Inversión de escena (unedited footage I and II).

The Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (CADA) is a Chilean activist group of artists 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

On October 17, 1979, eight milk trucks left the Soprole milk factory to drive through the city of Santiago according to a previously planned route, which ended at the National Museum of Fine Arts, where the trucks stood for hours forming a long line. The route symbolically connects a milk producing factory with a conservative 'art factory', the museum. This connection is further performed by closing the entrance to the Museum by covering the façade with a large white cloth. This civil action sought to expose political violence, cultural censorship, and human misery in a country threatened and under surveillance by Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. The Museum was under the control of the dictatorship so the milk trucks worked as a critical reference to military technology and Pinochets regime. The white cloth sought to evoke and resist political repression; it indicated that art was not inside the museum but outside, dispersed in the city, clandestine. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics

Shown in this video clip is the productive 'backstage' of the action: the workers at the milk plant packaging the milk and the milk trucks driving through the city. Then we see the long line of parked trucks in front of the Museum of Fine Arts. The artists at its front door spread a large white cloth in order to cover the entrance. They haul down the Chilean flag. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics