Political and Social Context of the Country during the October Outbreak
Since October 2019 in Chile, a civil protest movement has surged, giving rise to incidents referred to as estallido social (social awakening). The protests originated from the initial concern over the escalating costs of public transport tickets. However, they rapidly evolved to address broader issues like inequalities and institutional violence, linked to the county’s dictatorial past and the unchanged constitution. Citizens took to the streets, organizing public mobilizations that extended beyond Santiago de Chile to include other cities in various regions, including Concepción, Coquimbo, and Rancagua (Paúl Reference Paúl2019). The 1980 Constitution drafted during the period of dictatorial rule, “continued to govern Chilean institutions dictating the state’s commitment to neoliberal policies, the stratification of unions, the illegality of labour strikes and the criminalisation of abortion” (Green Rioja Reference Green Rioja2021:5). Due to these reasons, stemming from internalized dictatorial violence and its ongoing effects even after the end of the dictatorship, Chilean citizens advocate for the renewal and rewriting of Chile’s constitution as a priority during the protests.
As Chilean society was calling for radical changes in the governmental system, the authorities responded with more oppression. Sebastián Piñera, who served as Chile’s president during 2019, was the first conservative president to be democratically elected since 1958. In opposition to Chile’s transition to a democratic government, Piñera implemented a series of measures that brought back to the collective memory the censorship, repression, and torture of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973–1990).
Piñera has been defined as a patriarchal and oppressive leader. Several sexist public statements, pronounced notably during his presidential campaign, led to the creation of the term Piñericosas. For example, during a presidential campaign event in Linares, Piñera had a sexist and gender violent chiste (word prank). He said: “Me acaban de sugerir un juego muy entretenido. Todas las mujeres se tiran al suelo y se hacen las muertas, y nosotros, los hombres nos tiramos encima y nos hacemos los vivos—¿qué les parece?” (Molina Reference Molina2017) [I’ve just been suggested a very fun game. All the women lie down on the floor and pretend to be dead, and us, the men, we lie down on them, and we pretend to be alive—what do you all think?]Footnote 1
Piñera’s actions makes it clear how gender violence is a normalized attitude within the neoliberal and capitalist state structure of Chile. Rather than advocating for the promotion of gender and sex education in schools, enhancing laws addressing violence and femicide, and generally proposing antipatriarchal regulations, the president, unfortunately, becomes the first to perpetuate sexist behaviour in public settings. Back in 2013, Piñera had praised the maturity of Belen, an eleven-year-old Chilean girl who had decided to carry through a pregnancy resulting from rape (cfr. Associated Press in Santiago 2013; El Mundo 2013).Footnote 2 This case reopened the discussion about abortion’s legalization and depenalization, a debate initiated by the previous president, Michelle Bachelet, who “favour[ed] legalising abortion in cases of rape or risk to the health of the pregnant woman or the child.” Up to this day, there are only three cases in which abortion is a legal option in Chile: when there’s a risk to the mother’s life, in cases of rape, and in instances of severe foetal malformation. The issues of women and sexual dissidents’ self-determination, particularly around sexual health (including, among others, the use of contraceptives and the possibility of legal abortion), have become central for the Chilean feminist movement. Several feminist movements, such as Ní Una Menos, are advocating for the complete legalization of abortion, which was prohibited during Pinochet’s dictatorship. This fight became even more visible during the civil outbreak of 2019.
As protests intensified, the “boils of silence, of fear, a burst of anger that demanded dignity in an organised way,”Footnote 3 the police’s brutal violence, or carabineros, increased under presidential orders in an attempt to silence and curb a popular anger that was now escalating. During the demonstrations, law enforcement agents not only hit or torture people, but they also fired at face height, injuring the eyes of hundreds of people, who suffered serious and perennial injuries such as partial blinding or loss of one or both eyes. In addition to generalized violence, there was also a noticeable increase in gender-based state violence. Reminiscent of the 1973–1990 military dictatorship, when the agents of the Chilean State used sexual violence as a form of torture on political dissidents, the 2019 protests saw a return of sexual violence as a tool of intimidation. During those months, carabineros were accused of many psychological and physical cases of abuse and rape against women and sexual dissidents, in a series of structural homo and transphobic attacks. The Al-Jazeera news website reports: “The National Human Rights Institute has documented 194 cases of sexual violence by authorities in the context of protests and detentions, and has filed 117 legal motions against authorities for sexual violence, including four cases of rape.”Footnote 4 Quoting Romina Green Rioja, we can say that the estallido social came to represent the awakening of Chilean society: “The feminist and the student movement shook Chilean society from its neoliberal haze, showing that fearless action can engender change and trauma can be basis for collective action” (Green Rioja Reference Green Rioja2021:15). In this process, the contribution of the feminist movement was essential.
