Santiago's Cultural History

Santiago

In short, there was a coup d’état carried out by the Chilean military forces. From the bombing of the presidential palace, La Moneda, in 1973, we had a dictatorship that lasted around 20 years. During that period, there were restrictions on freedom, cultural expression, media control, interference in elections, as well as assassination, torture, disappearance, and persecution.

Much of what happened during that time, due to Chile’s history, was never really resolved. We transitioned into democracy, which is what we live in today, but during that transition, the processes of justice, truth, and reparation were very limited—and to this day, they remain limited. Because of that, due to the lack of resolution, due to the lack of justice and reparation, the story of the dictatorship is still alive.

"Due to the lack of justice and reparation, the story of the dictatorship is still alive"

Even though the democratic transition established a political system that continues to govern today, the symbolic, social, and cultural transition—the historical transition—never happened. So, while the dictatorship ended, its unresolved effects are still expressed today through the arts, public discourse, social movements, etc.

One of the greatest wounds left by the dictatorship, in my view, is the damage not only to the cultural institutions—because let’s remember that here, artists were expelled from the country, they were persecuted until they left. That kept happening. That created a huge fear among artists of revisiting these topics.

On the one hand, that happened. But on the other hand, people’s perception of culture was also deeply affected. For a long time, out of fear, much of the Chilean middle class associated culture with something dangerous. This led to a situation where, to this day, investment in culture is deficient. The cultural infrastructure is deficient. The resources available for the development of new talent are extremely limited.

And in that sense, I return again to this idea of this absurd duality. Because on one hand, there’s this lack of infrastructure and resources as a result of the dictatorship. But on the other hand, because of that, we have young political groups and artists seeking their own ways to create spaces of resistance. They find their own ways to self-finance, to build their own scenes, bypassing the state and the city’s infrastructure.

These two truths coexist: an unresolved history, and at the same time, a people—a society—that needs to express what it feels.