Solidarity art in the Low Countries: the Chilean arpilleras. Chilean denunciatory art asking for solidarity
(2019) The Low Countries and Latin America from the 19th Century until Present — Location: Leuven (8.April.2019)
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- (en) During the seventies and eighties, the Low Countries offered asylum to persecuted Latin Americans from countries with military regimes. The exile created a space for interaction between the citizens from the Low Countries and the Latin Americans, in which not only the exiles integrated in the new society, but where also the locals integrated in the exiled community through solidarity activities. One such activity was the exposition of solidarity art, among others Chilean arpilleras (see picture below). Our contribution firstly presents the network that made the smuggling of arpilleras from Chile to the Low Countries possible and secondly analyses the content of this artifact that represents the Chilean reality of that time. The arpilleras made during the Chilean military dictatorship (1973-1990) are a type of tapestry – forbidden at the time - that denounced the social situation, sometimes by using a mixture of images and text. They were made by unemployed women and relatives of executed or “disappeared” citizens. They were smuggled to many countries, among others to Belgium and the Netherlands, to raise international awareness about living conditions and repression (Adams, 2013). The main themes depicted on the arpilleras were poverty and repression. The corpus we analyzed comes from Chilean exiles who worked together with the Vicaría de la Solidaridad and consists of 60 photos of arpilleras that were smuggled to the Netherlands. The analysis is based on the concepts of viewpoint and meaning construction in multimodal messages, in this case messages composed by the integration of language, images and symbols (Dancygier & Vandelanotte, 2017).The methodology consists of (i) grouping the arpilleras that represent a similar scene, (ii) categorizing the types of utterances included (e.g. names of institutions, toponyms or represented speech) and (iii) analyzing the specific representation of poverty or repression. The results reveal that this kind of solidarity art visualizes Human Rights violations presenting information that is mitigated in official documents (cf. De Cock & Michaud Maturana, 2014 and 2017), and that these arpilleras describe poverty and repression through temporal and causal relations by establishing relations between themes such as education, healthcare, torture and forced disappearance or assassinations.
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De Cock, B., & Michaud Maturana, D. (2019). Solidarity art in the Low Countries: the Chilean arpilleras. Chilean denunciatory art asking for solidarity. The Low Countries and Latin America from the 19th Century until Present, Leuven. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/61605