Fifty Years of Hope and Struggle

 

On 18 April 2023, students at the University of Leeds launched a month-long exhibition titled Hope, Struggle and Solidarity. The exhibition, the result of collaborative archival research and workshops, represents a creative and innovative approach to memorialising struggle against dictatorship in Chile and wider Latin America since the 1970s. It shows how the solidarity of the past can be reactivated and retransmitted in the present to take on new political meaning.

The exhibition formed part of a wider project titled ‘Thinking Inside the Box: 1973’, a collaboration between the Universities of London (KCL, QMUL, LSE), Leeds and Liverpool. It connected students to each other and to a range of archival materials, broadly themed around 20th century Latin America, to inspire a contemporary response to events in Latin America fifty years ago. To this day, the year of 1973 remains most evocative of the Chilean military coup in which Salvador Allende was overthrown by the military, who went on to imprison, torture and kill tens of thousands. This year was, however, pivotal for many other countries in the region, as authoritarian military rule spread and intensified, including in Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil.

Opposition to these regimes came in various forms, ranging from cultural resistance to armed struggle. The events of 1973 saw Latin American solidarity proliferate across the world. Groups gathered data on human rights abuses, petitioned local political actors, rallied support from unions and other social justice organisations, and raised awareness through publications, press conferences, performances, and demonstrations.

Material remnants of these expressions of hope, resistance, struggle and solidarity are to be found in archives, digital and physical. Indeed, what we know about 1970s solidarity largely comes from archives: correspondence, political ephemera, newspaper clippings, photographs, posters, government documents, testimonies. Artefacts are often used to historiographically reconstruct events relating to state terror and political violence. Political and economic interests strive to influence this process by the: 

… inoculation of collective memory from State systems; the defensive oblivion assimilated by civil society; the depoliticisation of subjectivities in restructuring neo-liberal economies; the aestheticisation of counterculture, etc. More than forty years on from the outbreak of dictatorships in a significant part of Latin America, the ensuing traumatic effect still smothers intellectual life in our societies and immunises the poetic-political potential of those experiences.

The creation, collection and preservation of archival materials thus give us a snapshot of the past that would otherwise be lost to censorship, inaccessibility, denial and collective oblivion.

Seeking to reawaken the lived experiences contained within such archives, students at the University of Leeds carried out a lengthy research project and designed a ‘festival of events’ to take place in April 2023. They engaged with three specific archives: the Robert Pring-Mill collection at the University of Liverpool’s Popular Music Archive, the Senate House Library Latin American Political Pamphlet Collection, and the recently digitised collection, Memories of Resistance: A Digital Archive of Chile's Graphic Resistance. Their experiences and subsequent activities were innovative, performative and interactive, leading to a particular memorialisation of the past that actively pushed back against the bleakness imposed by the military regimes. Through a critical debate about memory and aesthetics, an interaction with a Chilean activist, and the pedagogical design of a series of workshops, Hope, Struggle and Solidarity reawakened the transformative potential of solidarity and hope for a better future. Here, we reflect on some of the key sources of inspiration for the design of the project.

Resistance, Hope, Struggle and Solidarity
Choosing hope and solidarity as the principles of the project was based on a debate around the aesthetics of political artworks. In early January 2023, students spent a day at the Robert Pring-Mill Collection at the University of Liverpool’s Popular Music Archive. Robert Pring-Mill (1924-2005) was an Oxford academic, studying and teaching Hispanic and Latin American literature. He first visited Argentina, Uruguay and Chile as an undergraduate in 1949. It was in Chile that he encountered the poetry of Pablo Neruda, while Neruda was in hiding in Chile after the Communist Party, for which he was an elected Senator in the national Congress, was outlawed during miners’ strikes. That trip sparked a life-long interest in socially committed poetry and music, resulting in his collection of canciones de lucha y esperanza, ‘songs of hope and struggle’, a term he preferred to ‘protest music’, because he considered protest to be against something, yet these songs were always in favour of something - land reform, literacy, better housing, democracy, and so on. The collection included books, pamphlets, posters, vinyl sleeves, and cassettes, artefacts for which visual artwork played an important role. Arriving at the archive to see brightly coloured artworks, celebrations of music and culture, and lyrics that transmitted hope, was not quite what the students were expecting.

This stimulated a debate about different visual communication strategies. The aesthetics of victimhood and denunciation differ from those of hope and resistance. In the former, images are designed to shock or intimidate; resistance to oppression highlights violence, injustice, inequality, and identifies their perpetrators. Furthermore, transnational solidarity with victims needs to convince distant publics and political actors of the veracity of claims of illegal imprisonment, torture, murder, and disappearances. The visual and semiotic language of resistance has to be striking: visually vivid or with violent or shocking imagery.

 

The materials of hope and struggle we encountered in the archive that day were also visually striking, however for different reasons. Struggles for hope seek to animate, uplift, and inspire, using images that portray homage, solidarity, sincerity and justness.

 

Connecting with Kadima
In 1977, graphic designer, artist and activist Antonio Cadima – Kadima – founded the cultural centre Tallersol in a Santiago firmly under military control. Along with its huge political library and vibrant community spaces, it has a cache of posters, leaflets, bulletins and other printed matter that Tallersol produced under repression. Kadima estimates that the Tallersol collective produced around 60% of the posters put up in the Chilean capital in the early 1980s. It is a unique resource, and one that Kadima is keen to preserve and promote to raise the profile of the anti-Pinochet resistance movement.

