“In Chile the highest art is to be silly,” “excuse the inconvenience, but we’re being killed,” “no saints nor whores, only women”, are just some of the messages that GAM spreads on its Alameda facade since September in a monumental artistic intervention.
The #ManifiestoGAM project celebrates the cultural center’s nine years and seeks to make the conversation between the citizens and the GAM billboard more public.
Led by Gabriela Mistral, relevant women from the Chilean artistic and cultural world, they voice from the front of the building to appeal to passers-by. It is a muralist fantasy where these characters, who have embraced social causes, gather in the middle of Alameda to demonstrate about today’s Chile and support the feminist struggle for equality and respect.
Photo Collage
The intervention is a collage composed of six street art canvases, 150 meters long, containing iconic photos of citizen movements from different eras. Faces of renowned cultural figures linked to GAM, such as Isidora Aguirre, Ana González and Pedro Lemebel, live marching with actresses who have been on their billboard, such as Claudia di Girólamo, Belgium Castro, Patricia Rivadeneira, Catalina Saavedra, the cast of Landscapes for Not Coloring, Claudia Vicuña and Marcela Said, among others.
Phrases from Mistral herself, such as “my indigenism made me hateful”, join messages from real marches such as “no one asked me how the rapist was dressed” and also to some texts of the GAM plays themselves, such as “one day the whole past will embarrass us” of the montaj and Mistral, Gabriela (1945), by Andrés Kalawaski.
“The purpose of this project is to participate in social movements from the visual, as we do from the content that we have in the programming of GAM,” says Felipe Mella, CEO of GAM, adding: “We think it is important to relieve the messages that artists have embodied in our rooms because they are absolutely connected to what happens in the Alameda.”
Art and social movements
The installation – created by GAM’s communications and marketing team – has paralyzed pedestrians and taken over social media photos: “We have always seen GAM as a means of communication between artists and audiences,” says Ximena Villanueva, Director of communications and marketing at GAM, adding, “#ManifiestoGAM is to show that art and social movements have a lot to tell us about how we treat children, women and minorities.”
The mural features works by iconic photographers such as Carlos Wagner, Javier Torres and María Eugenia Lorenzini with their record of feminist protests during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. They are joined by Rotmi Enciso, Maglio Pérez, José Parada, Pedro Marinello, Jorge Sánchez, Patricio Mello, Gustavo Milet and Nacho Rojas.
