A Woman Artist in the Neoliberal Chilean Jungle
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Date
2017
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Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan, London
Abstract
One of the perdurable effects of Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile is that adherence to Friedman’s and von Hayek’s neoliberal ideas of freedom, based on free markets and the withdrawal of state public-sector services, has been upheld by postdictatorship governments that have maintained and even radicalized neoliberalism by, in part, denying the atrocities committed by the Pinochet regime. As a theatre director and performer, María José Contreras Lorenzini challenges the government’s rhetoric of reconciliation and consequent amnesia by exposing forgotten documents in the historical record: testimonies, autobiographical stories, familial archives. Her performance Habeas Corpus, at the Palacio de Tribunales de Santiago, transforms an emblematic juridical enclave into an intersubjective, intercorporeal space, allowing spectators, through the circulation of affective memory, to recover political awareness and agency