SUPRASENSIBILIDADES
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Centro Nacional de Arte Contemporáneo Cerrillos Santiago de Chile, Galería Macchina
Curator: Mario Navarro; assistant curator: María Paz Ortúzar
Artists: Claudia Del Fierro, Gonzalo Díaz, Tamar Guimarães & Kasper Akhøj, Cristóbal Lehyt, Cristián Silva, Taller Gráfico UTE (Federico Cifuentes, Elías Griebe, Héctor Moya, Enrique Muñoz, Mario Navarro Cortés, Juan Polanco, Omar Rojas, Ricardo Ubilla)
The Santiago de Chile project station conjoins two texts by Hubert Fichte assembled for the project Chile: An Experiment for the Future (Chile: Experimento por el futuro, Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Metales Pesados, 2018): an account of Fichte’s journey from Brazil to Chile via Argentina, taken from his 900-page novel Explosion, and an in-depth radio feature that Fichte produced for several German broadcasters in 1971. Both texts include an identical conversation with Salvador Allende, conducted in the radio feature by Hubert Fichte, and in the novel by his literary alter ego Jäcki.
In the novel, the trip to Chile is a re-orientation. For several months the author has sought out Afro-diasporic cultures. He has studied Candomblé rites, spoken with prominent anthropologists, whom he has increasingly come to doubt, and reconsidered his own role: What am I, a writer, or another useless white ethnologist? And the more he learns of the socialist government in Chile, the greater his interest in whether this might be a solution to the continent’s problems. After all, Jäcki has always placed his hopes in socialism only to be disappointed not least by the homophobia of actual socialist governments such as Cuba. In the novel, the storyline of which runs from the late 1960s to the 1980s, Jäcki has another opportunity to talk about the 1973 coup with Carlos Jorquera, Allende’s press secretary, in a look back from his Venezuelan exile. Here, as in other parts of the novel, Fichte notes the inglorious role of West German industry and the West German government who failed to support the Chilean “experiment.”
In his radio feature, Fichte attempts to sketch out the new situation through his usual journalistic method – a cumulative condensation of observations – to grasp as many aspects as possible as he travels through the country. He conducts interviews, collects, and hints at political connections. He often tries to understand opposite political positions: In the end, is there something to be said against nationalization? And he poses the crucial question of how free a regime can be considered: how are its minorities treated? How are they defined?
