A la hora señalada

The Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (CADA) is a Chilean activist group of artists (artists Lotty Rosenfeld and Juan Castillo, sociologist Fernando Balcells, poet Raúl Zurita and novelist Diamela Eltit) who used performance to challenge the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. One of the most important contributors to the 'Escena Avanzada', CADA incorporated strategies of theatricality and performance as an essential element to all its 'art actions', while questioning the practices and institutions of all politics and conceiving art as a necessary social practice that eradicated the traditional distance between the artist and the spectator. Committed to the foundation of an open and spontaneous practice of spectatorship, their 'interventions in everyday life' intended to interrupt and alter the normalized routines of the daily urban life of the citizen, by means of a semiotic subversion that decontextualized and semantically restructured urban behaviors, locations and signs. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics

Shown in this video clip is raw footage of CADA's performance on arts and politics 'A la hora señalada'. In a neon light factory, CADA members Juan Castillo and Raúl Zurita perform a remake of the famous duel in the American western film 'High Noon' (translated in Latin America as 'A la hora señalada'). Symbolizing a physical trace of this tense and dangerous situation, the artists extended between them a neon strip illuminating the scene -a duel of light, without weapons. The reference to the film works here as a denunciation of Chilean political violence during Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, and as an open call to utilize mourning as a productive force in the struggle for civil rights. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics