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Mónica Mayer and Lotty Rosenfeld: erasing the boundary between life and art

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Mónica Mayer and Lotty Rosenfeld: erasing the boundary between life and art

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Content MÓNICA MAYER AND LOTTY ROSENFELD:
ERASING THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN LIFE AND ART
by
Nahui Ollin Garcia
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
(CURATORIAL PRACTICES AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE)
May 2022
Copyright 2022 Nahui Ollin Garcia
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures iii
Introduction 1
Section 1: Mónica Mayer
Case Study: El Tendedero (1978)
Iterations: Resistance from Within
7
11
16
Section 2: Lotty Rosenfeld
Case Study: No + (1983-)
Ephemerality and Permanence in Mujeres por la Vida
23
29
33
Section 3: Erasing the Boundary Between Life and Art 36
Bibliography 48
Appendix of Figures 52
iii
List of Figures

Section I: Mónica Mayer

Fig. 1.1 Mónica Mayer, El tendedero, 1978, Museo de Arte Moderno Mexico City,
Mexico.

Fig. 1.2 Mónica Mayer, participant response from El tendedero, 1978, Museo de Arte
Moderno Mexico City, Mexico.

Fig. 1.3 Mónica Mayer, participants responses from El tendedero, 1978, Museo de Arte
Moderno Mexico City, Mexico.

Fig. 1.4 Mónica Mayer, El tendedero, 2016, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo
(University Museum Contemporary Art, MUAC), Mexico City, Mexico.

Fig. 1.5 a-b Mónica Mayer, participant responses from El tendedero, 2016, Universidad
Autónoma de Mexico, UNAM), Mexico City, Mexico, photograph by Victor
Lerma.

Section II: Lotty Rosenfeld

Fig. 2.1 Colectivo Acciones de Arte, No+, 1983, Río Mapocho, Chile.

Fig. 2.2 Lotty Rosenfeld, Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (A mile of crosses on
the pavement), 1979, Santiago, Chile.

Fig. 2.3 Colectivo Acciones de Arte, No+, date unknown, Santiago, Chile,
https://hemi.nyu.edu/hemi/es/hidvl-profiles/item/501-cada-no-
mas?tmpl=component&print=1.

Fig. 2.4 Vicente Huidobro, Paysage, 1917, Horizon Carré, Paris, France.

Fig. 2.5 Mujeres por la vida, Decimos No+ Porque Somos+ (We Say No More Because
We Are No More), 1986, Santiago, Chile.

Fig. 2.6 Mujeres por la vida, No+ Porque Somos+: Día Internacional de la Mujer (No
More Because We Are More: International Women’s Day), 1986, Santiago, Chile.

Section III: Erasing the Boundary Between Life and Art
Fig. 3.1 Ibero Students, “Cuelga a tu abusador,” 2019, Universidad Iberoamericana
(Ibero), Mexico City, Mexico. https://lasillarota.com/lacaderadeeva/cuelga-a-tu-
abusador-quadri-aparece-en-tendedero-de-uia-el-lo-niega-/369760.

iv
Fig. 3.2 Ibero Students, participant responses from “Cuelga a tu abusador,” 2019,
Universidad Iberoamericana (Ibero), Mexico City, Mexico.
https://lasillarota.com/lacaderadeeva/cuelga-a-tu-abusador-quadri-aparece-en-
tendedero-de-uia-el-lo-niega-/369760.

Fig. 3.3 Feminist activists, “MEXICO FEMICIDIA,” 2021, Palacio Nacional (National
Palace), Mexico City, Mexico.

Fig. 3.4 Feminist activists, “NO+ VIOLENCIA,” 2021, Palacio Nacional (National
Palace), Mexico City, Mexico.
1
Introduction
This thesis studies the utilization of text and image in art as protests against gender-based
violence in Mexico and Chile. I focus on two case studies, created only five years apart by two
pioneers of Latin American feminist art: Mónica Mayer (b. Mexico, 1955-present) and Lotty
Rosenfeld (b. Chile, 1943-2020). Mayer’s El tendedero (1978-) consists of a dialogical
installation that emboldens women to share experiences of sexual abuse by writing them on pink
index cards and hanging them on a clothesline. Rosenfeld’s No+ (1983-) employs a protest
slogan that emerged during Chile’s military dictatorship and has become emblematic of the
women’s movement. Both of these projects condemn sexual violence through the use of words,
transmitted intergenerationally since their first iteration.
Divided into three sections, the thesis is anchored in three main arguments: the social
circumstances in which El tendedero and No+ emerged; the role that text played in the artworks’
transmission to succeeding generations of feminist groups; and the emotional relief that women
experienced as participants of these artworks. I investigate how El tendedero developed in
institutional spaces such as the Museo de Arte Moderno (Museum of Modern Art, MAM) and
the Universidad Iberoamericana (Ibero) in Mexico City while No+ spread in the streets of Chile
and, later, in Mexico. The thesis uniquely explores the individual contributions of Mayer and
Rosenfeld as contemporary artists rather than members of art collectives.
Mayer and Rosenfeld began their careers in the late 1960s and 1970s, a period of political
turmoil that solidified the core foundation of their practice: speaking truth to power. In 1968,
students from the Universidad Autónoma de México (Autonomous University of México,
UNAM) took to Reforma Avenue in Mexico City to protest the Olympic Games’ inauguration,
criticizing the government’s financial investment on the international sports event instead of the
2
public school system.
1
In response, President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz ordered the military arrest of
protestors, an event that led to the murder of at least 200 students at the Plaza de las Tres
Culturas, known as the Massacre of Tlatelolco.
2
While Mayer viewed the massacre as an attack
on students’ rights, it also encouraged her to adopt an attitude of dissent and demand changes in
Mexico City’s fine arts institution, the Academy of San Carlos.
3

Two years after the Massacre of Tlatelolco, in 1970, Chile celebrated the appointment of
President Salvador Allende, the first socialist candidate elected under a democratic electoral.
Three years later, Military General Augusto Pinochet executed a coup d’état that changed the
course of Chile’s history, enforcing an autocratic Military Junta for the next seventeen years.
Like Mayer, Rosenfeld lived through a period of severe state surveillance, one in which “nightly
curfews caused an epidemic of self-censorship that affected what people said, how they
interacted with one another, how they did business, and what they did in their free time.”
4

Rosenfeld, who studied lithography at the Escuela de Artes Aplicadas de la Universidad de
Chile, continued her artistic career despite the “apagón cultural” (“cultural blackout”), the
sudden erasure of cultural production in literature and art.
Confronted with political instability, Mayer and Rosenfeld sought refuge in collective
action. Mayer founded the collective Polvo de Gallina Negra (Black Hen’s Powder, PGN; 1983-
1993) with performer Maris Bustamante, which allowed both artists to question female
stereotypes through satire. Rosenfeld founded Colectivo Acciones de Arte (Art Actions

1
Mexico became the first Latin American country to host the Olympic Games, pressuring Diaz
Ordaz to portray a progressive and modernized image of the country.
2
Cite numbers
3
Monica Mayer, Rosa chillante: mujeres y performance en México (Mexico:
CONACULTA/FONCA, 2004), 14.
4
Jane D. Griffin, “Chilean Literary Culture Since 1970: A Panorama,” in The Labor of
Literature, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 18.
3
Collective, CADA; 1979-1985) with Raúl Zurita, Damiela Eltit, Bernando Balcells, and Juan
Castillo, which responded to Pinochet’s regime by organizing public interventions. Both PGN
and CADA sought people’s engagement, creating spaces for public dialogue and reflection; they
also foregrounded the artists’ role as women, living in a patriarchal society that demanded
compliancy. Outside of the art sphere, Mayer participated in Women’s International Day
marches and pro-choice protests, as registered by photographer Ana Victoria Jiménez. Rosenfeld
contributed to the feminist organization Mujeres por la Vida with art interventions, which
mobilized thousands of women to address gender inequality in Santiago.
As I deepened my understanding of these two artists, I noticed a lack of scholarship on
their individual contributions to the feminist movement outside of PGN and CADA. In the
autobiographical book Rosa Chillante: mujeres y performance en México (2004), Mayer
describes scholars’ interest in “la generación de Los Grupos” (“the generation of The Grupos”).
This generation—which Mayer and Bustamente contributed to with PGN—demonstrated a
commitment toward collective work during the seventies, with many artists working together in
defense of gender equality, same-sex rights, and environmental justice.
5
While these collectives
helped circulate Mexican art across the Latin American continent, Mayer acknowledges how
little attention has been paid to individual artists such as the performer Marcos Kurtycz.
6
These
sentiments are mirrored by Mexican curator Karen Cordero who, in the exhibition catalog of
Radical Women: Latin American Artists 1960-1985, writes:
“The radical impact of these works by women artists on the cultural scene and on the
possibilities for self-representation by women in a broader sense in Mexico, as well as on
the representation of vulnerability and difference in relation to conventional constructs of
gender and sexual identity, has only much more recently become the object of art

5
Mayer, Rosa Chillante, 38.
6
Ibid., 15.
4
historical analysis and begun to be integrated into the museological and critical narratives
of modern and contemporary Mexican art.”
7

In recent US-based exhibitions such as Radical Women (2017) at the Hammer Museum and
Wack: Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los
Angeles, Mayer’s oeuvre is introduced as collective and performance-driven; in response, this
thesis focuses on the overlooked relationship between collectivism and text-based works. Like
Mayer who formed part of Los Grupos, Rosenfeld formed part of the Escena Avanzada
(Advanced Scene), a term coined by Chilean art critic Nelly Richard. After Chile’s military coup
d’état, Richard witnessed a new generation of emerging artists. They confronted Chile’s
censorship laws by rejecting traditional forms of artmaking and inventing a new, covert style that
could subvert the regime without facing penalization. More recently, Richard has collaborated
with Rosenfeld in other projects; she curated the Chilean Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in
2015, where Rosenfeld presented the installation Poeticas de la Disidencia (Poetics of
Dissidence, 2015) and the film, No, no fui feliz (No, I was not happy, 2015), which displayed
images of previous performances with CADA.
8

The recent inclusion of Mayer and Rosenfeld in curatorial projects evinces the nascent
scholarship on Latin American female artists within US institutions. To further the discourse on
each artist, I draw inspiration from the book Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of
Liberation by Brazilian conceptual artist Luis Camitizer. In the chapter “Poetry and Literature,”
Camitzer explains how Chilean poets Vicente Huidobro and Nicanor Parra escaped the two-

7
Karen Cordero, “Corporeal Apparitions/ Beyond Appearances: Women and Bodily Discourse in
Mexican Art, 1960-1985,” in Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 (Los Angeles:
Hammer Museum, 2017), 271.
8
Richard, Nelly, Kristina Cordero, Paz Errázuriz, and Lotty Rosenfeld. Poéticas de la disidencia
= Poetics of dissent: Paz Errázuriz - Lotty Rosenfeld. Santiago, Chile: Consejo Nacional de la
Cultura y las Artes, 2015.

5
dimensionality of poetry (written on a book) by writing poems on physical objects or in the
shape of objects.
9
In another chapter, “The Aftermath of Tucuman Arde,” Camitzer addresses the
contribution of Southern American collectives such as CADA and “Los Grupos” during a period
of political repression in Chile, Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil.
10
While Camitzer separates these
issues into separate chapters, I connect the dematerialization of poetry in Chile with the work of
Rosenfeld to illuminate the artist’s relationship with text.
My interest in Latin America’s feminist movement is informed by personal experiences,
which, with encouragement from Professor Suzanne Lacy, I feel compelled to share.
11
Born and
raised in Veracruz, Mexico, during the early 2000’s, I lived with an unwavering fear of being
kidnapped: stories of violent deaths circulated on local and national television, describing the
abduction and eventual murder of young women and girls. In the first seven years of my life, I
witnessed how my three-year old cousin was taken away in a local mall by a group of strangers,
who were stopped when the police intervened. A year or two later, I experienced being pulled
away from my mother’s arms by a stranger in Mexico City’s subway; when my mother realized
what was happening, the subway doors opened, we jumped off the wagon, and the perpetrator
ran away. I responded to pedestrians with a sense of anxiety and have few memories playing
outside unsupervised or walking to school alone. I wanted to feel safe.
By 2007, my mother and I moved to the United States. My mother—who had made
several attempts to leave Veracruz—began to exhibit severe anger episodes which, while

9
Luis Camitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation, (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2007), 131.
10
Ibid., 60.
11
Here, I refer to the phrase “the personal is political,” first used by feminist author Carol
Hanisch as part of an essay of the same name in Notes from the Second Year: Women’s
Liberation (1970).
6
abnormal, seemed justified due to the recent move and lack of support system. Encouraged by
my then-stepfather, she shared something with me that dramatically changed my relationship to
my family: her uncle sexually abused her for almost a decade throughout her childhood. When
she made the decision to share this information with her relatives, all of whom lived in Mexico,
she experienced shame and blame.
For my mother, speaking out unloaded an overwhelming confusion; eventually therapy
helped lead a more stable life. To quote bell hook’s words, we “come from dysfunctional
families in which we were taught we were not okay, where we were shamed, verbally and/or
physically abused, and emotionally neglected even as were also taught to believe that we were
loved.”
12
By accepting that love and abuse cannot coexist, people can begin to heal childhood
wounds. The feminist movement in Latin America has allowed women to discuss instances of
sexual abuse, often anonymously; anonymity grants them protection from their perpetrator(s) and
from being stigmatized by their nearby communities. While it is difficult to revisit my childhood,
I can begin to image a different reality for the next generation of women by de-normalizing the
lack of safety that I felt in the streets and at home.
My interest in Mayer’s El tendedero and Rosenfeld’s No+ is rooted in these artworks’
potentials to help women protest gender-based violence through words. Art historian Grant
Kester’s Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication plays an important role in my
understanding of Mayer’s and Rosenfeld’s works as dialogical. Kester defines “dialogical art” as
socially engaged works requiring the active audience participation, and the exchange of ideas to
reach a final goal. Dialogical artworks are typically led by an artist who has an end-goal in mind:
the understanding of one another. Also important to my considerations, scholar of Latin

12
bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (New York: Harper Perennial, 2000), 6.
7
American art Diana Taylor discusses how ephemeral gestures such as protests and performances
are transmitted through the spoken word, therefore holding a stronger significance than written
historical accounts. I integrate Taylor’s scholarship in The Archive and the Repertoire:
Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas to study how El tendedero and No+ are
transmitted generationally, especially since both depend on a dialogue (the spoken word) and on
textual accounts (the written word).
I conclude the thesis with “Erasing the Boundary Between Art and Life,” an analysis that
demonstrates the transmissibility of El tendedero and No+ among feminist groups in Mexico and
Chile. Contemporary feminist women who have adopted the work of Mayer and Rosenfeld do
not directly associate themselves with the artists; yet, they have gained the attention of the public
and presented a new way of demanding social change through artistic collaboration. I hope that
my new approach to Mayer and Rosenfeld’s praxes will inspire scholars, curators, and artists
interested in advancing the discourse of Latin American feminist art. By tracing the development
of El tendedero and No+, women can fuel the lasting momentum of the feminist movement by
strengthening their solidarity bonds, internationally and intergenerationally, founded on writing.

