqueline. Art Against Dictatorship: Making and Exporting Arpilleras Under Pinochet. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. Adams, Beverly and Natalia Majluf, editors. The Avant-Garde Networks of Amauta: Argentina, Mexico, and Peru in the 1920s. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Art History
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Smith, T’ai Lin, 1975-
Disappearing threads : art between text and textile in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile after 1955
Text