A key figure in video art in Latin America, Lotty Rosenfeld (Santiago de Chile, 1943–2020) was the author of an unclassifiable oeuvre, situated at the confluence of her political struggle against state violence and a conception of images as an essential space of freedom for transforming the present.

Her work erupted during the Pinochet dictatorship, when the streets were off-limits for any citizen demonstration and taking films or photographs was forbidden. Through a series of public space interventions, she challenged the silence imposed by the political-military power while also urging the community to imagine new forms of collective participation. The impact of her first actions marked all her subsequent works.

One of the cores of her artistic practice entailed situating herself with her body in unexpected places. More specifically, she highlighted signs whose power to organise the economy of life had been so naturalised that they became invisible to critical questioning. Rosenfeld intervened from those points, chosen with surgical precision, as her actions and the movement of her images generated waves of interferences, whose effects were—and still are—fundamental.

The Santiago Stock Exchange, cross-border places, pawn shops, and epicentres of institutional power were just some of the sites where she chose to work, aiming to question the mechanisms that instilled social inequality, exclusion, and the normativity of behaviours or genders. In this sense, her audiovisual work, characterised by a radical intersection of materials, languages, and archives, operates as a true bypass, opening up new possibilities wherever life and its creative forces have been obstructed.

Credits: Lotty Rosenfeld, Paz para Sebastián Acevedo, Valparaíso Chile 1985 © LOTTY ROSENFELD, CORTESÍA FUNDACIÓN LOTTY ROSENFELD