Para no morir de hambre en el arte

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

'Para no morir de hambre en el arte' is a multi-faceted 'art action' performed in 1979 addressing the problem of unsatisfied civil and human needs of the Chilean people (hunger, poverty), endowing milk with the symbolic power to represent this unrepresentable political issue. The performance consisted of several actions: passing out milk to people in Santiago's slums; parading milk trucks through the city's streets; calling attention to the performance with full-page ads in periodicals; enacting the group's message in front of the local United Nations building; altering the façade of a museum to draw it into the theme of the performance; broadcasting, through loudspeakers located outside the CEPAL building, a critical speech; and filling an acrylic box with 100 milk bags, an issue of the periodical 'HOY' and an audiotape with the broadcasted critical speech in an art gallery. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics

Shown in this video clip is a text (in Spanish) describing the work, along with camera material alternating between two actions: the artists delivering milk to the inhabitants of a 'población' (a marginalized neighborhood), and the artists sealing milk and other materials in an acrylic box inside an art gallery. The artists explain the goal of the action: CADA wanted to point out to unsatisfied civil and human needs of the Chilean people. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics