An American Wound

Stela, a young Brazilian actress, decides to make a work on the letters exchanged between Latin American plastic artists in the 70s and 80s. She travels to Cuba, Mexico, Argentina and Chile looking for her works and testimonies about the reality they lived during the dictatorships that most of these countries faced at the time. In the midst of the investigation, Stela discovers the existence of Ana, a young Brazilian artist who was part of this world, but disappeared. Ana went from southern Brazil, from a small town in the interior to Buenos Aires. Obsessed by the character, Stela decides to find her and find out what happened to her.

The artist's voice-over saying "No, I wasn't happy" marks the beginning of the video-recording of this, her first art action, which consisted in the intervention to a traffic sign along a mile, specifically on Manquehue Street, in Santiago de Chile. A fundamental work within the history of 20th century Chilean art.

"Moción de Orden" is one of the video pieces corresponding to a video installation by the artist Lotty Rosenfeld. In the work we see the image of a maritime oil platform in the South of Chile, the image surrounds it, flying over. You hear the constant sound of the helicopter, and a voice-over text at the end.

Reflecting on decades of economic fallout from the Pinochet regime, Rosenfeld used surveillance footage from a pawn shop in Santiago where customers sold their jewelry to pay off debts. The video's pace signals the dizzying circulatio of commodities. The artist's soundtrack of guttural vocalizations could imply strenuous efi or intense bodily pleasure. The title stresses tha a pawn is both a powerless player and a pledge! to an exhausting financial system with an insatiable greed for more.

Rosenfeld's collaged video compositions break the supposed transparency of televised news images. She often used video to call attention to the violence of language. During Pinochet's "Operation Silence," the news was highly controlled, and Rosenfeld grasped how all communication is highly codified and manipulative.

Rosenfeld is well-known for her experimental videos, some of which involved projection onto buildings and other outdoor surfaces. She projected these marching ants onto a variety of sites, including the Presidential Palace in Santiago and an oil rig off the Strait of Magellan. One of the many components of a larger audiovisual project, the ants-with their highly stratified behavior, defined by a strict division of labor and social caste-serve as a potent parallel for our own behavior.