Las Tesis’ Un violador en tu camino in Valparaíso and Santiago de Chile
With the 2019 protests in the backdrop, the Chilean feminist interdisciplinary artistic collective Las TesisFootnote 5 created and performed Un violador en tu camino. This song and stage performance rapidly became an anthem of the transfeminist struggle that spread all over the world. The performance has been restaged and adapted to the social and political conditions of more than 200 countries, as GeoChicas collective mapped.Footnote 6 Las Tesis is an artistic collective rooted in Valparaíso, Chile, consisting of four Chilean artists, each with a distinct artistic background: Sibila Sotomayor and Dafne Valdés in performing arts; Paula Cometa Stange in design, history, and social science; and Lea Cáceres in fashion design. The name they chose refers to feminist theses produced by different feminist thinkers, such as Argentine-Brazilian anthropologist Laura Rita Segato and Italian philosopher and sociologist Silvia Federici. According to Dafne Valdés, “We set out as a group premise to try to bring feminist theories to a stage format in a simple, straightforward and catchy way so that the message of different feminist theorists could reach more people who may not have had the opportunity to read or analyse the theories of feminism.”Footnote 7 Las Tesis’s objective is therefore to simplify and facilitate access to the ideas of feminist authors for a diverse public, capturing the essence of the theories while making new knowledge accessible to people who do not have the possibility, interest, or time to read.
Las Tesis’s creation process consists in a research period, reading texts and collecting ideas, before extrapolating the main points of the feminist theories and structuring them in performative acts or intervenciones callejeras (street interventions). Those public artistic acts use theatrical tools, such as basic moves and steps, music, and, of course, chant. The street performances are rather short, as Sibila Sotomayor says: “Our interventions last only fifteen minutes, the idea is to be precise, concise and effective.”Footnote 8 The aim is therefore to transform feminist books into catchy lyrics that everyone can understand and memorize.
Las Tesis’s first work, Patriarcado y Capital es alianza criminal (2018), [Patriarchy and Capital is a criminal alliance], is based on Silvia Federici’s book Caliban and the Witch (2004) (cf. Las Tesis 2022:19-42). The second one was scheduled to be staged in October 2019, but due to the social and political protest it had to wait for a month. Named Un violador en tu camino, it focuses on Rita Segato’s book Contra-pedagogías de la crueldad (2018), [Counter-pedagogies of Cruelty], and in other previous essays such as Las Estructuras Elementales de la Violencia (2003) [The Elemental Structures of Violence] (cfr. Las Tesis 2022:73-90). Las Tesis’s Un violador en tu camino Footnote 9 asserts:
The text focuses on state violence and its ties to gender violence. According to Segato, gender violence is not an accidental act, but a structural and organized violence visible in every country; it is not a private fact but a public one that also involves public charges. Gender violence is both performative and discursive as it asserts and reproduces gender hierarchies on both the victims and the perpetrators of violence, marked by a gender divide (Segato Reference Segato2018:39–40). A set of archaic and mythical narratives supports and justifies the structure of patriarchy (ibid.:45). Such mythological justifications help the rapist to feel as a moralistic and puritanical subject, turning the victim into a moral deviant. On a higher scale, and yet at the same time, institutions and their representatives uphold systematic violations of women’s rights (idem).
The public performance of “Un violador en tu camino” was premiered in Plaza Sotomayor in Valparaíso on 20 November 2019,Footnote 10 during the artistic event Fuego. Acciones en Cemento. Actress Katty López and other collaborators in Valparaíso created this event to organize a barricata escénica (staged barricade), a short performance (5 minutes max.) aimed at stopping traffic in an eligible point of the city (Almeida Reference Almeida2019). As López explains, “The idea was for the performing arts to go out from the theatres to the street, in the context of social protest, invited to make a barricade, with all that the word brings: to cut, to stop, to shake, to illuminate, seeking to make things that are also more joyful as if to say that we are not afraid” (Almeida Reference Almeida2019).Footnote 11 For that occasion, Las Tesis decided to transform the performance they were working on to interweave it with the social and political situation of 2019. For López, “What they did was to propose to us a women’s action that they had already been developing for a play and which they adapted for Fuego” (idem).Footnote 12 Las Tesis focused on institutional and police violence that women prisoners were suffering during the protests in a way to connect Segato’s thesis on gender violence to the current situation in Chile.
The performance was staged for the second time in the capital, Santiago de Chile. The collective traveled to the city on 25 November to coincide their artistic intervention with the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. The performance took place in Plaza de las Armas, situated in the heart of Santiago’s historical center. Subsequently, the intervention was replicated on numerous occasions in various cities across Chile. A notable instance was the December 2019 performance held in front of the Estadio Nacional in Santiago de Chile, featuring the participation of Las Tesis Senior. Las Tesis invited Chilean women aged forty or older, those who carry living testimonies of the years under the Chilean dictatorship. The space, the Estadio Nacional, is a public monument deeply connected with the memory of the dictatorship and the collective trauma of torture (cfr. El Clarin de Chile 2019). During Pinochet’s coup d’état of 1973, the Estadio became a camp where prisoners were tortured and sexually abused, and in many cases murdered (McGowen 2019). Some of the women who participated in Las Tesis Senior were also survivors of the Estadio prison. As Sibila Sotomayor recalls, “It was deeply moving to see thousands of older women, who make up Las Tesis Senior, who previously did not feel comfortable protesting in the streets, or could not claim public space in the Pinochet dictatorship, now performing and raising their voices in front of the National Stadium in Santiago, a space that was used as a torture centre during the dictatorship” (Kasumi Reference Kasumi2022:360).Footnote 13 Due to the historical significance of the location, witnessing a massive crowd chanting and moving in perfect unison on 4 December 2019,Footnote 14 was an incredibly emotional experience for Las Tesis. They used their performance as a tool for social empowerment.
