Artist, Francisco Casas Silva: We will not forgive or forget until we know where the last political prisoner in the history of Chile is.
Hello, I am Francisco Casas. I am an audiovisual artist and a Chilean writer. Me and Pedro Lemebel formed the art collective Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis.
What this photo represents is what we called “art actions”—intervening into public spaces and holding demonstrations there. It was not until much later that we understood what we were doing was a work of art and it was called “performance.”
During this time, Chile was plagued by the dark, sinister, terrifying shadow of the military dictatorship, with thousands of detainees and the emergence of concentration camps, basically extermination camps. The mothers of those detained, when they saw it was impossible to continue protesting, they began to dance a cueca called the cueca sola. It is the national dance. And so, the mothers danced for the absent, for those not present, for the massacre.
We decided to do a performance for the mothers and dance a cueca on a map of Latin America full of glass and barefoot. We listened with some Walkmans and the cueca went:
Let me call you my darling, my darling, because you get everything in my life with your persistence. You are the darling, my darling. Love of loves, I give you everything in life, so that you don't cry.
While we danced, the glass cut our feet, leaving bloody footprints on Latin America—an entire bloody map. I think this is one of our most important works at the end of the dictatorship and shook it up a lot. It was a way of saying, “Hey, you don’t dance alone.”