Issue # 20 Lotty Rosenfeld

Locus-tmag publishes an excerpt from Calendarios de Arte Contemporáneo – Lotty Rosenfeld  by Alexia Tala. The book is the first of a series in which each artist engages in a one month long interview via correspondence with curator Alexia Tala. The conversation between Lotty Rosenfeld and Alexia Tala were held between  January 1st till January 30th 2020, in what turned out to be the artist's very final opportunity to discuss and reflect over her 40 years long career. 

Alexia Tala: How fast have these 40 years gone by since your first intervention in A mile of crosses on the pavement on Manquehue Street?

Lotty Rosenfeld: It seems like it was only yesterday that I was returning from a meeting with the CADA, driving to my house and a few blocks from Manquehue Avenue (a curious coincidence) I began to pay attention to the broken lines on the street. I remember that instead of taking one of the two demarcated routes, I instinctively slowed down and started driving down the middle of the street, thus obtaining a view from the front of the white lines as they passed, one by one. I was 36 years old, I was young and I wanted to find a visual clue in the public space, in the city, that would allow me to work in parallel with the collective work I was doing with the CADA group. All I needed was to cross the line. I was beginning a new phase in my artistic production.

Alexia: Proposition to (inter) cross border spaces, is a work that interests me greatly, since it is the only one where the intervention of the sign is carried out in an alternative way. On the border of Chile and Argentina you create the two axes of the cross and In Germany, one of the axes is your own body. This departure from your norm is also seen in a Motion of order, where the line is replaced by a living line of ants, which break their order due to the intervention of your finger ... What’s more, there is the resource of sound. We can talk about how this has often structured your work.

Lotty: Exactly, in Motion of order the ants replace the line of the road, but in motion. When interrupted, in this case by a finger, they return in a matter of seconds to linearity again. Just like society, which is used to operating along a certain imposed path, often without contemplating the possibility of resistance. As I was telling you last week in Proposition to (inter) cross boundary spaces, the use of sound in Morse code was interesting, as well as the inclusion of recordings of shortwave radio stations extracted from a random exploration of news bulletins such as Radio Moscow, BBC London, Radio Berlin, and others. Rather than as different languages, I inserted these sound emissions also as symbols of borders.

In general, I have used sound as an instrument to structure my works. I have been interested in exploring the phonic discourse, where the voice of the witness connects with the official voice to represent the "other version", the one submerged by the dominant discourses. These audios often pass from one work to another. For example, there are fragments of the sound track, specifically the voice-over of a deaf-mute person, which is part of my "Vocabulary Archive" -as you have called it- that I used for the first time in Who comes with Nelson Torres? and I have reused in other works such as Motion of order; the sound installation Estadio Chile, and in No, I was not happy, which was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2016.

Alexia: About censorship, please tell me what the reasons were for the censorship of your work Proposition to (inter) cross border spaces?

Lotty: In addition to the two interventions on the Chile-Argentina border and that of the Democratic Republic and Federal Germany, an important feature was the incorporation of a soundtrack consisting of a fragment of Morse code and, as if from a random poll, snippets of news bulletins taken from shortwave radio stations.

In dictatorship all artwork produced suspicion, especially those that were beginning to innovate in their artistic languages. For this reason, we requested that when closing exhibitions abroad the works not be mailed back to Chile. On two occasions this request was ignored, and the videos were confiscated by the censors on arrival in the country. Ay Sudamérica! was classified as pornographic. But the most serious accusation was levelled at Proposition to (inter) cross boundary spaces. The document sent to me said word-for-word: “It is hereby advised that the honorable council of cinematographic classification has unanimously rejected the video entitled “Proposition to (inter) cross boundary spaces” which corresponds to the context of a system established for the constant maintenance of a propaganda situation against the Supreme Government with a technique that almost reaches a subliminal order...” etc. And it summoned me to the office of the classification council, signed by Juan Enrique Fromel, Frigate captain, undersecretary of education. Naturally, I went accompanied by a lawyer before the military prosecutor in charge. They had decoded the Morse audio that I used, although I had no idea what it was transmitting when I used it.  I was only interested in the symbolism of the code language.

Alexia: On the leitmotiv of your work presented at Documenta in Kassel, you answered in your notes with several questions. One of them was, what should we do, what must we learn to face globalization in a spiritual and intellectual way? Now I’m asking you those questions.

Lotty: We must approach sustained aesthetics in public images in constant change. We must learn to propose new relationships between art and society that put the viewer on alert, encompassing the multiple networks of hegemony and resistance that are woven into the fabric of capitalist globalization. We must travel culturally and aesthetically along the edges of systems in a rigorous and not complacent way.

Alexia Tala is curator of the 22nd Bienal de Arte Paiz, taking place in Guatemala in May 2021.    

Images courtesy of Lotty Rosenfeld Estate.

Translation from Spanish into English made by Sebastian Brett.