art is la raja

translation: the shit. Last Saturday I was in Santiago and went to el Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende run by la Fundación Salvador Allende. It was eleven a.m. on a Saturday morning, so I was the only person in the building and the guard outside had to turn on a video exhibit and open some rooms just for me. The video exhibit wasn't very neat, it was a 'piece' by some woman who had linked together clips of explosions from lots of different wars. Everything else was really neat though. Some cool pieces were a giant fiberglass piece in the shape of half of Allende's glasses that you had to duck under and walk around and some really cool paintings. They had a really powerful exhibit up called "ausencias" by an Argentinean photographer named Gustavo Germano, about the dictatorship there between 1976 and 1983. He had taken old photographs of families, friends, couples, etc. and then in 2006 set up photos in the same spot/pose minus the people who had been assassinated/disappeared. Seeing the new photos with everyone grown older without their friends and family was really powerful.

As I was leaving the two guys working gave me some posters, probably because they were so excited to have someone actually come to the museum early on a Saturday and then I heading to the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, just a short metro ride away. I love the Santiago metro, by the way. The trick is to never ride it during rush hour or else you'll end up hating it. Not during rush hour, it's the easiest, cleanest, nicest metro ever, even if Bachelet got way criticized for the entire TranSantiago project. I like it, so there. Anyways...before going to the second museum I took a long walk to and then through the Plaza de Armas. They have a new exhibit up below La Moneda about Salvador Allende but I didn't go in.




The contemporary art museum was cool. Not very big, which is nice because I don't have the greatest attention span. I recognized a few statues (Juan Egenau and Sergio Castillo) from that one time I studied for my History of Chilean Art class :P But the coolest part was the exhibit of art from Japanese artists, especially Nobuyuki Takahashi (above) and Satoshi Hirose.