The Battle of Santiago

The Walls of Santiago is an immersive study of the wave of protests that rocked Chilean society and pushed the center-right government of Piñera, and the country’s political institutions, to the verge of collapse between October 2019 and March 2020. As the dust still settles on that seismic event, Terri Gordon-Zolov and Eric Zolov’s beautifully illustrated book represents an early, valiant attempt to wrestle with the open question of what it all meant.

As suggested by its title, the book focuses on the graphics that took Chile’s public surfaces by storm over a five-month period. Graphic art became a significant element of the protest movement, in large part because of its sheer pervasiveness — barely a wall in downtown Santiago was left unmarked — but also since many of the markings were so aesthetically impressive, a fact highlighted by a group of artists who took to adding a gold frame around pieces of graffiti.

Graphic activism and arts are understood here to include everything from “graffiti, posters, stencil art, [and] wall murals, [to] the more recent approach known as ‘paste-up.’” The authors’ fascination with the inventiveness of some of these graphics, a fascination that readers of the book will likely share, does not prevent them from documenting and analyzing much humbler tags and scribbles. One of the merits of the book is that it covers both the work of accomplished street artists as well as average citizens who chose to leave their mark on the walls of the city. The Walls of Santiago therefore captures the demands and aspirations of a broad subset of protesters — not just the most artistically eloquent — and conveys the openness and horizontal spirit of the October 2019 protests.

Under the umbrella of artivism, the authors explore the aesthetics and substance of the protest movement, venturing into areas like body art, performance, art installations, and other manifestations of public art. They also cover the defacing and toppling of public monuments, one of the most prominent and controversial features of the demonstrations.

Yet this is not a coffee-table book of revolutionary art. It is an important contribution to our understanding of protest iconography in contemporary Chile and, indirectly, a probing look at the nature of the October protests.

Plaza Baquedano

The Walls of Santiago includes roughly 150 color photographs of public art, the great majority taken by the authors, who happened to be in Chile when the protests erupted. The documentary dimension of the project is likewise evident in an interactive digital map that accompanies the book, allowing readers to locate the site where the photographs were taken.

The photographs are a very welcome addition. Graphic art is by nature ephemeral, and all the more so in Chile, where the Piñera government scrubbed the walls with a special vengeance. In March 2020, the government decreed a state of catastrophe to tackle the COVID pandemic and quickly seized the opportunity to clean the streets: the same night as the decree, professional cleanup crews were sent to downtown Santiago to erase any remaining memory of wall protests.

Gordon-Zolov and Zolov focus on the iconoclastic nature of the protests and the prominence of certain iconography to drive home one of their main claims: “Both the nation and its discursive formations are in a transformational moment,” a moment of “struggle to reimagine the nation-state itself.” The widely circulated image of General Manuel Baquedano’s defaced statue and the prominent display of Mapuche symbols, representing Chile’s largest indigenous minority, seem to support their assertion.

For the authors, the protesters’ depiction of the Chilean state as authoritarian, patriarchal, and racist signified not so much a “repudiation of national identity” per se as it did a “rejection of a narrow set of historical markers” that have circumscribed Chilean identity. In that sense, they situate the defacement and toppling of statues of statesmen and military officers and their replacement by Mapuche flags and revolutionary heroes within a global wave of protests challenging the foundational myths of the Western nation-state.

This is a compelling perspective, but other parts of the book suggest that there was more at stake. Case in point, the chapter devoted to the protest movement’s anarchist sensibility shows that, for some of the participants, October 2019 was not just a struggle to define Chile’s national identity, but a direct challenge to the nation-state project itself. The violence of the protests — sometimes ideologically driven, other times not — made such a position all the more troubling, particularly for those who feel that modern states can play a positive role in leftist politics.

Chile’s protest movement was famously spontaneous and leaderless, the political left — in its social democratic, communist, and New Left variants — failing first to lead and then to channel its momentum. The authors rightly highlight how this dynamic led to tensions between destructive and creative forces. But their love for the cultural artifacts they analyze, and the fact that they wrote the book while the protests were giving way to a progressive-led democratic constitutional process, perhaps led them to exaggerate the creative force of the movement.

The much less auspicious political context of present-day Chile asks us to consider the movement’s destruction more seriously. Chile seems much more fractured in 2023 than before October 2019, the waves of violence having “awakened other, darker forces that lie latent within society,” as the authors themselves note in the conclusion.

