Yeguas del Apocalipsis. Performance Art and Body Politics during the Chilean Transition to Democracy

DELFINA CABRERA

Beijing

Congreso; 34th World Congress of Art History; 2016

Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art（CIHA）

Since the mid-1970s, numerous Latin American artists started to experiment with the body and their own bodies as a potent space for poetic and political action. In the context of the many military dictatorships that overtook the region since the 1970?s, their artistic interventions moved away both from the right-wing dominant discourses as well as from the left-wing rhetoric that did not incorporate gender and sexuality issues in their revolutionary agendas. The way artists worked with the division between the private and the public (i.e.: the traditional and opposed territories for sexuality and politics) put under new light the arbitrary separation of these spheres, allowing for a rethinking of the relationship between art and politics in the Latin American art field. This paper focuses on Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, an art collective that was active between 1988 and 1997 in Santiago de Chile. Through the presentation and analysis of some of the performances they staged during the Chilean transition from dictatorship to democracy, the aim is to examine the challenges and disruptions they provoke both into the discourse of art history and in the political context of the time.