Chapter 1: Mónica Mayer
Mónica Mayer (b. 1954), a multidisciplinary artist from Mexico City, creates work that
grapples with feminist expressions. Her practice has been influenced by the suppression of
student voices during the Massacre of Tlatelolco (1968), the Feminist Studio Workshop in Los
Angeles, and the rise of feminist art collectives in Mexico. While she is recognized as a pioneer
of performance art in Mexico, text has also played a central role in her projects. The primary
artwork explored in this section, El tendedero (1978), emboldens women to write down their
8
experiences with sexual harassment on index cards and hang them on a clothesline (fig. 1). In the
first part of this section, I will illustrate the progression of Mayer’s socio-political standpoint,
which propelled her to embrace a career in non-traditional forms of artmaking.
Mayer began her art education at the Academia de San Carlos in 1972, where she
familiarized herself with non-traditional forms of artmaking. Founded during the Spanish Empire
in 1781, San Carlos was Mexico’s epicenter for European art training that prioritized painting,
drawing, and sculpture, which, by the 1970s, most students rejected. As described by Mayer, the
seventies represented a period of academic experimentation; she learned under the tutelage of art
historian Juan Acha, art critic Armando Torres Michúa, and surrealist photographer Kati Horna,
while attending courses in semiotics, mass communication, and computer science.
13
Outside of
school, students assumed agency over their education and read authors such as John Dewey,
John Berger, Simone de Beauvoir, Walter Benjamin, and Paulo Freire.
14

They encouraged each
other to expand their knowledge of art theory and worked in collectives to contest ideas of
authority and authorship, while scrutinizing the European models taught in San Carlos.
In the late 1960s, following the Massacre of Tlatelolco, an atmosphere of revolt lingered
in academic institutions. The Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary
Party, PRI), which remained in office for seventy consecutive years, ordered the forced
disappearance of local journalists reporting the massacre, prompting people to protest. By 1974,
San Carlos students organized a strike to modify the school’s curriculum. Mayer recalls how
female students were excluded from the “student movement” by men who questioned their
creative ability, implying that motherhood diluted their artistry and could only contribute as

13
Monica Mayer, Rosa chillante, 14.
14
Ibid.
9
loving partners.
15
Thus, Mayer and her fellow female classmates met at the Escuela Nacional de
Artes Plásticas (National School of Plastic Arts, ENAP) to discuss gender issues in relation to
their work. While male and female students sought strategies to change the world around them,
women worked together to make their voices heard.
After graduating from San Carlos in 1976, Mayer visited the Feminist Studio Workshop
(FSW; 1973-1991) in Los Angeles, where she learned about socially engaged art. Founded by
artist Judy Chicago, FSW gave women the opportunity to discuss women’s issues, helping them
realize that their individual experiences were collective ones.
16
Mayer also assisted Suzanne
Lacy and Leslie Labowits in the activist group “Ariadne: A Social Network” and the collective’s
exhibition, Making it Safe, which addressed the rising number of rape-related cases in Ocean
Park, Santa Monica. Subsequently, Mayer graduated from Goddard College and wrote her thesis
on FSW entitled, Feminist Art: An Effective Political Tool (1980), with Lacy as her advisor.
17

Upon her return to Mexico, Mayer committed herself to Mexican audiences. Even though she
understood that her artistic practice would be well recognized in the United States, she wanted to
change the patriarchal power structures in her home country.
Inspired by FSW, Mayer founded the collective Polvo de Gallina Negra (Black Hen's
Powder, PGN; 1983-1993) with performance artist Maris Bustamante (b. 1949). PGN embraced
three central aims: to analyze women's role in the media, promote female artists' inclusion, and
alter Mexico's visual culture.
18
Through the use of humor, they sought to provoke the public with

15
Ibid., 16-17.
16
Monica Mayer, “De la vida y el arte como feminista,” n.paradoxa, no. 8 (1998): 39, accessed
August 15, 2021, https://www.ktpress.co.uk/pdf/nparadoxaissue8and9_Monica-Mayer_36-
58.pdf.
17
Mónica Mayer, Intimidades… o no. Arte, vida y feminismo (Mexico City: Editorial Diecisiete,
2021): 18.
18
Mayer, “De la vida y el arte como feminista,” 43.
10
performances such as, El respeto al derecho al cuerpo ajeno es la paz (1983; Respect for the
right to another's body is peace) which is recognized as the first performance art piece realized
in Latin America. As part of the performance, both artists dressed as witches and prepared a
magical potion to share with their audience, which was meant to symbolically scare away rapists.
El respeto al derecho al cuerpo ajeno es la paz references Benito Juarez, Mexico's first
Indigenous president, best known for proclaiming: "respect for others' rights is peace."
19
Other
performances included "Las mujeres artistas o se solicita esposa" (1984) and their most
ambitious intervention, "¡Madres!" (1987). PGN helped both artists examine their attitudes
toward motherhood, abortion rights, and sexual harassment. The collective came to an end after
ten years, when both Mayer and Bustamante started to form families and began to explore their
new, dual roles as mothers and artists.
As Mayer searched for alternative platforms to communicate with the public, she began
working as a columnist for the newspaper El Universal from 1988 to 2008. Her work primarily
focused on performance art, independent art spaces, and Mexico’s policies on culture. In a recent
interview with art historian Fabiola Iza, Mayer shared her experience as a writer:
Since the internet was not so common in those days, I did this through humor, an
accessible language, and constant references to pop culture… I tried to build bridges
between the reader’s daily life and contemporary art. I was fortunate to have Paco
Ignacio Taibo as my editor; he allowed me to write as I pleased. I could publish artworks
as articles. I could invent imaginary art competitions as a way to talk about women’s
roles in the art world, bestowing ironic awards and so on. I wanted to bring up questions
and let the audience reach their own conclusions.
20

19
Ibid., 43. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
20
Fabiola Iza, “Mónica Mayer” Artforum International, August 16, 2021, accessed on August
20, 2021, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/monica-mayer-talks-about-her-collected-
writings-86277.
11
Mayer was interested in the possibilities that writing could bring her; readers perusing El
Universal could learn about the artist’s feminist ideas without visiting an art institution or
attending her performances. Instead, they could begin to question their patriarchal beliefs and
issues surrounding women’s inequality in their offices, homes, and schools. Mayer further
explained how writing has played a critical role in her life since childhood; her interest in writing
began at eight years old and has continued to diversify in her practice through letters, articles,
blogs, performances, and text-based works.
21

Faced with Mexico's political turmoil, Mayer paved the way for alternative modes of
self-expression. Her fine arts education introduced her to the "student movement," where she
encountered sexism from male students and, as a result, became committed to women's liberation
within the arts. Over time, her desire to contest Mexico's patriarchal system and engage female
audiences increased; she adopted writing as a strategy of dissent. Whether she wrote articles or
organized performances, she sought methods to interact with non-artistic audiences in the hopes
of positively influencing their position on women's issues.

Case Study: El Tendedero (1978)
In the spring of 1978, the Museo de Arte Moderno (Modern Art Museum, MAM)
inaugurated the biennial, Salón 77-78 Nuevas tendencias: Pintura, escultura, video, audiovisual,
fotografía, conceptualismo (Salon 77-78, New Trends: Painting, sculpture, video, audiovisual,
photography, conceptualism). Museum director Fernando Gamboa invited a new generation of
artists to create work for the biennale, choosing the “city” as its unifying framework.
22
From the