Collaboration with Delight Lab
A year after the creation of the performance, on 25 November 2020, which marks the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Las Tesis staged their performance in collaboration with another art-political collective, the Delight Lab, at Plaza Italia in Santiago de Chile. The two collectives dedicated this intervention to all the victims of gender violence of that year.Footnote 15 Delight Lab is an audio-visual art and design studio that develop experiments around light, video, space, and sound.Footnote 16 It was created in 2008 by Andrea Gana, visual and sound artist, and Octavio Gana, artist, designer, and poet. Their projects range from audio-visual installations and digital museology to audio-visual design for performing arts and large-scale projection mapping on architecture. During 2019, under Piñera’s government, Delight Lab protested the injustices of the neoliberal policies and the repressive manoeuvres of the president, such as the imposition of a curfew. They prepared a large-scale projection on the Telephone Tower, in Plaza de la Dignidad (Santiago de Chile), changing the key words or the sentences every night. For example, they screened the word Dignidad (Dignity), No estamos en guerra (We are not at war), Estamos unidas (We stand united), and Chile despertó (Chile woke up) (Bozzato Reference Bozzato2022). Delight Lab works with poetry, in particular concrete or visual poetry, and their references include the famous Latin American poets Raúl Zurita and Nicanor Parra, among others. Screening large-scale words on historical monuments turn something as ephemeral as light into powerful symbols in terms of public vision. Delight Lab’s actions are linked to political and artistic activism. As Las Tesis, they use the public space as the canvas of a painter, as Andrea Gana explains: “When art meets activism, it takes on political power, which is not party militancy, but the possibility of reoccupying a public space. In this way, art drains the ego of the great artist and offers itself to society. It is something wonderful, which allows something larger and plural to become art and claim it” (idem).Footnote 17 Organizing actions in public space also means exposing oneself to opposition. This happened to Delight Lab, who have been affected by censorship. Other groups opposed some of their interventions, like the screen of the word Humanidad [Humanity], an informal group used long-range spotlights installed from a truck to cover Humanidad with white light (Villarroel Reference Villarroel2020).
At Plaza de la Dignidad, the collaboration between Las Tesis and Delight Lab took the form of an interaction between the collective body of the participants and the use of light projections coordinated to the lyrics of Un violador en tu camino. The participants, gathered in the square, danced, and sung together, all repeating the same words and moving at the same time, creating a collective and multiple body. The single participants gained anonymous identities, each one becoming a part of a unique protesting being. In synchronicity with the performance, Delight Lab projected some lyrics on the Torre del Telefono, a monumental building close to the square. Sentences and words like El violador eres tú, Son los pacos, Los jueces, El Estado became dynamic projections floating from the top to the bottom of the tower. At the end of the performance, they projected a single and stable message, SOMOS + [We are more]. The “+” broadens the identities of the performers, creating ties with the killed and disappeared protestors, making their voices heard, and remembering their lives. In this performance, bodies and lights worked in unison not only to make the structural violence visible but also to reject it.
Performance Structure
The title, Un violador en tu camino, is an explicit reference to a line in Chile’s 1980s and 1990s Carabineros official song, Orden y Patria Footnote 18 “un amigo en tu camino” [a friend on your way]. Here is the complete strophe: “Sleep peacefully, / innocent girl, / without worrying / about the bandit, / he watches over your dreams, / sweet and smiling, / your loving Carabinero.”Footnote 19 Las Tesis’s ironical reference exposes the reality of the power abuses committed by the Carabineros, who are supposed to protect people while they act as sexual abusers. As Dafne Valdés explains:
The quote is a call for direct attention to Carabineros de Chile who are using sexual violence to intimidate us, because obviously the fear of going out on the streets is a daily occurrence for women and sexual dissidence, but today with the social outbreak there is fear not only of being arrested, but also of torture, stripping and a host of things that are denounced and that the government openly rejects, it is terrible that this situation is still called democracy. (Huenchumil Reference Huenchumil2019)Footnote 20
As we will detail later, this part of the text has been modified in the following translations and reelaborations, according to the specific sociopolitical conditions of each country and community.
