The installation MEMORIA MÁQUINA brings together and stages heterogeneous stories about the 1973 military coup in Chile.

It is an exhibition of collective authorship and mestizo formats that evades the paralyzing forms of the “monument” by evoking the flow of political practices, resistance, and upheaval related to this historical event. The sky is a common metaphor, the molecular memories of the days of repression and torture, the beatings on the body and the language, the disappeared, clandestinity, and exile. But also the protests of the Chileans and the armed struggle against the dictatorship, the reconquest of dignity and the 2019 uprising, and the resistance in Wallpamu, the territory of the Mapuche indigenous people, which has been subject to permanent militarization for centuries.

All of this is staged in a series of stories that challenge official historiography. MEMORIA MÁQUINA allows interaction with a multifaceted cross-media material that allows visitors to take a different perspective on the events of September 11, 1973, and learn about micro-histories that the coup and the civil-military dictatorship were unable to erase.

An important part of the installation is a “memory machine” or a machine of memories in the form of a chair, designed on the basis of Unidad Popular‘s Synco cybernetic project. Also, an important part of the installation is the work DE SURA (NO)RTE by Gabriel Tagle Petrone, consisting of two audio collages derived from the sounds of the bombing of the Presidential Palace Palacio de la Moneda in Santiago de Chile on September 11, 1973, tinnitus sounds and sounds of the Hawker Hunter fighter plane – the plane used for the bombing raid.

The installation contains a text with the military-geographical location data of the Palacio de la Moneda and the population of the San Gregorio slum in Santiago, which establishes a connection to the strategies of repression during the Pinochet dictatorship when planes and helicopters were flown at low altitudes to terrorize the population. The installation is accompanied by a “manual” and a sculpture of the SURA missile deployed by the Hawker Hunter on September 11, 1973.

Artistic direction: Álvaro Garreaud