21
Ibid.
22
Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda, “‘Mujeres que se visualizan’: (En)Gendering Archives and
Regimes of Media and Visuality in Post-1968 Mexico” (PhD diss., University of British
Columbia, 2008), 8.
12
76 works selected, feminist pioneers Magali Lara, Pola Weiss, and Mónica Mayer responded to
the curatorial premise by exploring women’s position in patriarchal society. Mayer, who was still
a student at the Academia de San Carlos, presented El tendedero (1978), a dialogical installation
that transgressed the divide between public and private spaces; the issues that women intimately
discussed at home were now discussed inside an art museum.
As a precedent to Nuevas tendencias, MAM previously organized the exhibition Mujer
como creadora y tema del arte (1975) to celebrate women's contributions to Mexican art. While
the exhibition featured famous painters such as Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, and Marysol
Worner Baz, most of the participating artists were men who objectified the female body and
portrayed women as “muses” or “objects.”
23
In De la vida y el arte como feminista (A personal
history of feminist art activism in Mexico), Mayer expresses her disappointment in the exhibition,
emphasizing the incongruence of honoring women’s legacy while, simultaneously, depicting
women through the male gaze.
24
She continues by stating that, as more female artists gained
visibility, they no longer depended on institutional exposure, but rather on curatorial strategies
that further advanced the discourse of their artistic production.
Along with Mujer como creadora y tema del arte, MAM dedicated its quarterly magazine
Artes Visuales to female artists. Directed by Latin American art historian Carla Stellweg, the
January/March issue featured transcribed interviews surrounding Linda Nochlin’s
groundbreaking essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971).
25
It also
featured critical pieces such as “Why Separate Women’s Art?” (1973) by Lucy Lippard, which

23
Mayer, “De la vida y el arte como feminista,” 37.
24
Ibid., 48.
25
Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Women, Art, & Power
(New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 148-178.
13
explored what male critics deemed as female imagery; and an interview between Judy Chicago,
Arlene Ravene and Los Angeles gallerist Zora Sweet Pinnery.
26
For Mayer, Chicago’s work
became a source of inspiration, encouraging her to join the activist group, Movimiento Feminista
Mexicano (The Feminist Mexican Movement). In 1975, Mayer reached out to Chicago and
visited the Feminist Studio Workshop in Los Angeles. Overall, Mujer como creadora y tema del
arte functioned as a catalyst in Mayer’s career, propelling her to investigate Mexico’s social
conditions and feminist practices.
To carry out El tendedero (1978), Mayer invited 800 women to answer the prompt:
“Como mujer, lo que más detesto de la ciudad es…” (As a woman, what I most detest about the
city is…). While the artist’s question sought an open-ended answer, the majority of the responses
centered around sexual harassment. Women complained, denounced, and described instances of
abuse, ranging from being called “mamacita” to getting spanked in the streets by male passersby
(fig. 2).
27
When Mayer collected their responses, written on pink index cards, she hung them in a
wooden clothesline inside the museum, hence the work’s title. The clothesline makes reference
to the Spanish-language phrase, “la ropa sucia se lava en casa” (the dirty laundry is washed at
home), which describes how sensitive issues must be discussed in private settings, especially
when it deals with family matters. The participant’s responses, in other words, reflected the
experiences that women were socially conditioned to keep secret (fig. 3).
28

26
Lucy Lippard, “Why separate Women’s Art?” in Art and Artists (New York: Hansom Books,
1973), 8-9.
27
Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda, “¿Cosas de Mujeres?: Feminist Networks of Collaboration in
1970s Mexico,” Artelogie 5 (2013): 12. Accessed August 9, 2021.
http://cral.in2p3.fr/artelogie/spip.php?article230
28
I make a personal connection here to the experiences mentioned in the introduction. In all
about love, bell hooks writes: “keeping family secrets often makes it impossible for extended
groups to build community.” In communicating traumatic events, women can begin to build a
support system that relates to or empathizes with their experiences. hooks, All About Love, 132.
14
After the biennial’s opening, Mayer received an unexpected surprise: visitors wrote
additional comments on the index cards, a gesture that prompted Mayer to activate subsequent
iterations of El tendedero, encouraging women to intervene in her work on-site. Mexican art
historian Rita Eder described El tendedero as a sociological work that relies on the use of
language, allowing women to reflect upon systems of oppression through words.
29
From her
point of view, Mayer and her contemporaries did not hide behind the oneiric symbolism that
characterized the Surrealist movement, embodied by Kahlo and Carrington.
30
Instead, they
expressed their discontent, fears, and desires in a straightforward manner; through their work,
they employed a visual language to communicate, encourage, and relate to one another.
In Eder’s analysis of El tendedero, the art critic briefly references Lara’s work and its
integration of language. Lara formed part of the collective, Grupo Março, which performed street
interventions by asking passersby to write poems on the pavement, based on randomized phrases
written on small pieces of paper.
31
Unlike Eder’s analysis of El tendedero, the art historian
centers on the collective’s experimental character rather than its potential to reframe women’s
understanding of their body and sexuality. In doing so, she implicitly highlights El tendedero’s
transgressive significance as a sociological installation that gives female participants a platform
to protest sexual harassment, perpetuated by men and normalized by society as part of the city
landscape.
At the time of the biennale, women’s concerns centered around three major social issues:
sexual harassment, domestic abuse, and the criminalization of abortion. Mexican philosopher Eli

29
Rita Eder, “Las mujeres artistas en México.” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas
13, no. 50 (1982): 258.
30
Ibid., 259.
31
Ibid.
15
Bartra describes the seventies as a period when women became aware of their “condicion
femenina” (female condition), a term used to describe women’s socioeconomic oppression.
32
In
1974, President Luis Echeverria modified the Mexican constitution to legalize contraceptives and
promote sex education. His political decision did not seek women’s liberation, but rather aimed
to regulate Mexico’s poverty levels by controlling its growing population. These decisions
caused outrage among women who sought abortion rights, which remained an illegal matter and
could lead to three years in prison.
By December 1977, approximately 30 women gathered outside the Cámara de Diputados
(Mexico’s Chamber of Deputies) to protest the criminalization of abortion in Mexico City.
Mayer was one of the attendees alongside her mother Lilian Lucido, who later became inspired
to join the activist group Movimiento Nacional de Mujeres (Women’s National Movement).
33

The following year in 1978, the year of the biennale’s inauguration, at least 85,000 rape cases
had been reported across the nation and, unfortunately, barely any of them had resulted in the
imprisonment or penalization of the perpetrator.
34
As a result, women from diverse ages and
backgrounds began to organize amongst each other; to break the silence and participate in
forums, conferences, and protests, demanding deep structural changes.
By using words, El tendedero developed a language of dissent that bridged the link
between an art museum and feminist protests. As participants wrote on index cards, they
communicated with each other without fearing social consequences; as they read the others’

32
Eli Bartra, “Tres décadas de neofeminismo en México,” in Feminismo en México, ayer y hoy
(Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2002), 46.
33
Mayer, “De la vida y el arte como feminista,” 38.
34
For a further discussion on gender-based violence in Mexico during the seventies, see Eli
Bartra, “Mujeres y política en México: Aborto, violación y muejres golpeadas,” Política y
Cultural, no. 1 (Mexico, 1992): 23-34.
16
experiences, they discovered that street harassment was a collective experience rather than an
isolated event, one that was rooted in the objectification of the female body. They used explicit
and definite language, providing Mayer with a female-oriented view of Mexico’s city landscape.
While women’s experiences varied, they had one thing in common: they all had the ability to
write in the same language and a desire to use it against the patriarchy.

Iterations: Resistance from Within
Since El tendedero's debut at the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1978, Mónica Mayer has
continued to reactivate it at institutional spaces. In this section, I will focus on the exhibition, Si
tiene dudas… pregunte: Una retrocolectiva de Mónica Mayer (When in Doubt… Ask: A
Retrocollective by Mónica Mayer) at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo
(University Museum of Contemporary Art, MUAC).
35
Curated by Mexican art historian Karen
Cordero in 2016, Si tiene dudas… pregunte is the only existing retrospective on Mayer's fifty-
year-long career. The exhibition encapsulates the artist's commitment to Mexico's evolving
feminist discourse as well as women's relationship to the private and public landscape. By
adhering to the museum's local context, Cordero presents Mayer's installation as a repository of
women's testimonies and a tool for institutional change.
Si tiene dudas… pregunte adopted a museological approach that differs from most
retrospectives. Instead of celebrating the artist's genius, Cordero explored the public's influence
over Mayer's career. The exhibition title is a play on words; "retro-collective" is a term coined by
the Argentine scholar María Laura Rosa, which evokes the symbiosis between artistic

35
Karen Cordero and Mónica Mayer, Si tiene dudas… pregunte: Una exposición retrocolectiva
(Mexico: Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México), 8.
17
individuality and collectivism.
36
Si tiene dudas… pregunte also presents a verbal command that
motivates the public to engage with exhibition materials and ask questions. MUAC's
Interpretation and Education Department organized artist-led workshops, guided visits, and
seminars in collaboration with UNAM's Gender Studies program.
37
Each program foregrounded
the relevance of political engagement, suggesting that the exhibition is activated through visitors'
reflective, critical, and physical participation.
Curatorially, Si tiene dudas… pregunte comprised three main sections: the aesthetics of
feminist art, the relationship between the personal and the political, and the dialogues that Mayer
has sparked throughout her career. The exhibition featured early drawings by the artist from the
Academia de San Carlos, photographs documenting her participation in protests by Ana Victoria
Jiménez, and the activation of pieces such as Performance parasito, which has performed with
her partner, artist Victor Lerma, since 2015.
38
Mayer installed a site-specific version of El
tendedero at the gallery's entrance, which also functioned as the exit—a symbolic gesture that
inaugurated and ended the retrospective (fig. 4). She hung each index card on a clothesline,
which invited participants to document instances of dissent with the question: "Qué has hecho o
dicho en contra del acoso?" (What have you done or said against [sexual] harassment?). Based
on the answers received, anonymous women described traumatic events beginning at a young
age, citing examples of physical molestation and verbal harassment in primary school.
Women's testimonies interacted with one another; visitors could read the cards—aloud or
in silence—as they entered or left the corridors and formulate their own opinion of the show.
Mexican scholar Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda connects El tendedero to old forms of archiving,

36
Ibid., 24.
37
Ibid., 31.
38
Ibid., 34-35.
18
traditionally set up by hanging files in rows of ropes. She suggests that archives gain a
transformative meaning when they share "a common subject [and] are combined by either
physically tying them together in a binder of some sort or grouping them as a loose collection."
39

These ideas are reminiscent of those developed in Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever: A Freudian
Impression. Derrida delves into the etymology of the Greek word, "arkhe," which roughly
translates to “origin,” “command,” or “authority,”
40
framing the archive as a repository of power
and recognizing Western cultures’ "feverish desire" to withhold information and convey control.
Seen through the lens of Derrida's Archive Fever, Mayer’s El tendedero functions as a
repository of power and, therefore, a tool for institutional change. The feminist installation
diverges from official power structures by inviting women to contribute their testimonies to the
repository, thereby expanding the definition of “arkhe.” Now it is women who are in an
authoritative position, who collect information, and report instances of sexual violence often
missing from Mexico’s legal databases. As explained by the French theorist, private documents
that become public experience an institutional" transition, which "does not always mean from
secret to nonsecret."
41
I associate these ideas with Mexico's judicial system. When journalist
Lydia Cacho reported children's sexual abuse by a pedophile ring from Cancún in 2004, her
testimony became public; yet the details of the events remained concealed from justice in a court
that refused to press charges.
42
Similarly, El tendedero gathered more than 7,500 responses
collected by Mayer and Cordero, which registered women's willingness to protest based on

39
Sepúlveda, “¿Cosas de Mujeres?” 10.
40
Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25,
no. 2 (1995): 9.
41
Ibid., 10.
42
Fiona Jeffries and Lydia Cacho, “Lydia Cacho: Dangerous Journalism,” in Nothing to Lose but
Our Fear, (London: Zed Books, 2015), 119.
19
personal experiences. Even though Mexico's judicial system remained the same, the installation
became its own repository of power by providing female voices with a sense of safety and
camaraderie.
The archive is a subject of study that has manifested in other areas of Mayer’s practice.
Her conceptual project, Archiva: Obras Maestras del arte feminista en México (Archival
Masterpieces of feminist art in Mexico, 2013), selected 76 artworks by Mexican female artists,
including Lorena Wolffer and video artist Pola Weiss.
43
While some of the participating artists
do not identify themselves as feminists, Cordero explains that the content of their work responds
to feminist concerns and, thus, were included.
44
As a result, Archiva is a repository that disrupts
hegemonic narratives of art by evincing the lack of support given to Mexican women. In the case
of El tendedero, the repository centers around gender-based violence. It begins with an insightful
question and, once all the answers have been provided, develops into conversations, usually
organized by museums in the form of workshops or conferences.
During the course of Si tiene dudas… pregunte, Mayer was invited by UNAM Professor
Ignacio Lozano Verduzco to form part of the “V Jornada de Equidad de Género: Salud,
Diversidad y Ciudadanía” (5th Conference on Gender Equity: Health, Diversity and Citizenship),
as part of an initiative by the university’s Department of Psychology.
45
The other panelists
included Professor Jaime Géliga Quiñonez, Professor José Antonio Romero, and María Laura
Ise, who acted as a representative of the feminist collective, M.O.R.R.A. During the conference,

43
Mónica Mayer, “ARCHIVA: Obras maestras del arte feminista en México,” Pinto mi raya
(blog), last modified September 3, 2014, https://www.pintomiraya.com/redes/archivo-ana-
victoria-jimenez/item/158-archiva.html
44
Cordero, “Corporeal Apparitions/ Beyond Appearances,” 272.
45
Mónica Mayer, “El tendedero de la facultad de filosofía,” Pinto mi raya (blog), last modified
October 6, 2016, http://pregunte.pintomiraya.com/index.php/la-obra-viva/el-tendedero/item/76-
el-tendedero-de-la-facultad-de-filosofia
20
Mayer gave a brief description of El tendedero, starting with the first iteration at Nuevas
Tendencias and concluding with Si tiene dudas… pregunte. Professor Lozano Verduzco
suggested that female students should activate the clothesline under Mayer's guidance at the end
of the conference, which mainly focused on feminist art.
In her blog, Mayer expressed that, before the conference, she noticed an "emergency
button" in every bathroom stall of the Psychology Department, used to alert UNAM's security
services in case of an emergency. While talking to the panelists, she learned that men's
bathrooms did not have the same button, prompting her to scrutinize the school's facilities and its
normalization of sexual harassment. As a result, her new version of El tendedero asked students:
“¿Que siento cuando entro al baño y veo un botón de emergencia? ¿Qué podemos hacer para que
no sean necesarias estas acciones? (What do I feel when I go into the women's bathroom and see
an emergency button? What can we do so that these buttons are not necessary?). These questions
sought a deeper understanding of students' psyche that focused less on acts of resistance and
more on emotional reactions (fig. 5 a-b). Mayer, who represented a figure of authority to
students, could validate their testimonies and demand a response to the university's higher-
ranked faculty. Women could speak out and, at the same time, feel protected from the school.
When describing Mayer's work, Cordero links it to Hélène Cixous' literary oeuvre.
46
In
her seminal essay "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1976), Cixous describes the social conditions that
discouraged women from writing, which prevented them from claiming authorship over
linguistic expressions.
47
She asks women to implicate themselves into history; to describe "a
world all her own which she had been secretly haunting since early childhood" through the use

46
Cordero, Si tiene dudas… pregunte, 26.
47
Hélène Cixous. "The Laugh of the Medusa," Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 875-93, accessed September 5,
2021, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173239.
21
of words.
48
For UNAM students, their world appeared to be tainted with emotions of fear and
anguish. Their answers ranged from thinking that sexual harassment would never end to more
specific, detailed events. For example, on one occasion, a man hid inside the bathroom to
secretly photograph women and, when a student pressed the button, she realized that it did not
work. Although she and other students stopped the man, the university security guards did not
take any legal actions against him.
For Grant Kester, dialogical projects such as El tendedero become safe spaces where
participants can disassociate themselves from being "observers" and adopt a vulnerable
position.
49
As a key example, Kester posits Suzanne Lacy's The Roof is on Fire (1993-1994): a
program where students from Oakland’s public high schools discussed issues of sex, family, and
drugs with community members and officers in the city’s police department. He writes: "In The
Roof is on Fire, Latino and African American teenagers maintained control over their self-image
and transcended the one-dimensional clichés promulgated by mainstream news and
entertainment media,” which portrayed them as violent and uneducated.
50
Similarly, the call and
response strategy that Mayer employs shines a light on women's internalized beliefs. Even
though Mexico’s judicial system rarely punishes instances of harassment, the abovementioned
students understood the security guard’s actions as inappropriate. They transcended their role as
compliant and, instead, demanded institutional change.
Moreover, young women from the Psychology Department were able to denormalize acts
of sexual aggression, which had until then formed part of men’s socially accepted misconduct. In

48
Cixous. "The Laugh of the Medusa,” 876.
49
Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 85.
50
Ibid., 4.
22
Mexico City’s public subway, for example, several cars have been designated for women only to
protect them against abuse, especially during high-traffic hours. Recently, Mayer expressed her
disappointment at seeing how El tendedero’s written responses have barely changed since
1978.
51
However, she does acknowledge that, at least today, more women are joining collectives
in search of justice. On April 24, 2019, before the closing of Mayer’s exhibition at MUAC,
journalist Andrea Noel and the editor of the newspaper El Universal, Natalia de la Rosa,
organized “movilización del #A24” (movement #A24), a major protest against the rising
numbers of femicides.
52
The public attention given to the protest and Si tiene dudas… pregunte
allowed women outside of the museum to engage in difficult conversations about sexual abuse.
For Mayer, artworks are 80% the context in which they are shown and 20% the issues
that they seek to address.
53
At MUAC and UNAM, El tendedero adapted to two separate
contexts. On the one hand, MUAC’s installation registered instances of dissent that illustrated
women’s willingness to speak out while, on the other, UNAM’s initiative documented instances
of emotional aggression that affected student’s wellbeing. Generally, women do not come
forward with stories of sexual assault due to the lack of empathetic responses that they receive
from society; the lack of support from family and health institutions may sometimes be more
hurtful than the incident itself. With this mind, El tendedero welcomes women into a space
where they can register their testimonies and create a repository of knowledge that enriches—
and differs from—governmental statistics.

51
Mayer, Si tiene dudas… pregunte, 162.
52
Mónica Mayer, “El tendedero y sus saltos a la cultura popular,” Pinto mi raya (blog) last
modified June 23, 2016, http://pregunte.pintomiraya.com/index.php/la-obra-viva/el-
tendedero/item/68-el-tendedero-y-sus-saltos-a-la-cultura-popular
53
Ibid.
23
Section II: Lotty Rosenfeld
As an emerging artist, Lotty Rosenfeld (b. Chile, 1943-2020) lived through Augusto
Pinochet's seventeen-year-long military dictatorship. Her early work responded to—and was
exacerbated by—the legal systems that supervised Chile's cultural production during the
seventies and eighties. This section examines Rosenfeld's individual contribution to the
collective, Colectivo Acciones de Arte (Art Actions Collective, CADA), and the feminist activist
group, Mujeres por la Vida (Women for Life), both driven by leftist demands such as freedom of
speech, social security, and the emancipation of political prisoners.
54
I reveal how Chile's
authoritarian conditions propelled Rosenfeld to conceive No+ (1983-), a subversive political
slogan that exploits language's ambiguity toward collective protest, especially feminist
empowerment, to resonate today.
In the early seventies, Rosenfeld graduated from the Escuela de Artes Aplicadas de la
Universidad de Chile, where she specialized in engraving under the guidance of Florencia de
Amesti and Kurt Herdan.
55
Her scholarship, coupled with her printmaking skills, earned her first
place at the Salón Nacional, a nationwide contest organized by Chile's Museum of
Contemporary Art in 1979.
56
Although Rosenfeld had been successful as an independent
printmaker, her career took a radical turn at the beginning of Pinochet’s regime. In an interview
with playwright Joanne Polittzer, Rosenfeld describes the experience of finding a new language

54
The word “CADA” in Spanish stands for the word “each” in English, a potential play on
words to illustrate the collective’s individuality; each member contributed to the collective
equally while also working on their own projects separately.
55
Daniela Berger, “Lotty Rosenfeld. Cárcel Pública,” in Catálogo razonado. Colección MAC,
(Santiago, Chile: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, 2017), 514.
56
Ibid.
24
to express herself creatively, one that could communicate subversion while avoiding political
ramifications:
After the coup, I was concerned that my art and my political work were separate and
thought they should be one of the same. Art has to communicate. It has to take on the
responsibility of saying the things that are not being said. A dialogue, I thought, must be
produced through works of art.
57

In December of 1973, Augusto Pinochet started a coup d'etat that overthrew Salvador
Allende's presidency and, by extension, the first democratically elected socialist government in
Latin America. When Pinochet declared himself President of Chile, he established a Military
Junta that imposed censorship laws on arts, literature, and culture. As a result, the following two
decades compelled artists to develop a language that would subvert the state's hegemonic
agenda. Rosenfeld and conceptual artist Juan Castillo formed their first collective, known as
'Obra Colectiva' (Collective Work) at the Galería Espacio Siglo XX (Twentieth-Century Gallery
Space) in Santiago. They met from 1977 to 1978 and invited artists who shared a similar militant
ethos, such as visual artist Alberto Pérez, writer Marcela Serrano, journalist Antonio Gil, and
sculptor Francisca Cerda.
58
Together, they engaged with alternative forms of exhibition-making,
alternating between producing work at the gallery space and, on some occasions, in the street.
Obra Colectiva traveled across the country, engaging public audiences, creating a unique space
where they could learn from each other's multidisciplinary practice.
Despite Obra Colectiva’s separation, Rosenfeld and Castillo continued searching for
collaborative, radical endeavors that could intervene in the streets of Santiago: the most
surveilled place by the Military Junta. In 1979, they attended an exhibition opening in honor of

57
Joanne Pottlitzer, “Lotty Rosenfeld, Visual Artist,” Review (Americas Society) 36, no. 66
(2003): 65. Translated by Pottlitzer.
58
Robert Neustadt, CADA DIA: La creación de un arte social, (Santiago, Chile: Editorial Cuarto
Propio, 2001), 48.
25
the Spanish painter Goya where they met Diamela Eltit and Raúl Zurita, two writers who had
previously formed part of the literary group Tentative Artaud at the Centro de Estudios
Humanísticos de Universidad de Chile (Humanistic Studies at the University of Chile).
59
Once
they decided to form a collective and rethink the boundaries between art, life, and politics, they
invited Fernando Balcells to join, a sociologist who had recently arrived from Paris. In that same
year, they formed Colectivo de Acciones de Arte, which, similarly to Obra Colectiva, engaged
local communities by staging public interventions.
Without a direct translation, the English word performance takes the form of acción or
acciones de arte in Spanish; thus, CADA sought to disrupt Pinochet’s coup d’état through
performative acts. The literary group Tentative Artaud, for example, centered around French
writer Antonin Artaud, who sought to shock people through his conceptualization of the Theatre
of Cruelty. Organized by Ronald Kay, the group introduced students to Fluxus performers such
as Joseph Beuys and Wolf Vostell as well as the North American land art movement.
60
For Eltit
and Zurita, the group became an escape from reality; military soldiers armed with machine guns
surveilled Santiago’s universities to provoke fear and compliance among students.
61
These
lessons served as a foundation for both writers, who could finally express themselves in a
performative manner and contest Chile’s self-censorship tactics.
Confronted with an atmosphere of social repression, the Chilean collective performed a
series of ‘acciones de arte’ through a multidisciplinary lens. For example, their first art action,
Para no morir de hambre (To not die of hunger; 1979), consisted of distributing one hundred

