La Moneda Research Articles

Remembering Salvador Allende

The article is dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the death of Salvador Allende, the President of Chile, who was the first in the world to attempt to move towards socialism by peaceful means, within the framework of a representative democracy. The article explains the reasons of the failure of Chilean "socialist project". The reader will learn how Salvador Allende's last message to the Chilean people was putting on a journalist's tape recorder on “Radio Magallanes” from La Moneda Palace, besieged by the putschists on the day of the military coup on September 11, 1973. The author managed to keep this tape recording during those dramatic days in Santiago. That last Allende’s call to the nation became his political testament.

Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America

Beatriz Allende: A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America

Interventions at La Moneda Palace, from the 19TH, 20TH, and 21ST centuries. The projects and their architects

The Palacio de La Moneda, or La Moneda Palace, is the seat of the Presidency and the Executive Power of Chile, the Ministry of the Interior and Public Security, the General Secretariat of the Presidency, and the General Secretariat of the Government. It is one of the main historical and most important buildings in Chile in terms of its current representative function, as the Government Palace. Since its construction, in 1786, it has been the witness and star of the historical-political and social-urban evolution of the nation, of events that have been expressed in its own architectural metamorphosis and the evolution of the urban fabric. Designed by architect Joaquín Toesca, a disciple of Francesco Sabatini, a professional of the court of Carlos III, King of Spain (1759-1788), the Palace is the main example of Neoclassicism in Chile. It was inaugurated in 1805 as the Royal Mint of Santiago, to mint the kingdom's currency. After the independence of Chile, in 1845, the Seat of Government and Presidential Residence moved to the building. It is on this date that it adopts its representative function, and therefore, the moment where the first important modification of its floorplan took place, beginning a process of continuous evolution characterized by the dynamic transformation and permanent adaptation of its architecture, through successive interventions, functional updates, and its reconstruction after the 1973 air raid. The lack of an organized and detailed record of its permanent alterations makes it difficult to understand them from their current state and for possible future interventions. As a result, this article presents the most important and significant changes on the perception of the building, thus becoming the first organized record of contemporary interventions of La Moneda Palace.

El Problema del Pesebre en La Moneda

Uno de los renovados focos de interés de la teoría política liberal ha sido la forma en que los estados despliegan símbolos religiosos en el uso de su capacidad expresiva, es decir, sin coerción. ¿Son estas formas de establecimiento religioso simbólico permisibles en un estado formalmente separado de la iglesia? Esta pregunta es pertinente para el caso chileno, donde la autoridad conmemora una serie de ritos religiosos al interior del palacio de gobierno, siendo la instalación de un pesebre gigante de Navidad el que genera más resistencia en una fracción de la creciente población de ateos, agnósticos y no creyentes en general. Este artículo recurre a la recientemente influyente teoría del “secularismo mínimo” de Cecile Laborde para concluir que el pesebre en La Moneda solo es políticamente relevante si envía un mensaje de exclusión cívica a una identidad vulnerable y subordinada, lo que es difícil de argumentar desde la perspectiva de sus críticos.

Evolución de las normas urbanísticas y su incidencia en la conservación del patrimonio colonial del centro histórico de Santiago de Chile

El presente artículo analiza la evolución de la normativa del Plan Regulador Comunal de Santiago, Chile, y cómo este ha incidido en la conservación del patrimonio construido en torno a cuatro monumentos históricos de la época colonial: la Iglesia y Claustro de San Francisco, el Palacio de La Moneda, la Casa Colorada y el Museo de Arte Precolombino. Los resultados revelan que los cambios normativos han influido de distintas maneras. En el caso de La Moneda se definió un entorno construido que se ha conservado hasta el día de hoy, mientras el entorno de la Casa Colorada se ha ido transformando a largo de tiempo, generando una discordancia en relación a la altura máxima permitida. Finalmente, se discute el potencial de las normas urbanísticas en aportar a la conservación del patrimonio urbano y al desarrollo sustentable del centro histórico de la ciudad.

