Art, avant-garde, and politics in northern Argentina in the 1960s: Zafra by Ariel Petrocelli and Pepe and Gerardo Núñez

ORQUERA, YOLANDA FABIOLA

Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Taylor and Francis and Routledge

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2017 vol. 42 p. 197 - 220

0826-3663

Art, the vanguard, and politics in northern Argentina in the 1960s: Zafra by Ariel Petrocelli and Pepe and Gerardo Núñez AbstractIn 1966 the Cuban Revolution reinvigorated the socialist utopia in Latin America. Inspired in that change and moved by the hardships that suffered the sugar mills workers in the Argentinean Northwest, the acknowledged artists Ariel Petrocelli and Pepe y Gerardo Núñez composed a lyric, musical and visual piece called Zafra. Poema musical y anunciación (Harvest. Musical poem and annunciation). This work, conceived as an integral piece, proposes a radical change in the social consciousness of the sugar mill worker to free himself of his condition. It was aimed to generate an empathetic feeling among the audience with the protagonist, contributing to consolidate leftist identities by the acknowledgement of the local social conditions. This article analyses Zafra as an outstanding piece on solidarity and arts network, framed within the political context of Tucuman in the sixties, characterized by the social activism and the resistance to the dictatorship in power. It also recreates the process of its reconstruction from 1966 to the present, considering that if the piece was on stage different times (1972, 1975, 1985, 1992, 2013 and 2015), it was registered as late as in 2013.