NO+ : the making of.

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 1983, the 10th year of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile, CADA proposed the slogan 'NO +' (NO more). This was meant as an open text to be completed by the citizens, according to their specific social demands (No more ...). CADA invited Chilean artists from different fields to spread this message on walls all over Santiago. Wall tagging was the first form of NO+, but the slogan was soon used by different collectives all over the country as a massive public symbol of political resistance and non-conformity. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics

Shown in this video clip is a 'Making Of' documentary, including a synopsis of the project (in Spanish), footage of the first NO+ actions in the Mapocho river in Santiago, and a series of slides (showing diverse actions, protests, plays, and wall tags) evidencing multiple appropriations and uses of the slogan for political intervention in the public sphere. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics