The Chilean culture under the government of Gabriel Boric resembles a large Assyrian tomb: everything seems possible and, at the same time, nothing is. The best symbol of this is TVN, which lives to lease studies for parties and films, fulfilling enviable fidelity, the aphorism attributed to Eugenio Tironi: “The best cultural policy of a government is not to have cultural policy.”
A president surrounded by artists, musicians and writers – inveterate guide, frustrated writer, friend of actors such as Mario Horton and Elisa Zulueta – has achieved the unthinkable: that his passion for culture is not infected with anyone, that his love for the arts is a personal phenomenon that implied absolutely nothing. Except for a government worried about safety or macroeconomics the applause that decided to miss the country’s theaters and cinemas.
This president was expected to avenge the helplessness of being able to reinvent the culture. If I could not change the economic model, I could change the symbolic landscape in which it develops. If I could not change the story, I could tell it better in a public channel that was not the deficit copy of private channels. But nothing happened. Even less than that.
Nothing takes the last minister of the branch, Carolina Arredondo Marzán, with enumerating, with his perfectly calibrated voice of actress, a list of supermarket of unlikely laws and budgets. Its enumerations do not clear the generalized sensation of stagnation and lack of direction.
“Against Piñera we were better” is the phrase that no one dares to pronounce in a cultural field made monothemá, complainant and condescending. Against Piñera, all united behind the prophetic beard of Raúl Zurita, the artists considered something that today is unthinkable: to dismiss a Minister of Culture. Mauricio Rojas barely lasted a weekend in office. He annulled a couple of contracts, went to lunch and spend the weekend with the family … and did not return. They were enough to tear down their previous statements on human rights. Rudo and nothing subtle, he believed – like so many converts – to have militated and have exiled just like many of those who answered him, gave him the right to direct them. That it was enough to be one of them. I did not know that, in culture as in any army that is respected, traitors shoots, not for hatred or resentment but because of the quite realistic fear that their example will be contagious.
The culture of “the below signers” took refuge in the Museum of Memory to point out its territory: the pain of the dictatorship, the memory of the wounds. There, in that pain, the conceptual art of each, the rock of the prisoners, the art actions of the mares of the Apocalypse, the Radrigán and Griffero theater was also born. That is, the classics. The dictatorship as a foundation, the coup as a birth certificate.
That is why the discretion with which the Government commemorated the 50 years: loose series, repetitive books, recycled works. The resignation under pressure of Patricio Fernández as presidential advisor was the most loud of the anniversary, even though there were no demonstrations from the signatories. Silence in the ranks. Even Chilean writers who usually visit the issue of the dictatorship – I think in Nona Fernández or Alejandro Zambra – abstained writing about 50 years.
Where did the energy of those actors, musicians and writers who, behind Zurita, knocked Rojas? The outbreak passed and the convention passed: two promised lands that left the cultural world in the most implacable desert that is remembered. The Boric government is also happening, and with him the illusion that, finally, one of ours ruled. We forgot something essential: a frustrated writer is almost always a frustrating politician.
Piñera wanted to buy the culture and courted Jorge Edwards and Vargas Llosa. He appointed Roberto Ampuero in foreign relations, which in foreign policy showed the unpredictable imagination that his prose lacks (although as a minister he lacked the same thing that lacks as a writer: to be credible).
Boric, on the other hand, did not need to conquer anyone: culture surrendered at his feet without asking for anything. But the world he inherited was not that of enthusiastic protesters who knocked Reds, but an ecosystem of groups that had learned to distrust individual talent. Rech (Chlenic writers network), Rauch (Network of Authors of Chile), Lastesis, one thousand m2, open skies, Latin American and independent editorial cooperative, for giving only some examples. Groups that first rebelled against the individual and then – almost inevitably – against talent. A personal note: in November 2019 I was summoned to an assembly of writers to pronounce us on the outbreak. We met at the Central House of the University of Chile, led by Nona Fernández and Jaime Huenún. Ideas, manifestos, a collective story, a great novel in the process that we were all writing in Red emerged. A young man interrupted, covering himself one of his eyes, to notice that any individual show would violate the pain of the mutilated eyes. Warned, we did nothing concrete.
If something explains the mediocrity of many works about the outbreak and the feminist May is that fear of offending the collective. A satisfied look that coincides with linguistic tourism full of the naive-engineer of Andrés Montero, perhaps the most visible voice of those times. Clean, the novel that with more successful criticism and readers reflected that, suffers from the social tourism of Montero, of a pedagogical Manichaeism, remembering Soviet socialist realism. Pinochet became a vampire. Feminism, choreography.
Fine Arts closes the government with two good exhibitions – Monvoisin and Matta – two safe numbers that could be in any government, such as TVN programming, only now accompanied by an unprecedented deficit that first puts its existence in something more than doubts.
And yet, someone could find in the poor and gentle self -confidence of the films History and Geography, People in the Dragon or Denomination of Origin something of the spirit of the time: a way of
Look at Chile – still and its miseries – without grandiloquence, from satire and tenderness. Something that we could call the Boric culture, or culture under the distracted and gentle kingdom of Prince Gabriel. Provincial to the marrow, these new Chilean comedies are, however, open to the world. As out of context and as close as non -labatut candles that can only have been written by a Chilean, but one who learned to be in the Netherlands and English.
A fresh air that is also breathed in Futrono, by Cecilia Armijo; Clandestine, by Salvador Young; Call Center, by Pilli Arteaga; Carmen, from Romina Pisto; Strong water, by Simón Soto; Kramp, by María José Ferrada or when we were not anyone, by Francisco Díaz Klaassen. Or in the family business essay by Álvaro Campos.
These and other artists seem to live anchored to memory or nostalgia, but in a world where the only sure thing is that nothing is safe. Meanwhile, the rest of the cultural field lives fearfully that, if the radical right comes to power, cut all budgets. Many interesting projects – and many others very expendable – hang from the fragile thread of a cultural battle that despises everything that mortals call culture.
The only thing we know who cannot live without it is that, probably, it will survive. And maybe in the obstacles that await her finds the answers that those who said they love her – but they never looked into her eyes – they didn’t know how to give her on time.