59
Ibid., 49.
60
Ibid., 23.
61
Ibid., 92.
26
milk cartons to impoverished neighborhoods, such as La Granja in Santiago.
62
The action
responded to Allende’s nutritional assistance program directed toward working-class women and
children between the ages of 7 and 14.
63
Other art actions followed a similar vein, drifting away
from traditional forms of artmaking, such as ¡Ay Sudamérica! (Oh, South America, 1981), in
which six airplanes dropped 40,000 pamphlets over Santiago, demanding the rights of people;
No + (No More, 1983-ongoing) functioned as a political slogan during protests, written on
billboards and walls across the city (fig. 1); and Viuda (Widow, 1985) commented upon the
military’s violent arrests by disseminating the photograph of a woman whose husband had died
during a protest, published in two magazines, Apsie and Cauce, and the newspaper La Época.
64

In a video interview with the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía, Rosenfeld confessed the main
reason why CADA disbanded in 1984: the collective felt that the public had fully immersed
themselves in their work, thus successfully erasing the boundary between art and life.
65
CADA
forms part of the Escena Avanzada (Advanced Scene), which art critic Nelly Richard describes
as a new generation of artists who sought alternative modes of expression in the midst of a
political catastrophe; an art movement that responded to the rupture of all commonsense with a

62
Jennifer Joan Thompson, “Each/Every: CADA’s Radically Democratic Dramaturgy of
Dissent,” Theatre Survey 61, no. 1 (2020): 12.
63
James W. McGuire, “Chile: The Pinochet Paradox,” in Wealth, Health, and Democracy in
East Asia and Latin America, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 104.
64
Robert Neustadt, CADA DIA: La creación de un arte social, 37.
65
After CADA’s disbandment, each member continued working in their respective careers. The
avant-garde writer Diamela Eltit became the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship (1985) and
published several novels, including Los Vigilantes (1994) and Mano de Obra (2002); Poet Raúl
Zurita became best known for his poetry books, earning him the Chilean National Prize for
Literature (2000); Sociologist Fernando Balcells became editor of art magazines such as Crítica
Cultural and Galería Metropolitana, and author of thinking-pieces surrounding CADA’s legacy;
and artist Juan Castillo moved to Europe in the eighties, where he continued expanding his canon
of visual arts.
27
new visual language.
66
Although CADA separated five years before the end of Pinochet’s regime
in 1990, it achieved its central goal. It offered an oppositional discourse independent of the
endorsement and exposure of institutional systems of power.
In the process of parting from CADA, Rosenfeld became an active participant of Mujeres
por la Vida. The feminist organization began as an immediate response to the immolation of
Sebastián Acevedo, a working-class man who, after learning that his two children—Galo and
Maria Aceveodo—had been detained by the National Intelligence Center, killed himself at the
Plaza de la Independencia in 1983.
67
That same year, a group of female journalists, including
Mónica González, Patricia Verdugo, María Olivia Mönckeberg, and Marcela Otero, organized
protests in opposition to the regime, drawing audiences as large as 10,000 attendees.
68
Besides
denouncing the surge of human rights violations toward all citizens, they addressed issues that
were not being talked about within leftist activist groups such as a the right to equal pay, access
to contraceptives, and the decriminalization of abortions.
In other words, Mujeres por la Vida represented a newfound opportunity for women to
explore the feminist concerns that they could not directly address in Chile’s leftist movement.
During Pinochet’s regime, employers were granted the right to fire female employees during
their pregnancy and deny them access to free gynecological check-ups.
69
The costs of daycare
centers had not only increased, but many of them had closed due to the lack of governmental

66
Nelly Richard, Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile since 1973, ed. Paul Foss and Paul
Taylor, (Melbourne: Art and Text, 1986), 17.
67
Isabel Gross, Por la vida: Las agrupaciones de mujeres durante la dictadura military chilena,
(Santiago, Chile: Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, 2015), 11.
68
Ibid., 23.
69
Jane S. Jaquette, “From Dictatorship to Democracy: The Women’s Movement in Chile,” in
The Women’s Movement in Latin America: Participation and Democracy, (Boulder: Westview
Press, 1994.), 68.
28
financial assistance. Other women, and specifically those from lower-income backgrounds,
joined the informal job market, working as sex workers or housekeepers and thus being further
exposed to other forms of labor exploitation.
70
Aware of women’s social condition, Rosenfeld
contributed to Mujeres por la Vida by developing street interventions and slogans as a form of
public protest, strengthening the feminist movement through collective action.
Rosenfeld's career is characterized by her ongoing involvement in collaborative art
practices. As a contributor to CADA and Mujeres por la Vida, the Chilean artist developed a
unique language to express her worldview, which seemed to thrive at the center of her
multifaceted identity; she was a woman, an artist, and a supporter of the socialist movement. Her
political ideals remained firm and unchangeable throughout the dictatorship, expressed loud yet
covertly through 'acciones de arte.' It was through her need to communicate ideas with others
that she formed long-lasting and prosperous friendships and expanded her practice by learning
from others. In other words, she understood that everyone needed to work together to overthrow
oppressive systems of power.

Case Study: No + (1983-)
During an interview with historiographer Robert Neustadt, Rosenfeld reflected on the
social conditions in which No+ (1983) emerged.
71
By the 1980s, people who were once cautious
to criticize Augusto Pinochet’s autocratic regime had begun to lose their fear. Soon, activist
groups took over the streets of Santiago, leading to unprecedented demonstrations that awakened
people from passivity into action and accelerated the formation of leftist coalitions. In this
respect, No+ (1983-) became a political slogan contingent upon language’s abstraction, one that

70
Ibid. 73.
71
Neustadt, CADA DIA, 47.
29
demands the active participation of people by compelling them to complete a sentence without
explicitly writing it.
Rosenfeld’s interest in language’s abstraction began in 1979, the year that she first
performed Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (A mile of crosses on the pavement) at the
Avenida Manquehue in Santiago, Chile (fig. 2). In between sidewalks, the artist glued
perpendicular lines of white paper across the pavement, disrupting the pre-established function
of traffic lines. While the resulting symbol is open to interpretation—which, in this case, could
range from crosses, halt signs, or plus symbols—it serves as a metaphor for describing the moral
confusion that the Chilean population experienced after Pinochet’s coup d’état. Alienated from
reality, almost every family suffered the disappearance or murder of at least one household
member, faced the privatization of basic health services, and organized community kitchens to
sustain each other. Without a direction to follow, they were forced to question the authoritative
voice that differentiates left and right, wrong and right.
72
Symbolically, Rosenfeld’s intervention
inspires self-reflection in the middle of a road, provoking drivers and streetwalkers to question
their rationality and regain agency over which direction to move forward.
By 1983, Rosenfeld felt that, after a decade of protesting Salvador Allende’s failed state,
CADA needed a new slogan that would inspire the Chilean population into mass subversion. In
response to the situation, she combined the symbol “+” with the word “no,” which reads as “no
más” or “no more” in English. It is a negation, an intimation, and a covert way of saying: no
more dictatorship, no more forced disappearances, and no more political oppression. The slogan
was first introduced as a banner, distributed around the city with the help of fellow artists who