The lesson of Chile’s 2019 protests is thus doubly tragic: first, the traditional left seems to be losing the cultural battle for the hearts and minds of left-leaning youth, who are increasingly drawn to a less coherent anarchist sensibility. Second, the sense of insecurity that the protests amplified seems to be at the root of Chile’s current political crisis, characterized by a powerful backlash against progressive demands and the Left more generally.

Under the banner of law and order, the Right has won the last two elections in the constitutional process: rejecting the convention’s original draft in September 2022, and then electing a much less progressive cast of participants for a watered-down convention in May 2023.

In winning by huge margins, the Right has deprived Gabriel Boric, the left-wing president who succeeded Piñera, of much of his power. Chile’s present and foreseeable future is even more disheartening, considering that these were the first two elections that took place with compulsory voting and thus reflect the will of a significantly larger number of citizens than those who gave a majority to the progressive forces in 2020 or elected Boric in 2021.

Power to the People?

One of the merits of The Walls of Santiago is that it acknowledges the distinction between the concrete subjects under study — protesters and artivists — and the more elusive collective subject for whom those protesters intended to speak: the people. This is no small feat, given that public protests are one way in which “the people” express their will, and Chile’s protests were indeed massive.

On October 25, 2019, about 1.2 million people took to the streets of downtown Santiago in what was described as the largest march in the country’s history. Astonished by the number of protesters and the prominence of protest graphics, it was easy for those present to conflate the walls of Santiago with the voice of the people.

The authors were indeed enthralled by images that “seemed to embody the will of the people.” Yet they avoid falling into the trap of confusing those images with the will of the people. They do so by focusing on the artivists themselves (their demands and aesthetic preferences) and by delving into the production process behind their eye-catching graphics. Revealingly, while tracing the web of references behind certain visual tropes, the authors point out that “much of the Chilean protest graphics read like an inside joke.” In other words, the scribbles and wall murals were not always easily understood by everyone.

This was true even for some of the most common graffiti tropes, such as “ACAB” or “1312,” which used an English acronym (for “All Cops Are Bastards”) to disparage the police — in a country in which the study of English as a second language only became mandatory in recent years. The fact that the authors are able to explain these visual tropes and inside jokes is a testament to their level of ethnographic immersion and to their grasp of the problem.

“It’s Not Thirty Pesos, It’s Thirty Years”

The Walls of Santiago is structured in three parts and comprised of nine chapters. The first part, “Memory Boxes,” discusses the country’s recent history and its representation in wall art. A large number of the graphics that emerged during the protests alluded to historical figures and events that were easily recognizable to almost every Chilean: protest songwriter Víctor Jara, socialist president Salvador Allende, right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, and so on. These images provided a straightforward historical narrative, with the Allende government (1970–73) heralded as a revolutionary moment worth emulating and the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990) as a procapitalist counterrevolution.

More problematic for the political elites, and perhaps more relevant for the protesters themselves, was the depiction of the country’s thirty years of postdictatorial democracy (1990–2020) as a nonevent, that is, a mere continuation of the political and economic system established by the dictatorship. So the slogan “It’s not thirty pesos, it’s thirty years” purported to explain the uprising not as the result of a small hike in the subway fares, but as a response to unfilled promises of political participation and social equity.

Many graphics and slogans equated Piñera with Pinochet, calling for a definitive break with the legacy of the dictatorship, whether in the political (e.g., the country’s controversial constitution) or socioeconomic realm (e.g., social security, health, and education). The authors thus conclude that the upsurge was “the culmination of decades of mounting frustration with the economic, political, and judicial legacy of the Pinochet regime,” an assertion that perhaps establishes too direct a link between history and memory. Here the authors, like some of the protesters, may have painted with too broad a brush.

The authors are much better at analyzing the imagery related to Jara, Allende, and the revolutionary ’60s more generally. They show that these signifiers functioned as a reservoir of utopian hope for protesters, while also cogently recognizing that the signifiers were subject to acts of creative reappropriation (leaving some leftist icons barely recognizable). For example, Allende, whose brand of socialism had little patience for marijuana and free love, was reimagined as an aging hippie protecting and encouraging the protestors.

Protest iconography often chose to elide the tensions that plagued Allende’s government, for example, between his call for peaceful, institutional transformation and the wave of unplanned factory seizures and “revolutions from below” it inspired. The Walls of Santiago nevertheless detects the survival of those paradoxes in the contemporary coexistence of different protesting subjectivities, from a nostalgic thread common to the orthodox left to left-leaning youths with their markedly irreverent punk-pop ethos.

The book’s second part, “Revolutionary Currents,” is the longest of the three. Comprised of four chapters, each one focuses on a specific motif, theme, or revolutionary sensibility. In so doing, the authors offer a comprehensive overview of what was a variegated and sometimes contradictory protest movement undergirded by powerful social movements. Three movements in particular take center stage: anarchism, feminism, and the proindigenous movement.

The protests were underpinned by a diffuse but recognizable anarchist sentiment, evident not only in the militant fringe of young protesters that made an issue of fighting the police at every turn but also in many of the central motifs of the protests: the call to “evade” or “dodge” the payment of subway fares; the heroization of the “Black Cop-Killer Dog”; the denunciation of the state as “a macho rapist,” and so on.

Anarchism also overlapped with other social movements active in the protests. In fact, some of the most noticeable allusions to anarchist iconography and phraseology appear in the chapters devoted to the feminist and proindigenous movements. In the former, we read phrases such as “A dead cop doesn’t rape,” “Legal abortion / fire to the patriarchal state,” and “Without country / without fear / queer love is resistance.” To illustrate the latter, the authors include a picture in which stickers suggest a fusion of the Mapuche struggle and anarcho-punk imagery.

Of course, Chilean feminism and the proindigenous movement can be fruitfully understood as independent movements, with influences far beyond the ideologies of anarchism. However, the confluence of anarchism with those movements was noteworthy, and the relevance of anarchist ideas — vague or coherent —for the protesters was not limited to the militant fringe.

That confluence is clear in a picture the authors took at the entrance to a student-run print collective. The door includes three small signs drawn by the same hand, which allude to anarchism, feminism, and veganism, and next to the door, someone has pasted a sticker produced by a group of soccer club supporters calling themselves “Anti-Fascists,” replete with red and black flags.

The book’s final section, “Aesthetics and Politics,” is perhaps its best. It delves into the aesthetic dimension of protest graphics and offers us a behind-the-scenes peek into the art production process. The authors consider the influence of certain movements of the so-called historical avant-garde (i.e., futurism, expressionism, Dada, and surrealism) on Chilean protest graphics, and zoom in on three street artists with a pronounced Pop Art sensibility — Paloma Rodríguez, Caiozzama, and Fab Ciraolo — as they discuss their pasteups and political ideas.

The influence of expressionism is also on display in some grotesque graphics that employ distortion, exaggeration, and satire. In one black-and-white poster, Piñera is depicted as a clown holding an aggressive yet obedient dog-cop on a chain leash, fed with cocaine. In another, a poster features a skeletal female figure with the skull of a huemul (a South Andean deer) kneeling against the backdrop of a city in flames, accompanied by an ode to the flames: “Oktobre [sic] don’t forget what you felt when . . . the city burned and the person next to you smiled.”

The book’s last chapter is a fascinating examination of three artivist workshops that produced art nonstop during the protests. Two of them — Taller Libre and Colectivo de Serigrafía Instantánea — sprang up during the student-led movements of 2006 and 2011, tracing their origins to public universities; in fact, one of them still operates on university premises. The third workshop, Brigada de Propaganda Feminista, emerged in the context of feminist mobilizations in 2015.

These workshops tend to be formed by a handful of core members, though they are open to other participants and collaborate to pool their resources with smaller collectives. All of them have a strong collectivist ethos, sharing materials as well as techniques, which leads to more-or-less recognizable styles. That ethos gives credibility to the authors’ contention that the creative visual kaleidoscope displayed on Chile’s walls should be understood as “the culmination of decades of artistic interventions, grassroots pedagogy, and collaborative graphics activism.”

The Walls of Santiago transports us to the heart one of the most stirring and divisive moments in recent Chilean history, serving as a capable guide amid the confusion. The book is perhaps all the more necessary now, in hindsight, as unfulfilled revolutionary hopes seem to be giving way to Thermidorian reaction.