[News] Chile the Other Sept. 11 - Multi Media Performance by Quique Cruz and Quijerema, September 24th

[News at freedomarchives.org]

QUIJEREMA & LA PENA CULTURAL CENTER INVITE YOU TO THIS SPECIAL PROGRAM

Archeology of Memory; Villa Grimaldi & the Autobiography of an Ex-Chess
Player.

A multimedia presentation by musician & writer Quique Cruz (aka Claudio
Durán), who will perform, show an art installation and read from his book
The Autobiography of an Ex-Chess Player, about his teenage experiences in
Pinochet¹s concentration camps.

September 24
Opening 6:30 to 7:30

Performance 8pm $10-$15 sliding scale

La Pena Cultural Center
3105 Shattuck Av.  Berkeley, CA
510 849-2572
www.lapena.org


AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-CHESS PLAYER
&
VILLA GRIMALDI:  ARCHEOLOGY OF MEMORY

An Art Exhibit and multimedia Program

Art exhibit will be at the walls of La Pena Cultural Center from September
to the end of October 2004.

For some year, Quique Cruz (aka Claudio E. Duran) has been exploring the
idea of an aesthetic coup that Chile suffered under the dictatorship of
Pinochet.  Mr. Cruz will read from his book  "The Autobiography of and
Ex-Chess Player", a narrative of his experiences as seventeen year old in
the concentration camps of Pinochet.

Together with photographs, slides, paintings, poems, documentary film, and
graphic arts he will also show his new up coming work that looks at the idea
of aesthetic and terror, and  how a group of his friends -poets, painters,
musicians- have kept producing art after being detained in one of the most
infamous torture centers of the regime: Villa Grimaldi.

Come and Celebrate with this local Artist the release and publication of his
book and up-coming musical and literary publication.

Music by:  Quijerema, guest musicos:  Alejandro Sabre (piano) Rafael
Manriquez (guitarra and charango) and David Barrows (tenor sax) Klaudia
Promessi (soprano sax),


THE GENESIS:

Villa Grimaldi: Archeology of Memory in Three Cantos is a multimedia exhibit
that gathers the art work and the experiences of seven artists who were
detained in one of the most infamous torture centers during the Military
dictatorship of Pinochet: Villa Grimaldi.  The work is a creation of Claudio
Enrique Duran Pardo/aka Quique Cruz, it is triptych  that  includes a book,
a documentary film and a musical suite.  Together with a photographer, a
graphic artist, filmmakers and musicians,  Claudio wants to explore the fate
of art during the Pinochet regime and its aftermath.

Claudio has been working on the idea that Chileans underwent an aesthetic
coup, bringing special violence to artists.  This repression to the artist
is symbolically understood in the spectacle of terror that the military
created by killing the country's most important singer, poet and playwright:
Victor Jara.

For the past four years, Quique has been interviewing, photographing and
filming a group of artists--poets, painters, writers, dancers, playwrights,
musicians-- who have created a narrative in which they explore the
contradictions of terror and aesthetics, the notion of pain and beauty and
how to convert darkness into light.

The scenario:

In 1975, by a direct order from Pinochet, the military created the secret
service, the DINA (National Intelligence Apparatus).  They chose as their
operating headquarters a placed called Villa Grimaldi, located on the lower
slopes of the Andean Mountain range.  It had been a beautiful Villa, with a
history of wealth and with close ties to powerful Chilean elites.  It was
here that the overall strategy for repression and systematic
elimination--both physical and political--was thought out and refined in the
most important years of the dictatorship.  During the years of full
operation, from 1975 to 1978, close to three hundred people are thought to
have disappeared from Grimaldi-as far as we know--and more than five
thousand people were tortured in Terra Nova, as the "special personnel" of
the torture center baptized it.  Villa Grimaldi was only one of many centers
in the country.

Parque por la Paz: Villa Grimaldi

At the end of the dictatorship (1986-90) the military sold the place to
build up-scale condominiums. The Villa was partially burned down and then
demolished. As demolition was taking place, people organized and fought a
legal battle to turn the site into a park of Memory. After a long struggle,
El Parque por la Paz was built.

Two Mexican artists took the debris and created sculptures in the park. The
photographs in the exhibit are of the fragments embedded in the cement of
the sculptures.

While doing research for the project, Claudio found a box of fragments
abandoned in a corner of the park. They were mainly pieces of metal that
survived the fire and demolition,  representing the archeological vestiges
helping us to reassemble the Villa.

Photographs of the exhibit come from that enigmatic box that speaks to us
from the Torture center Villa Grimaldi/Terra Nova


Artist Statement:

I began working on this project in the year 2000, mainly out of
insatisfaction. Pinochet, the dictator who had exiled me, was still free,
and the people who participated in the repression in Chile were not being
brought to justice in the new democratic Chile.  What to do with pain,
anxiety, anger, desire for justice, solitude,  frustration and shattered
dreams?  How to reconcile the self, the body, and the memories of so much
violence?  How to keep doing music and writing in the midst of laughter and
mockery?

In 1987--while at UC Berkeley--I became interested in the literature of the
Jewish Holocaust, especially the writing of Primo Levy and the French/Jewish
installation artist Christian Boltanski.  They gave me the key to begin
exploring my own experience as a survivor of political violence.   Thus I
decided to create a work that will speak from the memories of artists,
because I truly believe that it is through art that memory prevails in
society: the cave paintings, the singing of ancient songs, the making of
ceramics and the reciting of old poems .  Artists have been living a
thumbprint  on earth a talks to us as the memory of the human condition.

Archeology of Memory is the culmination of my accumulated experiences as a
musician and writer.  I feel that this work will embody and reflect upon
some of the main questions that I have asked in my career as an artist.
Can we create beauty out of terror? Is it possible to create a vernacular
artistic narrative that will prevail in time and serve as a
counter-narrative to official histories?  Does art really heal the self and
expand consciousness to arrive at a  greater understanding of difference?

In working on this project, I have felt that there was something  that had
sedimented over all these years, wanting to be dug up.   So, from all of the
layers that were safely guarded in my journey of exile, I am working with my
friends to create an overall art statement that will insinuate at times the
unspeakable, the subterranean and the very foundations of my existence and
that of artist friends who were imprisoned in this place/no place, in this
time/ no time, in the darkness of Villa Grimaldi.

Credits:
Photography: Adam Kufeld
Graphic Design:  Guillermo Prado (8point2 Studio)

Writing and music:  Quique Cruz/aka Claudio Enrique Duran Pardo

Art Direction: Claudio E. Duran

Special Thanks to:  Autumn Press, Mariola Fernandez, Marcia and Aquiles
Duran, Lautaro Cline, Guillermo Garcia, Sally and Emiliana Bean, Marilyn
Mulford, Vicente Franco, Gail Dolgin,  James, Matty Nematollahhi , Jim
LeBrecht, La Pena, Fundacion Grimaldi, Quijerema.


Sponsored by: National Endowment for the Arts, California Art Council,
Ministry of Education in Chile (FONDART),  Ford Foundation.  LOM Ediciones.


Memory,

A space of desire and betrayal,

Water and fire,

A kiss,

A closed door,

A suitcase,

An abyss,

Una necesidad,

To keep on walking.



Claudio Duran/

aka Quique Cruz



The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
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