Viuda.

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 September 1985, CADA produced a portrait of a woman whose husband had been killed in a political demonstration against the dictatorship in Chile; they accompanied the image with the following text: 'Mirar su gesto extremo y popular. Prestar atención a su viudez y sobreviviencia. Entender a un pueblo.' ('To look at her gesture, extreme and popular. To pay attention to her widowhood and survival. To understand a people'). They published this work in several journals ('Análisis', 'Cauce', 'Hoy') and in the newspaper 'Fortín Mapocho', all critical of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. This art intervention was meant to celebrate civil protests against the dictatorship; these protests were brutally repressed by the government. 'Viuda' was meant to refer to this political situation, while pointing to women as surviving social subjects who remained in charge of entire families and homes after the disappearance of their husbands. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics

Shown in this video clip are still images of the newspaper article. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics