Dis-locar la materia, re-orientar el presente. Sobre Neltume señala el camino (2016) de Araya-Carrión

Abstract

The intervention Neltume señala el camino by artistic collective Araya- Carrión in a former torture and extermination house in Santiago, Chile, invites us to considering history and its relationship with memory orientated by matter, in particularly by sawdust. Our reading, inspired in post-humanist and neo-materialist feminist perspectives, follows the course of this intervention that combines different temporalities (present and past, the times of colonization, oppression, torture and extermination, and also the times of collective resistance) and spaces (here and there, the center and the periphery, Neltume and Santiago) in the cluster of sawdust, both residue and witness of history. There are other objects that become entangled or ‘intra-act’ (Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity”) with sawdust, for instance, archival photographs and abandoned work gloves. These objects, metonymies of Neltume, are re-signified in their dis-location and placement in Londres 38, a space of memory. Diagrams, maps and audiovisual installations give a new framework to these objects and connect the different histories of political struggle, forms of resistance (both human and nonhuman) and repression that have marked and continue to mark these two places, Neltume (on the periphery) and Londres 38 (in the center).