Art Under Dictatorship

In my country, Chile, in 1973, the government of Augusto Pinochet (now finally deposed) began burning books throughout the major cities; the capital, Santiago, especially, resembled a giant bonfire. Years later, the government burned a youth, Rodrigo Rojas, but somehow Pinochet, the so-called "emissary of god" (a name he often used in his speeches) could not burn the spirit of the people and especially of the artists, the cameramen, the video artists, who recorded the political history of the country with their bodies and their lives. Artists found themselves caught between two desires: the desire to communicate a defiance of censorship and of cultural hegemony, and the desire to avoid the circumscribed language. This necessitated a constant disrup tion and circulation of messages, or a rediversion of the codes which determined everyday life. After the burning of the books, the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra created a street theater in 1974 in the downtown area of Santiago, called hojas de Parra ("leaves of Parra" — parra, in Spanish, means vine). Through poetry, through the performance of poetry with statements or poems that Parra called artifacts, the government of Pinochet was demasked, defaced, and denounced. Parra had slogans that said Nobody for President, and poems such as "Rape":