Exhibitions: Dignidad

Dignidad, 2018 – ongoing, is a multimedia project including audio and text archives, kinetic sculptures, sonic installations and performances that explores the history of Colonia Dignidad, the infamous enclave in Southern Chile founded in 1961 by former Nazi officers who escaped Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Known for its long history of child abuse, during the C.I.A.-backed military dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990), Colonia Dignidad was turned into a detention camp, where hundreds of dissidents were tortured and murdered, including Soviet-born, Jewish-American math professor Boris Weisfeiler. Many other victims were buried in mass graves or incinerated to eliminate evidence, and the bodies of many are still missing. The legacies of this massacre alongside traumas of children born and raised in the enclave are still felt today, revealing the damages of fascism in the present.   

Dignidad makes visible the site’s institutionalized and multilayered history of violence past and present. Built upon extensive archival research and interviews, the work reveals a complex system of codes and transcontinental actions that culminated in crimes against minors and opponents of the Chilean civic-military dictatorship (1973-1990). Restaging spaces of segregation and repression by different means, the work includes for the first time reproductions of documents such as minutes and official reports of the enclave facilitated to the artist by the National Archives of Chile, where the archive is located. It also includes process-like drawings and the exhibition of an actual, previously unreleased audio-tape found by survivor and human rights lawyer Winfried Hempel. In addition, the work comprises a sculpture that evokes the architecture of bunkers and cells and thus the political machinery uncovered within the archive. This sculpture is composed of four large-scale kinetic metal pieces, which are activated by the artist and collaborators. Described by the artist as “a political abstraction that refers to Colonia Dignidad’s history through a performance that physically deconstructs and reconstructs symbols of power,” the activation of this sculpture is accompanied by an immersive audio recording that reveals secret operations between Nazi agents in Peru, Germany, and Chile’s Colonia Dignidad.

Together, pieces in this project stand ​​against a culture of oblivion, proposing a path towards declassification that blends art and reparation. As such, Dignidad contributes with historical and cultural materials to different instances seeking justice, including the recently formed joint commission between Chile and Germany to transform Colonia Dignidad into a memory site. “When artists use historical archives as a resource to create, they can transform the archive’s nature and help to overcome the amnesia we live in, while subverting the text, the image, and the object” stated Emma de Ramón, Director of the National Archives of Chile. As she continues: “We can certainly observe and experience this transformation in San Martin’s project.”