The musical bases of Un violador en tu camino has been produced to be “like industrial a little bit, but not that much…. softer, more pop…. industrial pop, industrial tekno pop.”Footnote 21 For Las Tesis: “There are choreographic and musical moments that are more rhythmic and others of protest, always understanding that the performance also has to do with how the body positions itself politically in the street, which is the most dangerous place for a woman’s body. It is this transit of our body in violence.”Footnote 22 Music choices are strictly connected with body movements: There is a steady drumbeat and all the people involved in the performance start to shuffle from side to side following the beat (Polti Reference Polti2021:66). Those easy steps, on the right and then on the left, simulate a “confrontation with the perpetrators of the violence” (Saines Reference Saines2020). The steps are symbolically connected with the concept of exposing the body to the danger of the public space (street, square). The public space in the city serves as a site of marginalization and exclusion. According to patriarchal norms, women are expected to confine themselves to the domestic and private sphere, perceived as enclosed and secure. As Kenia Ortiz Cadena observes, “The performance is also expressed as a journey of liberation for women. Women occupy the public space from which they have been historically marginalised and position themselves politically: ‘it wasn’t my fault, or where I was, or how I was dressed’, ‘the rapist is you’, thus showing an alternative narrative to the hegemonically expressed one of ‘the rapist’” (Ortiz Reference Ortiz2021:278).Footnote 23 In the events described in the preceding text, art serves as a mode of activism and a political form of protest—commonly referred to as artivism. Artivism empowers and gives expression to individuals oppressed by gender hierarchies, especially those for whom public space is associated with violence. The bodily movements synchronize with techno-pop music, and the chorus, along with martial steps, follows the steady rhythm of the bass, resembling a drum or kultrun, marking the performance’s phases with a rhythmic cadence.
Another significant reference for this performance is the group Las Bistecs, which was founded in Barcelona in 2013 by Alba Rihe and Carla Moreno Parmenter. They are credited with pioneering the electrodisgusting genre, although the group has since disbanded.Footnote 24 Following their example, Las Tesis created a genre of electronic music that serves as an accompaniment to support the lyrics, to regularly mark the beat time. The movements are very simple, except in a couple of key moments. A squat down marks the first part of the performance, while singing “es femicidio, impunidad para mi asesino, es la desaparición, es la violación” [it is feminicide, impunity for my assassin, it is disappearing, it is rape]. Squatting, as a body position, refers to a practice of torture and humiliation employed by Carabineros and other police forces during the arrest procedure (McGowan Reference McGowan2019). Female and gender nonconforming detainees are forced to squat fully naked so that police officers can search their bodies entirely. The squat position serves also as an iconographical scheme of power: man standing up while all the others squat down in a submitted position, as it happens during the civil demonstrations, but also in Piñera’s previously mentioned “joke.” But these squats give place for the performers to rise again and keep moving, rejecting such submitted positions.
Hand movements are a key element of the choreography. The hand-shaking movement that defined the choreography in the middle section of the performance is synchronized with the theme of the song, which centers on victim blaming. Victim blaming is a media practice that falsely accuses women of provocation due to their clothing or being in the wrong place, thereby portraying the victims as instigators or the cause of gender violence. Toward the conclusion of the performance, the motion of raising hands to the left, extending them forward, and then turning identifies the perpetrators of violence—the police, the judges, and the state. Meanwhile, the crossing of hands and mimicking handcuffs specifically allude to the president who bears responsibility for the authorization of violence. In opposition to such agents, all the participants use finger pointing to indicate the author of the rapes as they sing “The rapist was you. The rapist is you.” The repetition in both past and present tenses affirms that the practices of abuse and torture have been pervasive in the country’s history and persist today, requiring denunciation. It stands as a historical fact and reflects the patriarchal structure ingrained in society.
Pointing ahead of them carries spatial implications tied to the location Las Tesis chose for staging the performance. In numerous instances, they deliberately selected public squares featuring institutional palaces, such as police stations or former detention centers like Estadio Nacional. In the words of Las Tesis: “The theme of pointing also serves as a direct interpellation. When we declare, ‘And it wasn’t my fault,’ the essence of the dance is to liberate oneself from moral constraints and the unjust blame placed on individuals who have experienced abuse by a man, for instance, within their family or among friends” (Pais Reference Pais2019).Footnote 25 These words and their accompanying gesture create a direct implication to all abusers and institutional figures that are mentioned in the lyrics (police, judges, president, police officers), which breaks the audience barriers.
The last movement of the performance is a fist up while chanting “El estado opresor es un macho violador.” This gesture historically expresses solidarity, strength, and defiance, underlining a sense of sisterhood or sororidad. Such a concept evokes belonging, community, and positive alliances against the patriarchal and capitalist system. The performance, intended as a collective act of embodiment, has been the occasion for many women and queer persons to “recognise and denounce the violence experienced on their own body in various contexts such as the family, university or social caste” (Cadena Reference Cadena Kenia2021:281).Footnote 26 Women and nonbinary persons record the suffering caused not only by personal and intimate experiences but also in collective ones, becoming aware of the structural violence provoked by toxic behaviors and relationships within patriarchal social structures. This introduces a different vision or a resignification of the meaning of women and sexual dissidents into the patriarchal symbolic order (idem.). It places them as neither hegemonic nor submissive, on the contrary, powerful, and vital.
