A key figure in video art in Latin America, Lotty Rosenfeld (Santiago de Chile, 1943-2020) was the author of an unclassifiable body of work based on the confluence of her political struggle against state violence and a conception of images as a space of freedom essential to transforming the present.

During the years of the dictatorship, when the streets were off-limits to all forms of citizen protest and film and photographic documentation were prohibited, her work emerged through a series of interventions in public spaces that challenged the silencing imposed by the political and military regime, while simultaneously urging the community to imagine other forms of collective participation. The impact of her early actions marked all her subsequent work, in which she continued to delve into the most contentious aspects of neoliberal policies.

One of the central aspects of her artistic practice was to position herself where she wasn't expected to be. More specifically, to point out those signs whose power to organize the economy of life had been so naturalized as to become invisible to all critical questioning. From these points, chosen with surgical precision, Rosenfeld intervened, generating waves of interference through her actions and the movement of her images, the effects of which were, and continue to be, fundamental.

The Santiago Stock Exchange, cross-border spaces, pawn shops, and centers of institutional power were some of the locations where she chose to work, aiming to question the logic and mechanisms that establish social inequality, exclusion, and the normativity of behavior and gender. In this sense, her audiovisual work, characterized by a radical interweaving of materials, languages, and archives, operates as a genuine bypass , opening a possibility where life and its imaginative forces have been obstructed.

Credits: Lotty Rosenfeld, Peace for Sebastián Acevedo, Valparaíso Chile 1985 © LOTTY ROSENFELD, COURTESY OF THE LOTTY ROSENFELD FOUNDATION