— chile – prelude —
First of all I would like to present from where my interest in this topic – the connection of spaces through a digital medium – comes from.
This topic is not only not “original” in the context of performative art (at least in a historical sense), but also after the health crisis of 2019, which has hit the whole world, it is a topic that we find more and more in artistic practices. Now days no longer with the intention of “experimenting” new technologies, but in a lot of cases in the need to find a mean to continue making performative art.
In October of the same year in which the Covid 19 appeared for the first time in China, a radical process of social and political transformation began in Chile: a social revolt of unprecedented dimensions. An episode that from the beginning was marked by violence and in which by January 2020, according to the statistics provided by the National Institute of Human Rights, would have meant some 370 victims of eye injuries or trauma, while in some 33 cases there was an explosion or complete loss of the organ. All this was the result of police and army shooting using rubber bullets aimed at the faces of the demonstrators.
As an aside, I wrote a piece about this topic called “Punto de Vista” for Double Bass, Bass Trombone and Contrabassoon, with animations made by Cristian Orellana and Isidora Páez reinventing interviews made by the “Colectivo Residencial” from Santiago de Chile, which was premiered as part of my graduation concert in my Master’s study at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg in February 2021.
I had to experience the social outburst of Chile in 2019 from a distance. I had just visited Chile, for the first time since my departure to start my studies in Germany during September, and a couple of weeks after returning to Hamburg to continue my studies I started to get the “bombardment” of news: burned subway stations; demonstrators who had disappeared; People turned up dead “the next morning”. The president declaring war on the demonstrators and calling in the army to fight against “a powerful enemy”.
The trauma.
The scar that Chile has never been able to heal from the military dictatorship of ’73 appeared fresh and boiling blood. This time not in a novel or a documentary, which have been the main sources with which I and my generation mates have been able to approach the events that marked that period of Chilean history, but in “real” life. With our friends and family in the streets.
The role of Facebook
Briefly I will try to summarise in these lines some of my feelings at that time: I remember waking up “with my stomach tight” and that the first instinctive act, the first engine that breaks the inertia of the body when sleeping, was unequivocally to take my phone and start reading the hundreds of whatsapp messages received during the night -which with the several hours of time difference zone represent the Chilean afternoon/evening- and only feel relief when, after reading all the messages of the groups, each family member or friend said “I arrived well”, “we are home”, “nothing happened”, “good night”.
To me -and I believe that my experience can be extended to many immigrants around the world- social networks already brought a connotation and relevance in the day to day, being the most efficient communication mechanism to maintain the feeling of closeness and daily life with my loved ones, but also to feel more presently the link with identities and groups of people that occurs when we learn about common news that affect the country, or even in the playful dimension of sharing memes to laugh at issues that allow us to see ourselves reflected in communities.
But during the days of the social outbreak in Chile, social networks became even more transcendental in daily life: all day long you were watching for news with data and statistics of what was happening there. Later in the day, people in Chile started to wake up and you could finally start asking them how they were doing. But the hardest part always came with the night on this side of the world: when the Chilean afternoon began and with it the messages “I’m going to Plaza Dignidad”, “the police are throwing tear gas near the house”, “does anyone know where she is?”, “take good care of yourself guys and report when anything happens”.
Maintaining the connection with the world around me, especially when I was in a classroom thinking and trying to write or program to perform works that I had been working on since before, and that now seemed futile topics facing the urgency of what my mates were living in Chile, was an impossible task. It seemed an understatement, something laughable and out of place to be in a room, sitting and paying attention to my teachers, while friends and family were in danger of being dangerously attacked by the Chilean public forces.
Then, reality -my reality- was much more the news (and memes) on facebook and instagram. The whatsapps of thousands of Chileans organised in Chile and the world. A news network that constantly forced upon you the images of what people in Chile could be going through and that from hour to hour blowed up when some important news was communicated.
In 1942, Jorge Luis Borges, Argentine writer, wrote for the first time his short story “Funes the Memorious”, which tells the story of a character who remembers everything. He remembers even the smallest of details, so his day was spent remembering what happened the day before, because in his mind he could repeat it without fail from beginning to end, hour by hour and minute by minute.
In those days you felt a bit like Funes. You lived the day stuck in “reading” reality or watching it in news videos, but unable to connect with the one that surrounds you physically and with the strange feeling that “reality” was what was happening there: on the screen of your phone.