The participants of the performance wear night-dance and party clothes, such as skirts, transparent mesh shirts, or dresses with fluorescent and lit colors, as a way of liberating victims to the stigma of provoking male sexual instincts, and therefore sexual violence (using the tool of victim blaming). Some women also choose not to wear any top and perform topless. Deciding to expose the body, with free nipples or with covered nipples but still topless, reclaims the autonomy over one’s own body in such a proud way that it becomes a clear signal of empowerment, and a slap in the face against the vulnerability that the image of bare breasts may suggest.Footnote 27
On another tone, the use of black blindfolds to cover the eyes refers to the injuries that police attacks inflicted to the population during the outbreak, “as a symbol of the 232 people who suffered eye injuries at the hands of the carabineros.”Footnote 28 It can be also intended as a reminder of the “censorship and erasure” (Martin and Shaw Reference Martin and Shaw2021:717) that the state operates by “omitting” gender violence. The blindfolders make visible a violence that is almost invisible in state media. But the black blindfolds also refer to a historical issue, the Venda Sexy (Sexy Blindfold), “or ‘The Discoteque’ as the guards would blindfold the women detainees and play loud music as they were raped and tortured” (idem 732). As it is reported, “The methods of torture differed from those in the other prisons in that sexual abuse was emphasised. Rape of detainees and other sexual abuse by guards and officers were common practice,”Footnote 29 and both men and women’s eyes were covered with blindfolds.Footnote 30 Another way of covering the eyes was to use a pañuelo verde [green scarf]. The green scarf became a symbol of feminist protest in Argentina since 2003 and it is nowadays the emblem of the National Campaign for Legal, Safe, and Free Abortion. Lastly, it “spread from Argentina to become a symbol of renewed feminist activism across Latin America” (Martin Reference Martin2020). Oscillating between black and green, the fabric used to cover the performers’ eyes refer to memory of sexual and gender violence but also to feminist fights and hope for a safer future.
Un violador en tu camino, a Feminist Performance in the Panorama of Latin American Artivism
The analysis of the performance structure of Las Tesis repertoire underlines characteristics defined as “artivism” in the field of performative and visual studies. Artivism encompasses various fields, transcending traditional art history categories in favor of political and social studies. One of the fundamental principles of artivism is the intersection of aesthetics and politics; the term denotes artistic practices with social and political activism and militant goals. In artivism, art is consistently linked to political struggles (Yanina Reference Vidal2020:54). In the context of this study, it serves as a means to propagate feminist theories and emancipate bodies from the structural violence of patriarchy. Artivism rejects art as an autonomous field, detached from social life; its purpose is to have a concrete application, to realize the fusion between art and life proposed by avant-garde movements of the nineteenth century, such as Dadaism and Surrealism. The aesthetic relates to the political in a way to create useful tools that people can use and reappropriate to produce radical changes in their own lives. Artivists decide to position themselves in public areas and to establish a direct relation with the context and the audience (Carrasco Reference Carrasco and Benavente2020:333). The audience leaves the passive role of observer to take an active part in the performance action, becoming producers and not only receptors of meaning (Aladro Vico et al. Reference Aladro Vico, Jivkova-Semova and Bailey2008).
In Latin America, artivism is traceable from the end of the 1960s and, with more emphasis, from the 1980s (years of the end of many dictatorships in the continent) (cfr. Stubs Reference Stubs, Teixera-Filho and Fernando2018:3-5). In the scope of this article, the long list of movements makes it impossible for me to be exhaustive, but key Latin American artivism include Tucumán Arde (1968), the Siluetazo (Rodolfo Aguerreberry, Julio Flores, and Guillermo Kexel), with the participation of las Madres de Plaza de Mayo (1983), or H.I.J.O.S. (Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio), G.A.C. (Grupo de Arte Callejero), T.P.S. (Taller Popular de Serigrafía), in Argentina, or C.A.D.A. (Colectivo Acciones De Arte), Lotty Rosenfeld, Juan Castillo, Fernando Balcells, Diamela Eltit, and Raúl Zurita (1979), and Yeguas del Apocalipsis, Pedro Lemebel and Francisco Casas (1987), in Chile (cfr. Tapia Reference Tapia2022:105-107). Those are some of the Latin American collectives that structured their practices according to political and social changes, engaging people in the participation and working more on the event and performative aspect rather than on the production of a material and long-lasting piece of art (Expósito et al. Reference Expósito, Vi del and Vidal2012).
The 1980s artivism and contemporary artivism share common aspects. First, the connection between art and activism becomes possible when art begins to break free from the confines of artistic institutions such as museums and art galleries, instead flourishing in public or autonomous spaces like squares, streets, or open community areas. This is what Hakim Bey refers to as a “Temporary Autonomous Zone” or T.A.Z. (Bey Reference Bey and Carlotti2020). The public or liberated spaces allow to construct new kinds of relations between those who propose art and those who can be involved as participants in art-actions. The new artivism space is also a “space for imagination” (Di Giovanni Reference Di Giovanni2015:19) where participants endeavor to redefine and reshape society. Artivism often results from a collective production challenging the concept of individual, genius artist and the singularity of intuition. On the contrary, artivists embrace the practice of multiple artistic languages and wholeheartedly advocate for collaboration.
The use of more acknowledgments and practices (including graphic, social science, theater, fashion design, music, choreography, text writing, lighting, new technologies, etc.) leads to an authorial collective, which does not aim at the recognition of an individual but rather the connection between different knowledges through a hybridization of practices. Another common trait is the use of poor and easily reachable materials, to show that art is not only an elite activity. A key aspect is the involvement of the community, its active participation, and its resulting collective subjectification.