Both as an activist and archivist, Kadima’s work does, as intended, provoke opposition. Tallersol have long been aware of the ongoing surveillance of groups, including themselves, involved in campaigns for justice, human rights and in supporting the families of the regime’s victims, political prisoners and disappeared detainees. The lack of state support or protection for key memorial sites, such as torture and detention centres, and Chilean human rights organisations, has long been apparent. Physical attacks on memory sites in Santiago during and after the ‘estallido social’ in 2019, including robberies, attempted arson and police harassment, have highlighted to Tallersol the vulnerability of their building and the irreplaceable archive it contains. Kadima was highly active during the 2019-20 protests, photographing the front-line protesters, and he himself was struck on the head by a teargas cannister.

 

The Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP), aims to digitise and make accessible vulnerable archives from the 20th and 21st centuries. They funded Tallersol and the University of Liverpool to create a catalogue and digitise a sample of 150 posters out of a collection of over 8000 items. For the University of Liverpool’s Annual Steven Rubenstein Lecture in Latin American Studies, we took a virtual tour of Tallersol with a live Q&A.

Thanks to the digitisation of Tallersol posters, students on the project have had the rare privilege of being able to engage with political artworks created under the Chilean military regime. During a collective analysis of these materials, students took notes on the particular fonts, phrases, recurring symbolisms and compositions that stood out to them in the artworks. Three particular symbols stood out: the dove, the sun and the guitar. Both the sun and the dove were understood to represent hope, while the guitar represented the role of music in spreading messages of hope in times of hardship. As a result of these discussions, the students designed the project’s logo by drawing directly from the symbols found in Kadima’s artworks.

 

The process of designing the logo reactivated the analogue production of cultural and artistic designs capable of spreading messages of hope in a now largely digital world. It also symbolised an act of solidarity. As a popular organization dedicated to preserving memories of resistance, Tallersol do not have the resources to protect their archive against natural threats or physical attacks from opponents. The owners of Tallersol’s building in the iconic Yungay district of Santiago have recently served notice they wish to repossess, adding physical and financial uncertainty to the challenges they face. With this context, the students discussed the need to stand in solidarity with Kadima by using the project to share his story and bring attention to the challenges faced by Tallersol. Through the design of the logo, students simultaneously reactivated the cultural and political actions of Tallersol under the military regime, whilst also standing in solidarity with Kadima in the present.

Workshops that Reactivate
While Hope, Struggle and Solidarity was predominantly imagined as an exhibition, it soon grew to include a range of parallel activities, the most important of which were a series of poster-making workshops. Inspired by the archives and by Kadima, students duly organised and delivered three well-attended workshops in Leeds, at the Hyde Park Book Club, a café and bar, and Left Bank, an event space. Both spaces are committed to public engagement, with a focus on local communities, and are frequented by the public as well as students and activists.

 

 

The central concept was for the workshops to inspire hope, struggle and solidarity by encouraging attendees to create their own solidarity posters; they were designed after conversations with Kadima and academic and industry experts. First, workshop visitors were introduced to the project through the story of how the students had chosen the title of Hope, Struggle and Solidarity, inspired by the Popular Music Archive and Tallersol. Participants were then presented with a selection of artworks and prompted to think about how particular symbols and visual elements spoke to them. Finally, written prompts were provided to guide participants as they created their own political artwork. 

 

The workshops were conceived as a public (re)activation of solidarity. By presenting audiences with visual stimuli they had selected from archives, comprising materials from the Popular Music Archive, Tallersol, and the University of London Senate House Library Latin American Political Pamphlets Collection, the students invited others to join them in reactivating ideas of hope, struggle and solidarity. The workshops challenged the condemnation of political struggles for hope and solidarity to the past by facilitating an interpretive dialogue with materials from the past. In one sense, by inspiring the creation of new designs, the students enabled others to bring their worldviews and intersectionality into a collective re-interpretation of archive materials, opening-up the possibility of renewed political action. In another, the students simply recreated their own experiences with the archives to share what they had learned with others. That the students were interested in engaging in this extra-curricular project is rewarding in itself; that they were then eager to share their experiences of engaging with progressive Latin American music and posters from fifty years ago with others, and reached out beyond the campus to do so, is perhaps evidence of a more profound impact.

The virtual exhibition and workshop posters can be accessed here.

Authors
Anna Grimaldi is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Leeds. She received her doctorate from King's College London, where she also lectured in International Development and History. Her research looks at the formation of transnational networks of solidarity with and between the Global South, in particular through Latin America and the Tricontinental Conference of 1966. Currently, she is working on critical pedagogies in relation to Latin American Cold War archives under a project titled Thinking Inside the Box.

Richard G. Smith, a Visiting Fellow at CLACS, originally trained as a chemist before a career in consumer product innovation took him all over the world, including three years living in Buenos Aires and many more working and travelling across the length and breadth of Latin America. Subsequently, he studied Spanish, French and History at the Open University and obtained an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Liverpool in 2016. His PhD, awarded in 2022 and also from Liverpool, concerned the student opposition to the Pinochet regime in Chile. As well as his doctoral studies, he is part of a project digitising a collection of political posters in Santiago, and one exploring music and memory with Chilean exiles and former Chile Solidarity Campaign activists. 

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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the position of CLACS, ILCS or the School of Advanced Study, University of London.