 I'm Bill Perthys. I'm the Bernard C. Watson Director of Adult Education. And I've been asked to monitor this session. I'll start with a question at the risk of oversimplifying these three remarkable presentations. A theme of the persistence of time seems to be one that each of you consider. And I wonder if, as you were listening to the other papers, you were thinking about how the idea of time resonates in different ways, obviously, with each of you. And I'm wondering if you could comment on that. Yeah, definitely. That's the very first thing that I thought when you were on also the relationship with the desert and the searching. The words that we are using are the same. It's interesting what you said that is important, like just not to universalize these words, because they are very located. But it's interesting how the same words were to think two different local things. In my case, my dissertation overall on these papers specifically, the issue of temporality is very important to think about time in a non-chronological way in which things are just not one next to the other, but they are in connection to both the past and the building of the future. So that's why in my dissertation, both the colonial idea of memory studies are interlacing to each other. I think that chronology is something that is related to the idea of forgetful, in the case of how neoliberalism is implemented in Chile, and to reject that chronology to think about time in a more circular or a way it's important to think the present and the future at the same time, in the specific case of Chile. Yeah, maybe you can comment on your. Sure, yeah. Yeah, I feel like every time I go back to my work, I think about time in a different sort of way. And recently, I was thinking about the word persistence specifically in the sense that from my work, I feel like this sort of simple presenting the work too much over such a long period of time, it really hammers home that sense of persistence where you are screening the film and at what point does exhibiting it become exposing it to vulnerabilities and things like that? And I think that's interesting. I always think of the maneuver that Douglas Gordon makes as a very mechanical one, one that is rigid, that is determined, that takes from, it simply expands the frame rate of the rules of film itself. And I was thinking about, in yours, the way the light, is it 90-second intervals? Again, that sense of this very rigid and a lot more conceivable kind of timeframe. And the changes that I would imagine go on through that where the silhouettes, where at first they seem very specific and individualized, then become glowing and harder to perceive and then affect the body and the shadows cast on the floor a lot more. And when that rotates at 90-second intervals, chronological becomes suddenly serial and infinite. And I wonder if in a way that the way I think about the Tree of Life photo, which is something I feel like I've seen since textbooks in early surveys. And I have that picture in my head. And to go from the Tree of Life to the photo of Mindy at the log, where it clearly changes over time, she seems to become part of the log, which seems to attest to a harmony that's occurring over time. But then there's that gap between she can't stay there forever and the gap between that, the performance, and the archival aspect of us looking at the photos and that reference that I have. It seems to be sort of a jump there that I think is sort of interesting. Is it on? OK. Yeah, I too was struck by the similarities between this particularly the extended performance and Gordon's video work in that, for some reason, stretching something out to a longer space of time makes the experience more active. You mentioned that in watching the video over a longer period of time, the audience is prompted to kind of internalize it more or contemplate it more, I think, was the term you used. And to me, that resonates a lot with Mindyette's attempt to kind of merge with the natural world by spending a serious amount of time kind of in immediate contact with it. And I think time is so much a part of that work and a part of that process of the merger. But I was also interested because Mindyette also works so much with memory, which I think relates to your presentation on Yara's work as well. She's attempting to kind of resurface memories that she has of her homeland in Cuba and her kind of personal memories, but also kind of merge that with a larger cultural memory. She works a lot with pre-modern cultures. She studies ancient Mayan religion and others. So I think she's interested in making connections between her time and that of those that have come before her, which is an interesting conception of time as well. One other theme that seemed to resonate is that each of these artists are interested in engaging their viewer in very sort of visceral and often physical ways of the way that Mindyette is once the viewer to imagine themselves in that position or the sort of retinal memory of Yara's memorial that even after it's gone, it leaves that imprint or obviously the spectator of Gordon's work out in the desert watching this almost interminable film and the environment that would impact their experience. So again, is that a theme that you think that each of these artists are sort of deeply engaged in trying to create this direct connection with their viewers? Yeah, totally. Sorry, before I was a little bit, it's weird to hear your voice. Like hearing my voice, yeah, it's so weird. I'm hearing myself. No, so I think that in the case of Alfredo, I think that it's important that he studied architecture instead of art. And he studied