Eugenio Dittborn: Clashes of Memory in Post-Dictatorship Chile

Abstract

In 1983, Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn began sending a series of Air Paintings to different art galleries around the world. These paintings consisted of portraits which came from different mediatic sources: magazines; anthropological archives; police reports; children's drawings. Dittborn would fold these travelling canvases measuring more than 2 × 3 metres and he would send them by registered post to galleries where they are opened, unfolded, arranged and hung up to exhibit, forming diptychs and triptychs. This article is an exploration of the critical discourses on memory generated in Dittborn's work in the context of the post dictatorial period in Chile. The notion of memory in his work is heavily influenced by a postmodern fragmentary aesthetic which moves beyond the figure of the political victim and of the stereotype of the Latin American revolutionary, presenting us with different types of anti-heroes which reside on the margins of official history. Furthermore, through a Benjaminian reading, I explore how Dittborn's work elaborates a critical memory based on the intrinsic relationship between historical forgetting, the dynamics of the neoliberal market and mass mediatization of culture.