Artistic Activism and Memory: The Matapacos Statue Intervention in Santiago de Chile
In November 2019 and during the largest social mobilization in the history of Chile, a large statue of a black dog with a red bandana appeared in the capital of Santiago. The statue resembled the Negro Matapacos or "Black Copkiller", a riot dog turned protest symbol. It instantaneously became part of a larger conflict concerning the lack of representation in the monumental landscapes of Chilean cities. The case provides an example of how artist-activists, in times of social unrest, affect the urban space in constructive ways, creating new points of assembly and commemoration. In this session, dMSA invites two central figures behind the Matapacos statue intervention and two researchers with an expertise in Chilean protest art to engage in a conversation about the intervention, its evolution through the 2019/2020 mobilization, and the protest symbol that inspired it.
Info about event
Time
Location
Online Event
Organizer
dMSA Spring 2024 session 2: Artistic Activism and Memory: The Matapacos statue intervention in Santiago de Chile, hosted by: Alexander Ulrich Thygesen
Join us for the UPAST x dMSA Spring 2024 webinar series where three researchers from Aarhus University each invite activists and academics from their respective research areas to take part in online conversations about memory studies in practice.
The second event in the series will be hosted by Alexander Ulrich Thygesen who is currently working on a PhD-project concerning the interconnections of memory and activism during the 2019/2020 Chilean social uprising and its aftermath. Thygesen has invited the artists Marcel Solá and Pablo Zamorano to talk about the creation of the Matapacos riot dog statue and its residence on the streets of the Chilean capital during the uprising. In a conversation about the statue intervention and the Negro Matapacos protest symbol, Solá and Zamorano will be joined by Associate Professor at The New School Terri Gordon and Professor at Stony Brook University Eric Zolov, who will provide perspectives from their research. Gordon and Zolov have recently co-authored the book The Walls of Santiago: Social Revolution and Political Aesthetics (2022), wherein they examine the extensive artistic output of the 2019 Chilean mass movement.
Speakers
Marcel Solá holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chile, a Bachelor of Aesthetics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, a diploma in Cultural Administration from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, a post-graduate diploma in Conservation of Assets of Cultural Interest from the Complutense University of Madrid, and a Master in Museology from the University of Valladolid. He has a long career as an academic and promoter of new museological approaches that focus on dynamics of community connection within heritage administration. As a visual artist, he has spent more than 20 years developing what he calls “Conscious Art”, art interventions linked to environmental problems. In 2021 he received the Chilean National Environment Award in the category Sustainable Culture for his continual effort to clean beaches and other terrain on a national and international level, to later resignify the solid waste in materials for the creation of artworks with the active participation of communities. He is the author of several works of critical art that took to the streets during the 2019/2020 social uprising in Chile, such as eyes hanging from bridges and the monumental sculpture of the black street dog Matapacos. In 2020 he founded the Museo del Estallido Social, where he currently functions as curator.
Pablo Zamorano is a photographer and visual artist based in Santiago, Chile. His creative focus is based on monochrome photography, specializing in the street and documentary image. Some of the photos he has captured have been used as paste up installations in public and private spaces in Chile, Argentina, and Germany. His work has been exhibited in museums and featured in different types of publications, including academic papers and independent press, both printed and digital. Prior to teaching himself photography, Pablo studied industrial engineering, a field in which he worked until 2018.
Terri Gordon-Zolov is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at The New School in New York City and a member of the editorial board of WSQ (Women’s Studies Quarterly). She is co-author (with Eric Zolov) of The Walls of Santiago: Social Revolution and Political Aesthetics in Contemporary Chile (2022). Her work has been published in Journal of the History of Sexuality, Latin American Literary Studies, Sociologica, NACLA, and The Nation, amongst others.
Eric Zolov is Professor of Latin American History at Stony Brook University. His books include The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties (2020), Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (1999) and with Terri Gordon-Zolov, The Walls of Santiago: Social Revolution and Political Aesthetics in Contemporary Chile (2022). He is former Senior Editor of The Americas and has published widely on popular culture, twentieth-century Mexico, and U.S.-Latin American relations.
Moderator
Alexander Ulrich Thygesen holds an MA in Spanish and Latin American Studies and History from Aarhus University, Denmark (2022). He is currently a PhD student at the Department of German and Romance Languages at Aarhus University. His doctoral project focuses on the interconnections of memory and activism during the estallido social protest wave (2019-2020) in Chile and the subsequent constitutional process that it provoked. His research interests include feminist and LGBTQ+ performances, activists’ remodelling of urban spaces, the protest symbol Negro Matapacos, a crowdfunded activist museum of the estallido social, and activist memory on Twitter (X).