Lotty Rosenfeld


Carlota Eugenia "Lotty" Rosenfeld Villarreal was a Chilean interdisciplinary artist. She was active in Santiago during the Chilean coup d'état of the 1970s. Her work was characterised by provocative public art interventions, including manipulating road signs. It has been exhibited in several countries throughout Latin America, and internationally in places such as Europe, Japan, and Australia.

Art movement and involvement in art

Rosenfeld's involvement in art happened during the Chilean military coup d'état period. Under this regime, she utilized her artwork to demonstrate how official power and conflict zones submit bodies to the margins and borders. She wanted to be separate from the guarded spaces of art and its market; therefore, she used the streets to perform her work, ultimately interrogating political and cultural spaces. With her art, she hoped that she could change the mentality of people by altering history of her country. The initial medium in which she worked was video recording. She then associated herself with neo-vanguardism and the Escena de Avanzada, a movement of artists and writers that appeared on the Chilean art scene after the 1973 Chilean coup d'état. In 1979, along with poet Raúl Zurita, sociologist Fernando Balcells, writer/artist Diamela Eltit, and artist Juan Castillo, she formed CADA or.
CADA is a collective activist and artist group that used interventions and performance to challenge the Pinochet regime in Chile throughout the 1970s and 1980s. She has also been involved with Fluxus, an experimental international interdisciplinary group related to visual arts, music, and literature. Rosenfeld and CADA’s work focused on transforming and intervening in public urban space through symbolism, aiming to challenge social political structures and authority. During this period Rosenfeld's work involved performances and video installations. One of her more recent works, a large multimedia installation, is titled Mocion de Orden.

Una Milla de Cruces Sobre el Pavimento, A Mile of Crosses on the Pavement (1979)

Rosenfeld is best known for her 'art action' entitled Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento . Influences of the social reality that frame societies' routines became the physical foundations of her creative interventions. It was begun in Santiago, Chile in 1979. It is one of Rosenfeld's most famous art action pieces. She altered the lines on the pavement, ultimately creating crosses.
With the help of anonymous passersby, she transformed the painted street lines into crosses with a perpendicular axis made of white tape. Rosenfeld used straight lines on the pavement as a metaphor for the tightly held control of the Pinochet regime. By altering these often-used markings, she transgresses this subsystem of control and confronts the public with an unexpected subversion of meaning. By converting the - sign into a +, she challenged the idea that signs are fixed, static markings of meaning. The work itself was a performance piece that disrupted every day traffic under the Pinochet regime.

Artwork

Una Milla de Cruces Sobre el Pavimento, Art Action/ Video Installation, 1979 Inversión Escénica , Art Action, 1979Una Herida Americana, video Instalación, 1982White House. Photography, 1982Proposición para Cruzar Espacios Límites, Video Action, 1983Valparaiso- Chile, black and white photography, 1985Paz para Sebastián Acevedo, Video Art, 1985MonedaMetro Wall St. – USACautivos, Video Instalación, 1989El Empeño Latinoamericano, Video Projection and Multimedia Installation, 1999Moción de Orden, multimedia installation, 2002Cuenta Regresiva, multi video proyección, 2006Acción de Arte, Allied Checkpoint, 2007Estadio Chile, Chile Triennal, ''2009''

Publications

  • Rosenfeld, Lotty, et al. Lotty Rosenfeld: moción de orden. Ocho Libros Editores, 2002.

Solo exhibitions

  • 1979/80 Art Action. Una Milla de Cruces Sobre El Pavimiento. Santiago, Chile
  • 1981 Art Action: Route 68. Santiago-Valparaíso. Atacama Desert. Copiapó, Chile
  • 1982 Art Action: White House. Washington D.D., USA. Santiago Stock Exchange, Chile
  • 1983 Art Action: Borders Chile- Argentina. RDA-RFA. Berlin, Germany
  • 1984 Art Action: Astronomical Observatory, El Tololo. La Serena, Chile
  • 1985 Art Action: Revolution Square in Havana, Cuba. Civic Center of Santiago, Valparaíso Highway. Santiago, Chile
  • 1987 Sound Intervention: Courts of Justice of Vancouver, Canada
  • 1988 Art Action: Diego Portales. Headquarters of the Military Government. Santiago, Chile

Exhibitions

2002 Lotty Rosenfeld: Moción de orden, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago 2007 Documenta 12, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany2010-11 Dislocación: Cultural Location and Identity in Times of Globalization, Kunstmuseum Bern 2013 Lotty Rosenfeld: Por una poética de la rebeldía, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain2015 Poéticas de la disidencia | Poetics of Dissent, Chilean Pavilion, Biennale Arte 2015, Venice, Italy

Awards and honors

Museum collections