El fulgor de la huelga (unedited footage I)

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

In 'El fulgor de la huelga', CADA enacted a hunger strike in a small metalworking factory, which had collapsed owing to the deep economic crisis in Chile leaving all the workers unemployed. CADA's action was meant to denounce the growing unemployment among the working classes and to highlight the importance of hunger strikes as political tools and ways of resisting the economic policy of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics

Shown in this video clip is the 'backstage' of the action: the artists are preparing for the performance and discussing it. Then the video presents the performance per se: first, the artists lie on the floor, covered in blankets that read 'CADA', sleeping. Then they wake up and leave the scene one by one. The video ends with footage of the factory. The image shows no movement, making reference to the closing down of the factory. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics