At the beginning of 2018, Piñera assumed the presidency of Chile for the second time.

By then, we had already accumulated a great deal of uneasiness due to previous

government policies, and this new election only strengthened them. Then, Natascha

summoned us to meet at the Courthouse Square dressed in black with signs that made

evident the "Manifestation of Unrest", we crossed from this iconic place to the Republic

Square week after week for some months. I remember that we would break the pattern

of the street and slow down its time, generating a black spot in the form of a line that

moved slowly. Those of us who participated were mostly artists, yet we never

discussed whether we were making art or just a political action, or both, but whether

we agreed that it was our way of protesting.

Two years later, social inequalities in Chile surpassed the capacity of resignation of the

inhabitants, who rose up massively in the streets through protest, confronting the

sensitive body of the popular awakening to the repression of the automaton body of

the armed forces. But, although sadly many bodies have fallen since then, the corporal

capacity of protest regenerated the performativity of the street that until now was

conditioned by the private sphere, it also returned to us the possibility of imagining

ourselves politically in the construction of the public sphere. And with this, even if we

don't know how it will end, it is worth holding on to the capacity of resistance until we

achieve a negotiation that considers the political potential of the "will of the people”.

It is not minor, to begin this text referring to the protest in Chile, if we consider

that the main contemporary protest around the world is conceived against the

neoliberal system that emerged at the end of the 19th century using Chile as a

laboratory of experimentation, which was later replicated in many other countries

destroying the territorial economies and the role of the state as a public entity in

charge of watching over the welfare of the inhabitants. That is why the protests

in Chile say: "neoliberalism was born in Chile, neoliberalism dies in Chile".

 (Transcription of contribution from Andrea Herrera in relation to the above. 16/03/20).

To put this in context, Chile, the place where I come from, that country located in the

so-called south of the world, after being devastated by European colonialism, had its

second colonization becoming the first country of experiment for the implementation of

the neoliberal system under the doctrine of shock imposed by the military dictatorship

of Augusto Pinochet in 1973 with U.S. funding. In order to privatize the entire country,

leaving it in the hands of the transnationals, Pinochet had to promulgate a new

constitution that allowed him to do so. This same constitution designed in dictatorship

continued to operate in Chile without modification after 7 superficially democratic

governments that did nothing more than exacerbate the conditions of social inequality

and the loss of natural resources. The imposition of the dictatorship's shock doctrine

(disappearances and torture) and the consumerism imposed by neoliberalism managed

to silence the Chilean people for three decades, but the $30 that the subway raised on

October 18 in Santiago was the last straw, under the popular denunciation that "it's not

30 pesos, it's 30 years" of social inequality. As of yesterday, March 18, Chile has had

five months of protests in the streets.

THE PROTEST
The protest reveals the place of the body with its history in "The History", the History

that as we have seen is told by the neoliberal system that is imposed in almost all

countries of the world. While a few win, the vast majority lose everything. With the

protest, the emancipated bodies in the streets come to seek to recover their history,

which as Judith Buttler points out: "when bodies come together to express their
indignation and represent their plural existence in public space, they are at the same

time making broader demands: these bodies are asking to be recognized, to be valued,

while at the same time exercising their right to appear, their freedom, and claiming a

liveable life. (p. 33). The protest itself is the enunciation of the "history" of the

displaced, the disadvantaged, the invisible, stories that are tested in the street to

demand their appearance.

The protest, forces us to rethink our bodies, as well as to rethink the place of action, to

think as an individual body within the collective body, it leads us to generate symbiosis

of thoughts and movement tactics with the others, to give importance to the

performative character of the appearance as its own right, as it has been said in the

protests in Chile we have nothing to lose because we have already lost everything. The

disarticulated body appears in meeting with other bodies to call for its re-articulation.

The body as an agent is inseparable from the political and also from the aesthetic that

is manifest in such an appearance. The protest itself is a performatic act and a site-

specific intervention of enunciation. Protest appeals to the sense of the common, even

if it is only an exposed body, because it appeals to the common sense of others.

Protest itself is a symbolic act capable of deconstructing exogenously imposed

regimes. In protest, the close relationship between art and life reappears, endowed

with symbolic expressions, with creative meanings of the place of enunciation, protest

demands that we rethink art in a contemporary way and from our own contexts.

Protest is a way of incorporating the body into the history of the territory, revealing

itself to the imposed absence controlled and monitored by the neoliberal system. It is a

matter of inscribing the body and its history even if it is to make its exhaustion appear.

The striking body or the violent body are symbolic acts that challenge the conditions of
habitability to which we are subjected. A strike of the means of transport or the

appearance of the violated bodies of women in the streets paralyse the city.

WHAT'S MY PROTEST HERE ?

Now as I write from Switzerland, I feel challenged by the political situation in Chile, by

those other bodies in struggle that also represent my body, by the collective sense of

the production of common meanings, we are bodies, we are a body that was born

fractured, children of the dictatorship. How do you manage to be here as much as

there?

This master's degree offered me a unique opportunity that very few can access, to

dedicate myself to research even with the possibility of making mistakes, without

pressure or worries about subsistence. It also gave me the possibility to get to know

another reality, so different from Chile's, but with connected stories. With the

discomfort of the researcher in a foreign land I throw myself into the question: what is

my protest here? In a country where apparently there are no struggles or internal

social inequalities, but being one of the richest countries in the world, it requires me to

think about its state of comfort in relation to those countries that live the tragedy day

by day, like Chile. Social inequality is not by generation spontaneous, Switzerland was

also a poor country, but knew how to play very strategically outside or inside the

chessboard to become the administrator of the wealth of the winners, operating with a

silence that after all the information I have collected seems monstrous, and of which

even what I have managed to scrutinize there is very little research and less justice.

"The handling of money in Switzerland has the character of a sacrament: to keep it, to

receive it, to count it, to treasure it, to speculate, to cover it up, are all activities

invested with an almost ontological majesty, which no word should come to profane

and which are carried out in a silent recollection". (Ziegler, 2001). Switzerland bought

75% of all the gold stolen by the Nazis, collaborating in the prolongation of the war and
obtaining resources from it, becoming one of the most powerful banking powers in the

world.

Later, under the same dynamic, it connected in a particular way with the neoliberal

system. The transnationals with the U.S. policy to achieve the implementation of

neoliberalism implemented dictatorships and drug trafficking networks that broke the

economic systems of almost all countries around the world. "The money from the

corruption and plundering of Third World states by dictators and indigenous elites is

the second great source of the fabulous wealth of the Swiss paradise. Switzerland

applies the free convertibility of currencies. Its political neutrality, cynicism and the

extreme competence of its bankers have traditionally incited dictators of all kinds"

(Ziegler, 2001), among them Augusto Pinochet. So the Swiss oligarchy functions as a

cover-up for money laundering in the world. "This question is by no means a minor one.

Switzerland has managed to maintain an economic, social and political model largely

thanks to the huge influx of fleeing capital. (...) Perhaps the Swiss don't want to see

that their neutrality never existed; money is not neutral and globalisation has made

any isolationist project impossible. (Arancon, 2016)

The pseudo harmony here flattens the possibility of discovering spaces of affection and

memory. At this point, just now, as I write, something appeared that I hadn't been

aware of before and that has been weighing on me even though I manage to carry it,

which is the lack of a home, and despite how dramatic it sounds, perhaps this is the

reason why I reach places of action for my undefined and sterile protest, such as the

road or the wasteland.

In one of the last investigations that I carried out before arriving in Switzerland, I began

to explore the capacity of enunciation of the presence of the body as a gesture in the

intervention of public space. So here I have my body, which is also the maximum
expression of protest, and from it I review the possibilities to talk about the dialectics:

absence/presence, inhabiting/uninhabiting; putting the body in sterile landscapes,

creating moments of suspense or pause in the apparent normality.

I carry my body to claim its own presence; I walk, I observe, I cross, I listen, I stop,

seeking to discover forms and signs to stress those structures of control and progress

that are blurred in security and stability. Weights, volumes and movements that go

unnoticed while acting as drafts of the notion and social relation of the public sphere,

silences that mask noises. I practice the action of my body in the blurred limit of the

public and the private as a protest against the inequality of scale of the body with the

environment.

The body that has been stripped of collectivity is exposed alone and abandoned to

space, wearing only an overall that evokes the subject on strike, a white overall that

represents assuming the failure of the protest here, an overall that also has an erased

history whose white color is only an ideal that lies in the face of blindness, in the face

of the anguish of claiming the impossible.

THE RIPPING OF THE TERRITORY

I have the road in front of my room, and although I like to open the window, I wish I

could hear the sound of the mountain more than the road. In my visual frame I see

plane after plane of roads and cars getting lost in the mountain. The cost of not living

in a crowded valley is the road intervention in climbing over the Alps.

The tearing of the natural environment is justified by the necessary culture of the car

that has turned its roars into something domestic, more domestic even than the sound

we heard decades ago in the countryside in the south of the world when the radio or

the TV lost the signal during the winter, although this comparison is absurd because
their meanings are very different and if you want to turn off the TV or the radio, the

road does not !

The unstoppable development of the automobile and the constructive capacity of roads

subject both rural and urban areas to dissection in cuts that break up the fabric of the

territory, which on the one hand favours the displacement of the inhabitants and on the

other disconnects them. As stated by Jane Jacobs (2013), certain borders are potential

places of decay of the surrounding environment by cutting off their spatial

interconnection. This influences the disarticulations of the territory as much as of the

bodies that inhabit them.

Like the intrusion that the family of the film "Home" directed by Ursula Meier (2008)

endured, when they saw their happy rural everyday life intersected from one day to the

next, when the trucks with workers appeared to build the missing part of the road,

which until then was the family playground, followed by the continuous roar of the

traffic and the impossibility of crossing to carry out their daily activities. At first, the

family resolved for a moment to continue with normality, but with their lives

interrupted, neurosis began to appear, the refusal to abandon the home and the

decision to isolate themselves inside until an untenable situation arose, which finally

forced them to leave.

I cite this film because it stresses the scales involved in inhabiting one place in relation

to another place that is an impossibility. And because it shows a completely different

perspective of the "road movie" genre that has created this fictional idea of the

alienated subject with identity problems who discovers himself while listening to music

inside his car or with the adventures that happen to him within a narrative of violence

and tension that promotes movement. So, when I comment on this research others say
ok! but the road has a whole narrative, it is not necessarily a neutral space, but that

narrative does not represent the narratives that justify the ideal of progress.

II

I remember the first time I got on the metro in Santiago, I was amazed at the amplified

sound of the machine all over the car, it was so minimal, but I was determined to hear

it as a concert of sound. Although later, its repetition and monotony, its density and

entropy, and after living a few months in this city, made me hate it, because that

sound now shared with me my distressing routine. I was forced to listen to it over and

over again for long periods of time going through moments of stress, anger and abulia.

I imagine that for the others who traveled like me day after day in rush hour, the

heaviness was not centered in the noise, but I had already put my attention there, as in

the road in front of my window, which becomes an annoying piece because I can't find

the way to play it, because I see myself surrounded by mountains and I would like to

listen to them.

The Australian researcher Douglas Khan in his book "Noise, Water, Meat" (2001) points

to noise as a possible manifestation of the suppression of something else, where the

noise would correspond to a kind of masking of a silence. This led me to recall the

research "Hacking the Antarctic" (2009- to date) by the Chilean artist Alejandra Pérez,

which she presented at a conference as part of the celebration of "World Listening Day

in Concepción" (2019). It was about her exploration of the white continent through

studies of electromagnetic ecologies and psychogeography in the landscape. At the

beginning of her research, Alejandra said that she expected to find imperceptible

sounds of nature, but above the listening of the ice bubbles she discovered infrasounds

of the military and scientific bases installed in this extreme continent.

The road is, perhaps, one of the first non-places in this pseudo history that begins with

modernity, and which today is such a functional and necessary element for the system

in which we live that its scale is now unquestionable. It is as functional as it is symbolic

of capitalist progress.

Our references in all senses are increasingly blurred.

THE WHITE CITY

It's been snowing all day, it's amazing to see the horizon so close. I walk to the hostel

on my way back and the time it took me to do the tour in half an hour now seems to be

two hours, it seems that I could never reach it, it seems that I could easily get lost, but I

know something about this town, I just speculate because I have that strange feeling of

being in a different dimension in space, I feel smaller and heavier, and I have the snow

hitting me in the face that makes my horizon even more closed.

My references are the images I see in Switzerland, beyond the fact that I love to see

the fog erasing the horizon between the mountain and the sky. This city is designed in

such a way that we could graph it as a white canvas, and not as a canvas to write on,

but as a canvas to lift, to dismantle the object it hides.

Federica my master's tutor tells me a beautiful story, it's about the text of a writer

called Boris Vian, who in Federica's words talks about the city of Paris "(...) and one day

you wake up and you can't see anything because there is fog everywhere in the city...

And this suspends the rules - like carnival - carnival is a contradiction of rules...

WALK AND LISTEN

 "Walk so quietly that the soles of your feet become your ears"
Pauline Oliveros

The techniques of torture and horror seek paralysis and silence. But while this is the

possibility of walking or listening, it is possible to set in motion political exercises that

suspend the mechanisms and discourses of power. Then walking or listening becomes

a practice of resistance that allows us to get lost in order to find ourselves again, to

open up to uncertainty and to move carefully through different times and spaces, but

also to subvert the time and space of control.

Almost every day I go out for a walk or a swim trusting the necessary movement of my

body to stay alert and at the same time be able to rest on it. Sometimes I just flow in

vague images, sometimes I concentrate on the coordination of my movements, on the

weight of my body and its perception of space, and sometimes I walk further into this

research. Today I reflected on the inherent capacities of the human being, both to

protest and to love, which however are silenced or mitigated by fading on the digital

screen.

OVEROL
In the residence I made last year in the village of Quilleco, walking around the pampas

with Felipe in search of the Ñeng-co or water spirits, we thought about the idea of

enunciating the performatic act of searching, of giving a meaning to that body by

deriving from the events of nature and its forgotten stories. The community did not

understand very well what we were doing there and for all of them, in different ways,

we were foreigners with a strange job at first. Then, we speculated on how to point out
that "strange job" where one of our ideas was to wear overalls for when we went out to

"work", finally we never did and the idea was left hanging.

Based on the political identity of the overalls as clothing for the working classes, this

can become a strategy to point out the absence and presence of the body in the social

structure, always assigned to the workers, which uniforms them as workers in the

production system, but what happens when their production is reversed? or when it is

moved to a place of discussion? the overalls can become a form of transgression for

the dominant classes. Thus the overalls can go from being a tool of work to a tool of

protest.