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At noon on July 12, 1981, a calm Sunday, six small airplanes in military formation dropped 400,000 fliers over Santiago, Chile. On each plane was a member of the Collective de Acciones de Arte, or CADA. Five individuals formed the group, including two writers who later achieved great renown, Diamela Eltit [born 1949] and Raúl Zurita [born 1950], as well as the sociologist Fernando Balcells [born 1950] and two visual artists, Lotty Rosenfeld [born 1943] and Juan Castillo [born 1952]. The sixth participant was a visiting artist who had been invited to film the proceedings. At ground level, both casual passers-by and artists alerted to the act and enthused by the proposal read texts on the fliers:
For each man a job in happiness, which by the way is the only collective aspiration / their only wound / a job in happiness, that's it. We are artists, but every man who works for the expansion —even if only mental— of his life space, is an artist. We say then that the work of expanding the usual levels of life is the only valid art event / the only exhibition / the only living work of art. Thus working together we build the beginning of the work: a recognition in our minds, blurring in this way all professional boundaries: life as a creative act.
HISTORY
In the context of a city occupied by its military, where tanks circulated at all times or a car could stop to quickly grab a pedestrian, finding those airplanes dropping leaflets rather than bombs was completely incongruous. The text was not an advertisement for con- sumers but an invocation that appealed to reflection on life and art, and the identity of the individual and the group. In what was almost a poetic Dada act, CADA surprised the public. Chile, no doubt, wasn’t the Germany where Beuys coined the phrase Jeden Mensch is ein Kunstler [Every man is an artist] but a nation that had been under one of Latin America’s most hardened dictatorships for eight years and where every act was suspected of subversion or of undermining the State’s internal security. Appealing to the union of art and life in this repressive reality was an openly rebellious act, from a poetic and formal metaphor: airplanes can drop fire not only of pain but also disguised in words in order to open up new spaces of meaning.
This was not CADA’s first intervention in the city, nor was it the first testimony/manifesto of its ideas and utopias to transform that reality. But it was one of the most visually forceful, and it was certainly risky. Art broke into everyday life, raised its voice, and subverted language structures to activate the collective’s memory. The lamentation “Oh, South America” — also the name of the action — appealed to a sense of remembrance, to an expansion of the boundaries of Andean men and women, and to the clarification of other boundaries for their actions. It was not an urban guerilla act, despite its boldness; taking advantage of the vacuum in the symbolisms and structures of power with regard to art, the group sporadically took over unexpected, unimaginable sites. Of course, museums and gallery spaces had ceased to encompass meaning, and thus the meaning, the action and function of art, could be located outside those institutions and in the city itself.
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ART BROKE INTO EVERY DAY LIFE
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[DERMIS PÉREZ LEÓN]
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