In the specific case of feminist artivism, there are two key elements to underline: the space and the body. Artistic interventions in the public space acquires an even more symbolic value for women and gender nonconforming people, who have historically been excluded from the public space. As mentioned earlier, the patriarchal organization of geography relegates women to the domestic and private spaces, denying access to most public areas. This hegemonic organization lasted at least until the 1970s, when women across Latin America infiltrated the street, breaking down the barriers of the private space, and, with it, the limited potential for relationships and domestic semiisolation that hindered the formation of emancipated consciousness (Rosa Reference Rosa2011:487).
Reclaiming the public space involves a strong take on the body. Feminist artists from the 1970s used their own bodies as artistic support, as the tradition of the performance demonstrates (see e.g., Ana Mendieta, Gina Pane, Regina José Galindo, Yoko Ono) (cfr. Alcazar Reference Alcázar, Kathya and Mercedes2008:333; Cordero Reiman Reference Cordero Reiman2007). They affirmed a will to break the patriarchal narrative on women’s bodies and their continued objectification (Zapperi Reference Zapperi and Marco2009:81). The analysis of Un violador en tu camino in terms of feminist artivist performance finds a confirmation in the consideration of Julia Antivilo Peña (cfr. Antivilo Reference Antivilo, Mayer and Rosa2017, Reference Antivilo2018) about the connection that exists between art, activism, and feminism in Latin America, “in which creation, production, and distribution of feminist art becomes a true performative pedagogy of feminist discourses” (idem 262). Today, Las Tesis’s performance continues a long tradition of Latin American feminist artivismFootnote 31 but it adds a new element to it through the focus on collectivism, as they turn the personal body into a collective and polymorphic body, with the consequent amplification of gestures and audibility that this multiplication enhances (Burdiles Reference Burdiles2020:262).
Global Diffusion and Readaptation
Un violador en tu camino, recorded on video and uploaded to social platforms, became viral on social media, and started to be reappropriated and restaged in many different languages and different countries all over the world since 2019 (cfr. Weihmuller Reference Weihmüller, de Sousa, Lucia and De Cassia Caetano2021:6-8). This performic ritual of liberation from the patriarchal regime quickly trespassed continental and political borders, but also the ethnic, religious, and linguistic ones. It showcases an intercultural and decolonial potential for this form of feminist communication. The peculiarity that made this performance go viral is the plasticity and malleability that characterize it (cfr. Geochicas map in Cuffe Reference Cuffe2019). While the artistic intervention was created in Valparaíso, Chile, and adapted to the social conditions of that moment, the lyrics, music, steps, and clothing allows for changes and adaptations to every location in which the performance takes place.
Las Tesis do not claim ownership or immutability over the performance; on the contrary, they think about it as a porous tool that lives on thanks to other women, queer people, and in general transfeminist collectives all over the world who readapt it to their local situation, speaking about their specific problems and struggles. Paula Soto explains the position of the collective about the circulation and reappropriation of the performance: “When it started going viral, what the collective said was that it was great that this had taken on a life of its own. The important thing is that it talks to women everywhere from very different realities”. When placed in a different context, the performance unveils new semantic interpretations. The piece traversed diverse realms, metaphorically embarking on a journey that sparks different metamorphoses, imbuing it with additional layers and perspectives mainly in the field of language and music.
On Linguistic Reelaborations
The performance had a global circulation through video sharing on social networks. Because gender violence is a worldwide phenomenon, versions were made in other languages, such as English, French, Italian, Hindi, Turkish, Arabic, Urdu, and (Spanish) sign language, and others, but also in various Indigenous languages of Abya Yala (land of flower) (Gargallo Reference Gargallo2014:23),Footnote 32 or South America.
At the beginning of December 2019, a group of Mapuche women and girls, belonging to Indigenous communities living between what is known today as Chile and Argentina, staged the performance in the parque Almagro in Temuco, Chile (CHV Noticias 2019). They reelaborated the Spanish version while adapting and translating the lyrics into Mapudungun, the Mapuche language.Footnote 33 The title Un violador en tu camino was translated to Kiñe Nüntukafe Tami Rüpü Mew. The performance was restaged using typical Mapuche dresses and jewels such as necklaces rather than party clothing, as a reference to their specific Indigenous identity. Another marker of their ethnic group was the use of their traditional musical instruments, such as the kultrun (Bieletto-Bueno Reference Bieletto-Bueno2020:78), the ceremonial drum, and the cascahuilla, a percussion instrument, both used during religious and spiritual ceremonies. The participants concluded the performance by raising their clenched fists and shouting in chorus marichiweu (cfr. Meganoticias 2017), an expression meaning “Ten or thousands of times we will win.” (cfr. Cambio 21 2019)
Quechan women in Peru also seized this song. They performed Un violador en tu camino in the Quechuan language Cusco, in Plaza Mayor and in Plaza de las Armas, and in Arequipa, with the local group Warmi Sikuris (cfr. La Republica Reference Huenchumil2019).Footnote 34 The title became Qanmi kanki violador [You are the rapist] (cfr. Gutierrez Reference Gutierrez2019).Footnote 35 In parallel with the Mapuche women, in this case the participants wore the typical colorful long skirts and dresses, specific to the Andean area, also common in Bolivia. They also used ceremonial instruments such as cajón. Footnote 36
In Ecuador, Las Tesis’s performance has been translated into some of the Indigenous languages of the Amazonia. Women of diverse Amazonian communities performed in the city of Puyo. Their group included participants from the Kichwa, Shuar, Waorani, Achuar, and Shiwiar communities. While their first performances were in Spanish, some of the participants who are also part of the Escuela Antisuyu WarmikunaFootnote 37 translated the lyrics into local Indigenous languages. Participants wore long dresses embellished with necklaces and belts. They appeared with body paintings and tattoos on their faces and with black blindfolds covering their eyes, therefore keeping original costume elements that remind state gender violence and adapting others to their realities and identities as Indigenous persons. All these cases demonstrate that Indigenous communities could make use of Las Tesis’s performance to challenge the specific gender violence perpetrated against their communities by the state.
