For Expanded Poetics. Readings and talks with Raúl Zurita and Cecilia Vicuña
Within the framework of the exhibition Colectivo Acciones de Arte (C.A.D.A.), 1979-1985, on display in the Museo’s Library and Documentation Centre, two readings and talks are organised with poets who were either part of or collaborated with C.A.D.A. Since it was founded, this Chilean collective set forth productive dialogue between visual art, literature and sociology, whereby poetics were conceived in both expanded and expansive terms. Texts, printed and/or recited, intervened in the sky, on the streets, in squares, magazines, industries and other spaces of public enunciation. This expansion of literature enabled, on one side, a move away from the book format, entering into the relational and dense dimensions of the political power of language; while on the other, it facilitated visual art’s appropriation of the word as an element of artistic discourse. In the dictatorial context of 1970s and 1980s Chile, these strategies constituted a pressing enunciation which, from micropolitical interventions, sought to “broaden living standards”, exactly as the collective indicated.
On this occasion, two eminent Chilean poets reactivate certain dimensions of the catalysing spirit of their work during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Today this takes on meaning inside the framework of the exhibition, which expands out into the public space inside the Museo: the Garden in the Sabatini Building. This form of expression looks to recover the drive to “take the square”, and through it highlights an agora of debate to reinvent the present.
Monday 30 May features an intervention by Raúl Zurita (Santiago, 1950). As a poet and founding member of Colectivo Acciones de Arte, he was awarded with Chile’s National Prize for Literature in 2000, and his books include Purgatorio (1979), Anteparaíso (1982), La Vida Nueva (1994) and Zurita (2011). His poetics have also expanded into landscape with the poems he wrote in the New York sky in 1982 and the Atacama desert in 1993. This poetic expansion concludes with a poem projected onto huge cliffs on the Chilean coast, where the words can only be read from the sea.
Friday 10 June features an intervention by Cecilia Vicuña (Santiago, 1948). A poet, film-maker and visual artist. Her precarious work in the sixties is pioneering in Chile and stands at the crossroads between Land Art, performance and critical-ecological poetry. She has written twenty poem books, and as a visual artist her work has been shown at ICA and The Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA in New York, and the Museo Reina Sofía.