Temporal and Narrative (Dis)junctures: Guillermo Núñez’s Aesthetics of Memory and the Museum of Memory and Human Rights (Santiago, Chile)

Abstract

Focusing primarily on Guillermo Núñez’s work, this essay juxtaposes two almost-identical exhibits of his ‘exculturas’ (sic: xculptures/ex-cultures) – one at the Chilean-French Cultural Institute in 1975, which resulted in his detention and exile, the other in 2010 for the official inauguration of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights (MM) – to explore their relationships to memory production in Chile four decades after the military coup. In the first, Núñez offered a pointed critique of the repressive post-coup context through a series of caged and netted objects; the second reconstructed the first as a memory gesture, framed within the ultra-modern, state-sponsored MM, in its designated art space, at once included and physically separated from the historical narrative of the Museum. How do the politics, aesthetics and design of the MM work to complement, complicate, or contradict Núñez’s – and, perhaps, any – artistic proposal? What challenges might the aesthetic of memory in Núñez’s work pose to the Museum’s narrative frame? Examining Núñez’s ‘exculturas’ (and, briefly, Gonzalo Díaz’s reconstructed Lonquén) reveals several tensions – around politics of inclusion and exclusion, the state’s role in memorysites, and the relationships between human rights concerns and museological and artistic strategies – marking the social production of memory in Chile today.