In the pursuit of true transnational and cross-ability inclusivity, performance is complemented by the incorporation of sign language.Footnote 38 The translations that I found for the moment involves Spanish (Argentina, Chile, and Spain) Sign Language adaptation but the existence of other versions, maybe not made public, cannot be excluded. In the Argentinian case, staged in Buenos Aires, all the participants added signing to the performance steps. The performance uses instruments from the Batucada and Murga, both being protest musical genres widely known in Argentina.
Looking at other places outside of Latin America, very early after the diffusion on social media of the Chilean performance, women from India decided to restage and adapt the performance to the local situation and problems due to domestic violence and its ties to state violence. Indian women organized the performance in Jantar Mantar, a public space reserved for protests in New Delhi, on 8 December 2019.Footnote 39 One of the organizers, Shru Ti, observes that “we are not here because of the cases of violence that have happened recently, but we are responding to everyday violence, something that is intrinsic to the patriarchal system, which considers women and LGBTQIA+ people as transgressive”Footnote 40 (Noriega Reference Noriega2019). The recent episode of violence she speaks about is the murder of a twenty-three-year-old woman, who was burnt alive while she was on her way to court to testify about the rape she suffered by two men. Indian women translated the lyrics into Hindi, but they also adapted the text with a special attention dedicated to the caste structure. The structural violence they speak about relates to the social structure, hierarchical and vertical, existing in India to this day. In this strict scheme of different levels of power and privileges, women belonging to the lower casts suffer crimes that receive almost no attention from police departments. Compared to Las Tesis’s original lyrics, the reference to Carabineros as the agents of the violence was substituted with the reference to the caste system. Here follows the Hindi version, translated to English:
The performance was repeated also in the Bengali region, in Kolkata, on 11 January 2020, as an act of demonstration against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s official visit to the city. The title of the song was changed to Bengali: Dhorshok Tumii, and part of it translates as follows: “Women are killed, And the killers aren’t punished” (Desai Reference Desai2020). Here again, the lyrics underline the nonenforcement of regulations in defense of women and all those particularly affected by patriarchal violence. As noted in the preceding text, patriarchal gender violence in India is also combined with the caste structure, in which the highest castes members who are authors of violence and rapes are never punished by the state justice due to the social power they benefit (Reid Reference Reid2020). Such reappropriations and adaptations, from Latin America to India, advocate for the creation of a transnational community. Feminist tools can serve as resources for any community that adopts an intersectional feminist perspective, which considers aspects like class, caste, race, age, and ability, while engaging in cross-linguistic and international dialogues.
On Musical Reelaborations
The free circulation of the performance also results in a series of musical reinterpretations that open new possibilities for performance staging and diffusion. This reinforces the potential for the performance’s adaptability to diverse contexts and historical references. In Puerto Rico, feminist groups reelaborated Un violador en tu camino Footnote 41 by changing the musical structure, influencing it with popular Caribbean rhythms:
The performance has spread throughout the archipelago and has integrated popular Caribbean rhythms such as bomba, plena, and reggaetón into these actions of public pedagogy and activism. Some smaller performances have incorporated traditional Puerto Rican plena music, which has become a staple of recent feminist protests thanks to the musical collective Plena Combativa. (Dávila and LeBrón Reference Davila and Lebron2019)
In the Puerto Rican revisiting of Un violador en tu camino,Footnote 42 the presence of panderetas is fundamental. These round, handheld drums come in multiple sizes and are essential to mark Caribbean rhythms. In parallel with the musical changes, the dance has been influenced by Caribbean traditions, most of all deriving from Afro-Caribbean cultures, that is, Afro-Puerto-Rican traditions:
After the recent performances, women have danced and moved their bodies to reggaetón as a way to lay claim to public space and make demands on the state. This “perreo combativo,” or combative reggaetón dance is now famous for being one of the unique ways in which Puerto Ricans demanded the former governor’s resignation, and further ties the feminist chant to larger protests against corruption and colonialism taking place in Puerto Rico. (ibid.)
As it happened in other countries, in Puerto Rico the lyrics were modified, adding the guilty role of the Church and other religious conservative organizations as collaborators in the refusal to give an education about gender violence in schools:
Therefore, the Puerto Rican version brought changes not only to the lyrics but also to the music, rhythm, instruments, and cultural references, to anchor the performance in a Puerto Rican feminist fight against state violence in favor of feminist resistance.
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in an imprecise location between southern Turkey and northern Syria in relation with the absence of a recognition of Kurdish nation, Kurdish women recorded a local version of Un violador en tu camino. This group posted on Twitter: “Women are resisting all over the world, in Argentina, Lebanon, Spain, Turkey. In Rojava [Kurdish region], women resisting occupation, gangs and male domination gave voice to this resistance with Las Tesis. Long Live Women’s Solidarity.”Footnote 43 This Kurdish women’s group entirely covered their faces with a pink scarf, symbol of their feminist struggle. They chose to add an accessory, holding a rifle and dancing with it, a clear signal of their fight against military oppression and persecution of Kurdish people by the states of Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq. The symbols employed by Las Tesis have given way to real objects and weapons of resistance as the Kurdish women have suffered for a long time from gender violence in relation to their political struggles.
The strength of Las Tesis’s collective performance became particularly clear as it received political attacks. In Istanbul, Turkey, on 8 December 2019, the group Kadın Cinayetlerini Durduracag ̆ĭz Platformu [Platform We Will Stop Femicide] called for staging the performance, yet the police repressed women by beating them and throwing pepper gas to them. In the Turkish Penal Code, insulting the president is considered a crime punishable by imprisonment. As an answer to this violent episode, after a few days, members of opposition party CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi) [Republican People’s Party] interrupted a parliamentary session in Ankara and started the performance.Footnote 44 All the women of the party were singing, wearing purple scarfs, while men were raising photographs of women. While Las Tesis performed in front of historical and governmental buildings, the Turkish performance managed to enter a highly symbolical and political space, the Turkish parliament, to draw attention to gender violence perpetrated by the state.
Conclusion
This article is the partial result of research on feminist artivism in Latin America. The work began in 2019, when I participated in a university exchange in Argentina, and when the Chilean estallido social occurred, leading Las Tesis to realize their performance. Staying in Mendoza, Cuyo region, and being an active part of the feminist struggles in the city, I took part, along with many other friends, activists, students, workers, pensioners, women and sexual dissidents, in the performance Un violador en tu camino in Plaza Independencia. Upon returning to Italy in 2020, I delved into the linguistic and musical reinterpretations of the performance. Through extensive web research and active participation, I immersed myself in the experience, particularly in Bologna, on numerous occasions. Therefore, this research consists of a combination of local research projects in Latin America with a later digital work of retrieval of material, thanks to interviews, videos, statements, and online conferences, trying to maintain an academic rigor to create the mapping of the reelaborations that are proposed here. I hope to be able to continue and enrich this research project by returning to Latin America, getting to know the members of the collective directly and expanding the research with other testimonies of feminist artivism.
Born from a highly contextualised critic of Chilean society, Las Tesis’s performance Un violador en tu camino quickly became a feminist hymn charged with visual and auditive cues against the patriarchal order of the society. The power of this performance is evident from the fact that it went viral in a short time while being reelaborated from different women’s groups throughout the world. This performance participates in the Latin American tradition of artivism: an artistic act that aims to be a tool for social change. The catalyst for such actions lies in the existence of a united collective that openly articulates its anger and calls for change in strategic public spaces. Every aspect is channeled through the body, bearing the weight of social, racial, ethnic, and gender values that shape identity. The experience of forming part of a collective body, perceiving the same feelings and acting together the same performance, offers the possibility for a union, a common struggle that challenges the power imbalances and gives strength to fight back public and private gender violence.
Feminist artivism connects art with social and political issues to activate social change, to reach better life conditions and to deconstruct the patriarchal structure. One of the elements of effectiveness of Las Tesis’s performance is the composition of a collective body that, in its strong manifestation, can undermine the security of the patriarchal apparatus. The substantial presence of women and gender nonconforming individuals, gathering both in public squares and institutional settings, generates a powerful visual and auditory impact, effectively transforming itself into a political tool. This performance aims at breaking the historical silence imposed on women and nonbinary persons by extending the idea of performance from the visual to the auditory field (Bieletto-Bueno Reference Bieletto-Bueno2020:81). The presence of a crowd performing in the same place and at a high volume transforms the performance into a ritual of liberation from the sense of guilt imposed by patriarchal regimen.
As an artivist intervention, this performance unifies people in the same struggle, building a sense of their empowerment. Shouting together that “la culpa no era mía” [the guilt was not mine], this performance tears open the shroud of oppression while opening a space for feminist political creation. Such space enacts collective liberation and makes it possible to imagine new practices of enunciation and self-narration (Serafini Reference Serafini2020:293). Connecting aesthetic purposes with feminist theories can create a global scale movement for transnational alliances. Shaking off guilt, caring for each other, and singing (as fighting) together create a space in which tenderness and radicality, love and struggle, go hand in hand to rebuild a more equal society.