architecture in a specific school of architecture, which is the University of Chile. And he studied with specific professors that were in the creative branch of the school. And the idea was to learn about the space and the interaction with society by observation and in collectivity. He entered school in 1974. So it was just the first year after the school. And the creative freedom that he had in the school was sort of like so different than the punishment that was inhabited you as a citizen in the dictatorial street. So he learned about space and interaction in a public space in which everything was prohibited. Speech was prohibited. Being out of your house after 8 PM was prohibited. But he learned how to see this prohibited space through a collective thinking about that space. So that formation is important in his later work. And I think what you mentioned is super important. The relationship between time and light in Alfredo. Because he also studied filmmaking after studied architecture. And that's why also his relationship to art and his environment are so architectural and are so connected to light to understand time as well. So he divided his art in three different phases. One is the creation of works. The other one is conferences. And the other one is public space interventions. So for him it's super important for him and for a lot of people until Latin America actually the connection with the viewer. And light is part of how he integrates the viewer in that sort of uncomfortable situation in which after 90 seconds you just, just as photography is the same. You just don't see anything. And then the idea is that the viewer had to keep that image in his or her thinking. So he's not, he's inviting the viewer to think differently. That's why the geometry of consciousness. There's an intention of intervening in consciousness in epistemology more than like the body but through the epistemic before and through light and time. Yeah. Yeah, so one of the interesting things about Mendieta is kind of a performance artist is that she's of course not performing in front of a crowd or she doesn't have a lot of people around her except a couple of assistants to take the photographs. So it's quite different from both of your projects in that there's not really that sort of direct participation in terms of an audience. But I was intrigued when I found that statement because I too when looking at the works felt sort of invited to like kind of climb into them. Especially the silhouette works. There's this amazing video that she did where she makes the silhouette and then sort of physically climbs into it and lays down in it. And I think there's this sort of strange invitation for the body to occupy those spaces. So it's definitely a prompting for the viewer to be implicated in the work but in a different way than the kind of direct experience. Yeah, I suppose at some point I sort of have to talk about the fact that for my work it's so five year drive-by would be so vast it mostly exists as a proposed piece of art and not one that if it is extant it is as we see up there in 2001 that's the closest we've come because it's in a desert setting in California. But that doesn't happen often. And so in that way, at least personally writing about this work and jumping between the work itself as an installation and writing about the searchers as reading the film as a text. It for me is sort of a very self, for me as a viewer of art and a critic of art I think it makes me self reflective in the sense that I think of film as a very sort of fleeting phenomenological experience. One that maybe has more in common with conceptual art as we talk about it than film is usually written about. Usually when someone describes a sequence or something like that it's as if it is set in stone and of course we all watch things different ways and things like that and this sort of opens that up. And the other thing is that this work usually people know Douglas Gordon it's for his 1993 work 24 hour psycho which does a similar sort of maneuver slows Averditch Cox psycho down to last a day but that's shown in galleries and fairly often. And so in a way it's the one thing that's missing is this sort of spatial expansion into the not contrived space outside of the gallery into the world with light that is not controlled. And of course that is the same thing that transforms the viewer to one watching a film to one outside and maybe a little frightened. Questions from there? Thank you for those talks, those were great. I have a question for Melanie. What do you think that Mendieta might be saying about gender and about the sort of age old equation between the female body and nature? That's a sort of favorite theme in the history of art. Thank you for your question. I knew I would get it. Sorry. Because this work has been seen as kind of an example of more of an essentializing form of feminism that does equate women in particular as being inherently more connected to nature. And I tried in this work to really dispute that and to suggest that she does have a really sophisticated understanding of nature and the relationship between humans and nature. And I can't say I've quite resolved how gender fits into that but I would suggest perhaps that she is taking that cultural notion of women being closer to nature and suggesting it as a model for everyone that this intimacy with nature is something that should be embraced by all human beings. That's as far as I've gotten so far. Thanks. Thank you very much. This is for Florencia. La Moneda. Okay? So could you put the picture with the presidential palace and the smoke in front of it? The first one? La Moneda