The artist as a witness of traumatic events in dictatorial regimes, as swell as of the daily routines is the topic of my presentation. Artists register “another reality” than the officially prescribed one that is mandatorily happy, optimistic, ideologically driven. As such, their work is often considered as illegal because to see the real without ideological lenses is unacceptable. This presentation will use visual arts’ examples from the dictatorial regimes in Romania and Chile but will also accompany them with further cases from neighbouring dictatorships (Argentina, Poland, Bulgaria, etc).
Artists often witness the desolation, the dirt, the equal passing of days far away from the obligatory joyful attitude. They chronicle events as they happen, they play the role of an archivist (Rancière) of a collector of signs of their environment and they often hide these “proofs” away from the public eye. In dictatorships the artist is a hidden, unseen witness that can contribute to the a posteriori understanding of past experiences and shared realities.
There are several ways in which artists testify of their experience: in literary forms, they fictionalize it using other places or other epochs to talk about their present; they can also include in their diaries their quotidian experiences and give us a feeling of their times. In visual arts they can simply photograph an everyday image, very common, but so far away of the propaganda images permitted by the dictatorships. Their registering of the real is important for our understanding of dictatorships because their gaze selects what counts, what can transmit us more than the anodyne.