Behind the Neoclassical Façade: A Haunted National Monument in Chilean Film

This article analyses filmic representations of the Chilean presidential palace (La Moneda), an emblematic site at which narratives of past violence, national exceptionalism and emancipatory anticipation intersect. I build on a growing corpus of work that uses film analysis to explore the spatiality of dictatorship memories and legacies in the Southern Cone. Unlike more conventional “sites of memory”, La Moneda is simultaneously a functioning government building, a site of violence, and an object of heritage. This complex temporal fabric makes it a powerful space for political interventions, a setting that can sharpen the continuities and symmetries between different historical events and periods. Drawing on theories of inheritance and haunting, I first examine the hegemonic temporalities of progress and heritage that frame the building, moving on to reflect on the alternative temporal imaginaries offered by film. In these texts the palace is haunted by images of its own destruction in 1973, as well as by the figure of Salvador Allende, whose prophesy of future emancipation sits uncomfortably with triumphalist accounts of the Chilean democratic transition. Through my analysis, I explore how site-specific struggles for historical justice are imbricated in resistance to ongoing state repression, and the formulation of alternatives to neoliberal capitalism.

Each/Every: CADA's Radically Democratic Dramaturgy of Dissent

We are therefore saying that the work of expanding the habitual levels of life is the only valid art installation / the only exhibition / the only work of art that lives.We are artists and we feel ourselves participating in the grand aspirations of all, presuming today, with South American love, the gliding of eyes over these lines.Oh, South America.In this way, together, we construct the beginning of the work: a recognition in our minds; erasing the trades: life as a creative act …That is the art / the work / this is the work of art that we propose.—¡Ay Sudamérica!,Colectivo Acciones de Arte, July 1981At 11a.m.on 11 September 1973, the Chilean Air Force bombed the presidential palace, La Moneda, as part of an attack that ended the presidency of Salvador Allende, suspended democracy, and initiated the repressive military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Eight years later, on 12 July 1981, in the midst of dictatorship, six airplanes again flew over Santiago in military formation. This time, however, the planes did not drop bombs. Instead, they scattered four hundred thousand pamphlets with a text that urged Chileans to claim their space, thoughts, and lives by asserting the potential for artistry within all people. This art action, titled¡Ay Sudamérica!(Oh, South America!) and orchestrated by the Colectivo Acciones de Arte (Art Actions Collective, or CADA), subversively re-created a central moment from the violent history of the military coup in order to disturb and articulate an alternative course for that history (Fig. 1). In doing so, CADA challenged the regime's conception of Chilean citizenship by calling for an expanded space of existence and invoking the possibility of an artistic and contestatory subjectivity within everyone.

La edición femenina decimonónica. Patrocinio de Biedma.

This work seeks to analyse Patrocinio de Biedma y La Moneda as an editor and a cultural entrepreneur in the second half of the 19th century. In addition to being an outstanding writer, her editorial work began after her arrival in Cadiz, where she met and established a close relationship with Jose Rodriguez y Rodriguez, archivist and owner of Tipografia La Mercantil, who eventually became her husband. While in charge of the journal Cadiz. Revista de Artes, Letras y Ciencias (1877-1880), she built a strong editorial collaborative network of women writers that resulted in various publications. Moreover, she promoted a much larger editorial project: the Federacion Literaria Andaluza or Federacion Cientifico-Literaria. Moreover, her role in selecting titles for publication in her husband’s publishing house, Tipografia La Mercantil, can also be proven by analysing its editorial selection.

Excavating La Moneda: cinematic memory and post-dictatorship documentary in Chile

ABSTRACTNearly three decades after the end of the civic-military dictatorship led by General Pinochet, the documentary cinema of Chile has systematically embraced this country’s public memory project, exposing state-sponsored atrocities and their perpetrators, recovering survivors’ memories of loss, suffering and resilience, while continuing to challenge the collective conscience of Chileans. Post-dictatorship documentary in Chile has featured changing approaches, aesthetics, and themes, while persistently interrogating the relationship between the nation and its collective memory in the afterlife of the dictatorship through a filmic formal strategy of cinematic memory. Cinematic memory is defined here as a film’s deliberate use of style to articulate a distinctively filmic procedure of remembering experiences subjected to a politics of erasure. Thus, Chilean post-dictatorship documentaries seek an encounter with cultural memory via a filmic approach that can be described in terms of the Benjaminian metaphor of excavation. These post-dictatorship documentaries unearth tenuous material traces of the past through cinematic memory by focusing on the embodied return of survivors and other witnesses of atrocity to La Moneda, this nation’s government house, one of Chile’s most significant sites of memory.

Interpreting three Gold Coins from Ancient Egypt and the Ancient Near East at the Museo Casa de la Moneda, Madrid

The aim of this paper is to study three gold coins from the pre-Hellenistic Egypt and Near East, housed in the Museum Casa de la Moneda, Madrid, since 1955. In all three cases, their description is made as well as a review of the hypotheses that have been issued on their typology. Some novel proposals are made about their iconography and the possible gold sources for the raw material. The first is a Daric, probably coined between the beginning of the reign of Xerxes I and the fall of Sardis under Alexander the Great. The study provides an original indication about its iconography, as well as about the possible (and vague) relationship of Persian imperial coinage with Zoroastrianism, the official religion of the Achaemenid Dynasty. The nbw nfr coin is an Egyptian coinage from the Nectanebos Dynasty; one of the few hundred preserved copies. The iconography of the horse on the obverse is explored from the art and plastic of pre- and post-Sebenitic Egypt, and some technical aspects of the elaboration of the coin from the type of its reverse are analysed. From an epigraphic point of view, a new reading of the nbw nfr group is proposed. The Double Daric is a complex currency, both regarding the precise determination of its chronology, as well as its interpretation and recipients. It is a coinage made possibly in Babylon with a broad chronology from 331 BCE until ca. 306 B

La cámara que tiembla: sobre el bombardeo al Palacio de La Moneda y algunas imágenes que nos mueven

While the iconic images of the bombardment of La Moneda Palace on September 11, 1973 have been relentlessly reproduced and revisited in fiction and nonfiction film, to the point they have become the “burden of representation” of Chilean cinema, there are other images from that day that have been scarcely seen. This article seeks to reflect about the affective dimension of archival images, looking at the “raw” footage registered by the journalist Juan Angel Torti the same day of the military coup. Torti donated his piece to the Cineteca Nacional de Chile in 2010 and its 13min. length are reproduced entirely in La conciencia de golpe (Manlio Helena-Urzua, 2009, 45min.) a documentary made by a film student. The article suggests that due to the distance inscribed in Torti’s footage by the shaking camera, the impressive ellipsis of the document (notably, the absence of La Moneda in flames and the lack of images for the day after the bombardment) – as well its material qualities (16mm, color, no sound), this footage provides little information, yet constitutes today a profoundly affective experience of the past.

Nuevos dibujos y dos lienzos inéditos de Claudio Coello

Artist of great resources, always appreciated and cited with praise, Claudio Coello (1642-1693) is undoubtedly the great figure of Spanish painting in the second half of the seventeenth century. In this article a group of drawings preserved in the Madrid Casa de la Moneda (Mint) and the Uffizi in Florence are attributed to the painter. Some of them are preparatory studies for secure works. Likewise presented are two unpublished paintings, one of them a splendid portrait of a member of a religious order.

El espacio público dictatorial: edificios y lugares significados por el poder político

This article raises reflections about the restrictions that the last military dictatorship imposed on the public space. Through the historical analysis of the transformations in the nomenclature, the geosymbols political, represented in La Moneda, the houses of Allende and Pinochet, and the spaces occupied by the regime, we delve into the characteristics that took over the public space involved. After the historical review, laying down some conclusions regarding the impact that these changes were in the public space in the framework of a violation of the rule of law and democracy.

Violencia política en Chile entre el pueblo Mapuche y el gobierno del presidente Ricardo Lagos

Con el retorno de la izquierda socialista al Palacio de la Moneda se esperaba que la democracia se consolidara definitivamente en Chile. Sin embargo, los métodos represivos y violentos utilizados por el Estado perduraron y se perpetuaron como mecanismo de control social. Durante el gobierno de Ricardo Lagos, la protesta social Mapuche fue reprimida, perseguida y criminalizada, tras el argumento de la protección a la gobernabilidad política y la institucionalidad democrática. La metodología que se utilizó se basa en la revisión de prensa para registrar los episodios de violencia provenientes del pueblo Mapuche y del Estado chileno. Con esa información se comparó el uso de la violencia entre ambos actores. El principal resultado encontrado es que el Estado chileno mantiene el control y monopolio de la violencia en el país, siendo la violencia represiva del Estado siempre superior a la proveniente de la protesta Mapuche. La criminalización de la protesta Mapuche se logra de manera eficiente y efectiva gracias a las reformas que experimentó el poder judicial, lo que permitió enjuiciar y encarcelar a la población en conflicto bajo la figura de terrorismo.

Alla Moneda con Salvador Allende

The oral sources collected among the persons who were inside La Moneda Palace during the coup against Salvador Allende's government, on 11th September 1973, facilitate the study of historiographical problems such as the resistance from inside the palace, with the participation of the president himself, and the question of the armed defence of the popular government, in the circumstances of Allende's death. The thesis of the homicide is dismissed, and two different versions of the suicide proposed, that open the way to a series of considerations about how the Concertación reconstructed the figure of Allende.

Nuevas aportaciones a la obra de Francisco Ignacio Ruiz de la Iglesia (1649-1703)

This article presents a series of drawings by the Madrid painter Ruiz de la Iglesia preserved in the Madrid Casa de la Moneda (Mint), which have been identified as preparatory studies for his large canvas of the Martyrdom of Saint Andrew in the parish church of Casarrubios del Monte (Toledo), one of his best works. Other drawings preserved in the Biblioteca Nacional de Espana (Spanish National Library) and the British Museum, demonstrate that he was an exceptional draftsman with an ample and varied production. The authors also ascribe to this artist’s production a painting attributed to Claudio Coello, the Virgin of Carmen giving the Cloth of the Order to a Knight of Santiago , with an interesting iconography.

La moneda visigoda: Anexo I

We present a first annex to the work La moneda visigoda, which includes not only the new finds that have taken place in recent years, among which is the treasure of La Vega Baja de Toledo, but also other coins that were not registered in the corpus. To this we will add some collections that we were then not able to incorporate, as those of the Museum of Roman Art in Merida, the Musee de Narbonne and Musee du Biterrois of Beziers, among others.

Fray Juan Ricci, Mateo Cerezo the Younger, and the Commission to Complete the Retrochoir of the Cathedral of Burgos

The final expense report for the construction and decoration of the new retrochoir of the cathedral of Burgos contains an inconsistency that may reflect conflicting opinions among the early modern clergy concerning religious imagery displayed in a public setting. The Benedictine artist and architect Fray Juan Ricci was one of the artists involved in this important commission: Ricci was awarded 5,5151/2 reales for a series of six paintings destined for the side altars, a series that included The Ecstasy of St Francis, one of his most powerful celebrations of visionary experience. Yet soon after Ricci's series was completed, two canons, Diego and Manuel de la Moneda, purchased an additional canvas of St Francis from a local artist, perhaps as a replacement for Ricci's version of the miraculous event. The possible controversy surrounding Ricci's painting provides an opportunity to examine the role of devotional painting in seventeenth-century Castile.

The Palace of La Moneda: From the trauma of the Hawker Hunters to the therapy of the signs

The objective of this article is to analyze and interpret a series of semiotic-discursive interventions that have occurred in the seat of the Chilean government, the Palace of La Moneda. Underlying these observations is the conviction that the Palace of La Moneda is not only an architectural construction but also a material object that must be read as a sign; that is, a representation of aliquid pro aliquod.

El azar y la teoría

El sueno de la historia, a novel by Jorge Edwards, narrates, on the one hand, the relation between Joaquin Toesca, the XVIII century architect of La Moneda ...