How do you give shape to darkness? 50 Años/50 acciones (50 Years/50 art actions) - Mesa 8, Chile

How do you give shape to darkness? 

By Lisa Crossman

 This project begins from conversations about the things that wake us up at night—the traumas that we know in our bodies and can’t find or trust language to describe. The project begins in a place of wondering about the exchange of traumas in relationship with our families and partners, collaborators and friends, communities and political entities during our lifetimes and across generations. How do we define trauma? How do we live with our own traumas and witness the traumas of those with whom we are in relation? Does trauma exist without a collective accounting of it?

 

We each come to this body of work from different personal experiences that have caused us trauma and lenses through which to understand the theoretical frameworks, the stories, the studies, histories, and philosophical touchstones that we read in search of the vocabulary that we don’t yet know. We seek words to help us describe the experiences that we’ve been told never happened. We have been cowed into silence and feel the loneliness of living in the dark. In the eyes of our family members, we see a familiar ache for truth and fear of the light.

We reach for one another from places of isolation and begin to tell our stories. We speak through and in relation to art because it is the language we share across borders.

 

 Act I:  Los ojos de la familia / The family’s eyes 

 

On the 50th anniversary of the coup that overthrew Chilean President Salvador Allende, Oscar Gavilán Ortiz and Pablo Angulo Vera begin How do you give shape to darkness? with the performance art  Los ojos de la familia / The family’s eyes. Los ojos de la familia / The family’s eyes

is created in memory of Oscar’s uncle Hernán Correa Ortiz who was murdered  on December 28, 1981. It is also created as an act of living memory of the becoming of Oscar's family, those who participated and those who did not, considering the heterogeneity of experiences, emotions, and memories. The performance is an initial gesture, part of a larger series that offers  testimony and tribute to Hernán, to the members of his family who were tortured and intimidated by state actors, and to the radiating impact of these events that is felt throughout their family and through other families and relationships. 

The performance by Gavilán Ortiz and Angulo Vera weaves together traces of images and conversations shared by some of Gavilán Ortiz’s family members, only the fragments that each