C.A.D.A.
¡Ay, Sudamerica! (Oh South America!)
The Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (C.A.D.A.) is a Chilean activist group of artists including Damiela Eltit and Lotty Rosenfeld amongst others, who used performance to challenge the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. One of the most important contributors to the "Escena Avanzada," C.A.D.A. incorporated strategies of theatricality and performance as an essential element to all its 'art actions,' while questioning the practices and institutions of all politics and conceiving art as a necessary social practice that eradicated the traditional distance between the artist and the spectator. Committed to the foundation of an open and spontaneous practice of spectatorship, their 'interventions in everyday life' intended to interrupt and alter the normalized routines of the daily urban life of the citizen, by means of a semiotic subversion that decontextualized and semantically restructured urban behaviors, locations and signs.:##
For ¡Ay, Sudamerica! (Oh South America!) C.A.D.A. dropped 40.000 fliers from 3 airplanes over poor sectors of Santiago. They carried the following statement: “The work of improving the accepted standard of living is the only valid project for art / the only exhibition / the only worthwhile artwork. Everyone who works, if only mentally, to expand the spaces in his or her life is an artist”. EF
courtesy Damiela Eltit & Museo de las derechos humanos