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Agonism and "cultural citizenship" in Chilean performance during and after dictatorship

Sun, April 30, 2:00 to 3:45pm, TBA

Abstract

Among the traumas of Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile is a crisis of citizenship. This paper examines how artists have responded to this crisis through a developing practice of cultural citizenship. I consider three key instances in the articulation and practice of cultural citizenship as it developed during and after the dictatorship. First, I examine the Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA), operating between 1979-1985. Drawing from Chantal Mouffe’s conception of agonism—which sees politics as the continuous challenge to and rearticulation of prevailing structures—I suggest that in their “art actions”, CADA articulated an alternative citizenship that was agonistic and artistic. This cultural citizenship encompassed both art-making as a practice as well as an artistic subjectivity that reframed the citizen. Then I turn to the opposition’s television campaign aired prior to the 1988 plebiscite that ousted Pinochet. This campaign also articulated a cultural citizenship influenced by the model developed by CADA, yet used this model to steer towards a more consensual vision of political engagement. Finally, I consider the contemporary playwright, Guillermo Calderón, in particular his play Escuela. which rejects both the plebiscite and contemporary Chilean consensus society. I argue that Calderón’s disillusionment stems from a failure to refigure society and the practice of citizenship after Pinochet. Yet Calderón is also, in the creation of his art, still practicing this “failed” form of citizenship. Thus even Calderón’s disillusioned conception is belied by the output of his work, which attests to the entrenchment of this notion of cultural citizenship in Chile today.

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