¡Ay Sudamérica! (video installation material).

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 1981, six small airplanes, flying in perfect formation over Santiago, dropped 400,000 flyers discussing the relationship between art and society. This action referenced the bombardment of the House of Government (La Moneda), which marked the fall of Salvador Allende's democratic government and the beginning of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile. Through this 'acción', CADA reconstructed the political trauma of 1973, while proposing a new political perspective. The flyers contained a message that simultaneously upheld each person's right to a decent standard of living and proposed that the general public was capable of instating an entirely new concept of art - one that could overcome traditional, elite boundaries and become part of public life. Here shown is video material from three monitors thought to comprise a video installation piece that would reflect on the performance (this installation is still a work in progress). Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics

As a set, the images in the monitors pose a call for discussion on the still open conflict between territorial isolation, censorship, and creative alternatives to these issues. Parts 1, 2 and 3 each contain the installation material from monitors 1, 2, and 3, respectively. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics