GUAGNINI, Nicolás (ed.)
The Counter-Public Sphere in the Condor Years

The Counter-Public Sphere in the Condor Years foregrounds a historical moment—from 1968 to 1980—pervaded by political repression and brutality, which gave rise to symbolic and often surreptitious modes of artistic production. Throughout South America, military dictatorships rose and fell with backing from the Cold War–era Operation Condor, a US foreign policy platform referenced in the show’s title, whose disastrous consequences transformed daily life—and contemporary art practices. Where artists could not explicitly represent violent realities, they turned to allusive and public interventions to mount dissent. As such, the exhibition invokes Alexander Kluge’s notion of the “counter-public sphere,” a critical response to Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the “public sphere” of social life, to describe artworks that undermine authoritarian control through indirect but publicly visible means. [publishers’ note]

Produced in conjunction with ISLAA’s 2020–21 exhibition The Counter-Public Sphere in the Condor Years, this illustrated publication made of loose sheets of newspaper print, includes essays by Nicolás Guagnini and Tobi Maier on contestatory artworks in South America during the late 1960s and the 1970s. It also gathers documentation on key works of South American contestatory public art and actions, by the likes of Antonio Dias (Brasil) Horacio Zabala (Argentina), Lotty Rosenfeld (Chile), and CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte, Chile), a group comprising Raúl Zurita, Fernando Balcells, Diamela Eltit, Lotty Rosenfeld, and Juan Castillo.

Published by ISLAA, 2020
Design by William Hayden
Exhibition Catalogues / Politics / Performance / Scenes / Art History