is the most, and I'm talking about issues of modern oblivion about this period. La Moneda is in some ways the most iconic representation of this period and of this, of the coup. And I've worked a lot in, in fact just in October I did a photo survey at the inside. I was in there and Piñeda's wife was there and everything. It was a bit frightening actually because you have to go underneath where the gendarmes pick you up and walk you through. But for me it's a very important colonial building. It's one of the two largest colonial era buildings in Latin America, Mexico City, Cathedral's the other one. So it's important for me to study it. But I felt distinctly awkward working in there because the persistence of this memory still haunts it in a way. And when you go out in the front and there's all these Chilean tourists coming and visiting it and there's all the police around making sure that they behave themselves. There's no, there's no monuments, there's no commentary about what happened in that iconic building. It's simply like visiting the White House, not the White House, like visiting the Capitol. I wonder if you could just comment on that, what you think about that. Yeah, totally. La Moneda and the bombing of the coup is an iconic moment and an iconic image of dictatorships not only in Chile but Latin America is the moment in which, and that, well, and those, it's also something important with photography that these images, a lot of images of La Moneda were also taken by international photographers that came to document Allende's revolution because Allende was the first democratically elected socialist, democratically elected ever president in the world so there were a lot of international press in Chile at the time. And when La Moneda was bombed, the military junta had headquarters in a building which is now Centro Cultural La Irina Mistral. Yeah. Yes. And that was the building in which the Museum of Solidarity was held before. And there is a statue of Allende now there and there's a lot of polemics also with that statue which is not in the very front. It's not in front, in fact. No, no, it's not in the front. And as you said, the fact that, for instance, now the President Piñera wants to rename the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, he wants to rename it as the Museum of Democracy. So what we were talking before overlaunched that there is an ongoing find that is so present in the daily political discourse in Chile about fighting for memory and fighting for deleting that memory. And that's very visible in the fact that that palace, which is the symbol of this catastrophic thing that is still affecting today's life, the feminist movement that is occurring right now in Chile, you see people with signs that are making reference to this moment today. And you see memory in public space protest or, for instance, in George's Memorial, which is underground in the Museum of Memory, that now they want to rename it as the Museum of Democracy because democracy according to the... Case significa. Yes, and according to the government democracy that there's a lot of people from military people or that they also were suffering at the time. So it is conflicted to just rethink concepts and rename super important buildings in order to forget. And what you were saying is key, the fact that there needs to be a sort of monument there, there needs to be something. But public space protest today and maybe in your next trip to Chile, you're gonna see the feminist movement, what it's doing now. And they choose emblematic monuments, such as, for instance, the Casa Central of Universidad Católica. It's an emblematic monument as well, so they go and protest over there. They haven't, I think, create any protest in front of this museum and that would be... This one. Yeah. Or La Moneda. That's all right, La Moneda, La Moneda. There is a museum. No, I don't think they get away with it. And there is a museum underneath, which is called the Central de la Moneda. Yes. But although they do have exhibitions sometimes related to memory in a way, it's much more traditional and conservative. Colonial art. Yeah, exactly. That's a great point. And it also struck me how clean that building is. It's amazing. It's so squeaky clean. It's just erasing the whole memory. It's erasing everything. But the balcony, which again delivers his last speech, is still there. Yeah. Empty. Yeah. Yeah, you can still feel the fountains of the past, but it's important. That's why memorial monuments are mobile and they recall the viewer and the pastor, but not specifically about the citizen, that that's still there. Because not only people still trying to find there disappeared, not because they think that they are there, because they want them to have a funeral. Because they want to have the right to do them, because they just want to do that, because it's a right of life. But also the fact that education is a mess, like the legacies of the leaderships are like inhabited every single aspect in today's society. And that's time again. And I think that, yeah, it's super important to, of course, continue thinking and continue thinking about how these emblematic monuments, as you said, play a pivotal role in how tourists come to Chile and don't see that. Yeah. Yeah. They take their selfies in front of the moneda, but agenda is back there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly, agenda is in the back. Yeah. It should be. Yeah, exactly. Okay. We're almost out of time, but we have time. Somebody has one quick final question. Does that do it? Either of you have a quick question you'd like to ask? Okay, then I think we'll leave it there.