72
Lotty Rosenfeld, Lotty Rosenfeld: moción de orden, (Santiago, Chile: Ocho Libros Editores,
2002), 38.
30
hung it at night to protect their anonymity. One of its first iterations took place on the Río
Mapocho, a contained river that separates Santiago’s territory into two (fig. 3). Here, the banner
was shown next to the illustration of a revolver—a subtle addition proposed by the artists Juan
Carlos Castillo, Pedro Millar, Luz Donoso, Hernán Parada, and José Ignacio León.
73
Through
active collaboration, No+ circulated rapidly and discreetly, prevailing in highly transited areas
without necessitating the continuous presence of protesters.
In his book, Conceptualism in Latin America: Didactics of Liberation, Luis Camitzer
previously described No+ as an ambiguous yet direct slogan that subverted the regime’s strict
censorship policies.
74
After the coup d'etat, Pinochet’s approach to art became known as the
“apagón cultural” (cultural blackout), a term that explains the sudden decrease in print and
material culture.
75
The Junta Militar not only supervised nationwide editorial houses such as
Editorial Quimantú—later renamed as Editorial Nacional Gabriela Mistral—but also coerced
them into publishing books centered around less politicized genres, including self-help books,
cooking books, and travel novels.
76
To a Junta officer, CADA’s slogan could not be classified as
either political or apolitical, allowing people to become the producers of an emerging subculture
rather than remain passive consumers. In other words, No+ could appear indistinguishable—and
almost elitist— due to its clever covertness.
Besides the apagón cultural, another critical influence on the creation of No+ was
Diamela Eltit. In the documentary film Hoy y no mañana, Rosenfeld acknowledges the novelist’s
influence and describes how she encouraged CADA members to engage in small writing

73
Ibid., 54.
74
Camitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art, 86.
75
Griffin, “Chilean Literary Culture Since 1970: A Panorama,” 18.
76
Ibid., 19.
31
exercises; to abandon the white page and think about the boundaries between writing and public
space.
77
Eltit and Rosenfeld also co-authored two short-film scripts: “La invitación, el
instructivo” (“The invitation, the instruction”) and “Quién viene con Nelson Torres?” (“Who
comes with Nelson Torres?”). Both scripts position language as a social practice and present
conversations with people from disenfranchised communities that rarely appear on the screen.
The short film, “Quién viene con Nelson Torres?”
78
distorts speech using special effects, hinting
toward their interest in manipulating language to avoid surveillance; their common desire to seek
opacity rather than being seen.
It is important to mention that, before CADA, other Chilean writers had experimented
with language’s abstraction. Eltit’s Professor and poet Nicanor Parra published the book
Artefactos in 1972, which encompassed 240 poems written next to small illustrations of
typewriters, toilet papers, or a woman’s body.
79
Each poem is brief and reduced to a single
stanza, a fragment that the reader must decipher by gathering from urban slang, advertisement
slogans, and journalistic jargon. Parra’s poems are similar to those of his predecessor, Vicente
Huidobro, who was influenced by calligrams and the Parisian avant-garde movement.
As explained by Camitzer, calligrams were initially known as “shaped poetry,” which can
be traced to eighteenth-century Spain and Portugal; it is a form of writing that illustrates the
content of the poem.
80
Although calligrams did not achieve mainstream popularity, they
experienced a revival in the twentieth century that has been attributed to Guillaume Apollinaire,

77
Josefina Morandé, directed. Hoy y no mañana, (2018; Santiago, Chile: Universidad de Chile,
2018), DVD.
78
Mónica Barrientos, “El Guión Como Escritura Comunitaria: Diamela Eltit y Lotty
Rosenfeld,” Altre Modernità (2021): 91.
79
Karen S. Van Hooft “The ‘Artefactos’ of Nicanor Parra: The Explosion of the Antipoem.” The
Bilingual Review 1, no. 1 (1974): 68.
80
Camitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art, 132.
32
a French writer “who gave them [its current name] by publishing his book Calligrams in 1918”
and who was a close friend of Huidobro.
81
Depending on the poem’s subject matter, Huidobro’s
texts adopted the silhouette of elephants and telephones to question marks and oceans. His poem,
Paysage (1917), alludes to the image of a countryside landscape with its sun and lake, hence its
title (fig. 4). Overall, Parra and Huidobro transgressed the relationship between word and image,
rupturing writing conventions and paving the way to future forms of self-expression.
Unlike Rosenfeld, other Chilean writers such as Eltit, Parra, and Huidobro remained
constrained by the page. While most of them expanded the boundaries between text and image,
they did so in a straightforward manner, employing literary devices such as stanzas, calligrams,
and written dialogues. Rosenfeld’s No+, on the other hand, is the opposite of a straightforward
art form. As best explained by art critic Nelly Richard, it is similar to many of the works created
during this period in the sense that it distorts a text’s meaning through “ellipsis and metaphor.”
To put it differently, it is a sentence that is not yet finished, stripped away from its meaning by
avoiding literary embellishments; it is a phrase that thrives off political omission, repurposed by
the public to arouse mass subversiveness.
By taking Chile’s post-coup period as a point of departure, No+ unravels the relationship
between the regime’s surveillance policies and covert forms of self-expression. Phrases such as
“no more dictatorship, no more forced disappearances, and no more political oppression” became
codified into ambiguous symbols of dissent in order to avoid censorship from the Military Junta,
which could range from incarceration, disappearance, or torture, or murder. Thus, any overt form
of protesting could lead people to a death sentence.

81
Ibid.
33
Ephemerality and Permanence in Mujeres por la Vida
For No+ (1983-ongoing), the year 1986 represented both an end and a beginning. On
March 8th, Mujeres por la Vida organized one of the largest demonstrations commemorating
International Women's Day in Santiago, Chile. With the help of bulletin boards, flyers, and
posters, the feminist group invited women from diverse political affiliations to puncture through
the seemingly impenetrable jurisdiction held tight by Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. In doing
so, it employed Lotty Rosenlfed's political slogan as a protest marker, giving it a new meaning
that moved away from CADA's legacy and, instead, fully embraced feminist values.
In The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, author
Diana Taylor outlines the differences between the archive and the repertoire, describing the latter
as “embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, and singing...all those
acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge.”
82
Since the March 8th protest
encompassed many of these acts, I suggest that No+ forms part of the repertoire and, therefore, a
pathway toward corporeal self-expression.
Rosenfeld, who by this time had established herself as a well-known visual artist,
contributed to Mujeres por la Vida by morphing CADA's slogan, No+, into distinct variations.
Phrases such as "Somos+" ("We are More"), "No+ Porque Somos+" ("No More Because We Are
More") and "Las Mujeres votamos No+" ("Women vote No More") became the new face of the
activist group, allowing women to unleash the pain and anguish that they had endured over a
decade. By writing out these phrases or chanting them, they served as a testament to people’s
collective healing. For example, Mujeres por la Vida printed a script for women to chant during

82
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas,
(Durham: Duke University, 2003), 20.
34
the march entitled, “Decimos No+ Porque Somos +” (“We Say No More Because We Are
More”). It resembled a theater libretto where the leader yelled out phrases such as “no more
political prisoners,” and “no more hunger, misery, or unemployment” while the attendees
responded with, “no more” (fig. 5). Thus, protesters could document their experiences on paper
or embody them through vocalization, adopting facial and bodily expressions that the white page
could not always capture.
Taylor further suggests that the repertoire necessitates an audience or, in her words,
someone else’s “presence.”
83
Unlike other feminist groups of the time, Mujeres por la Vida is
best recognized for its nonhierarchical structure, rooted in the unification of women from
different social backgrounds. According to Isabel Gross, the feminist group described itself as a
‘committee of equals,’ helping women from rural areas attend protests by subsidizing their
public transportation and providing them with legal assistance in case of military arrests.
84
It also
welcomed women from diverse political ideologies, including democratic, socialist, and
communist, opening the door to more fruitful dialogues.
85

As a state-wide organization, Mujeres por la Vida encompassed thirty different
participating organizations, including college students, the National League of Union Workers,
and the feminist organization, La Morada, which distributed meals to children and unemployed
parents, among others. Its social diversity laid the groundwork for women to converse with
themselves and the rest of the Chilean population; as best seen in the documentary Hoy y no

83
Ibid.
84
Isabel Gross, Por la vida: Las agrupaciones de mujeres durante la dictadura military chilena,
(Santiago, Chile: Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, 2015), 13.
85
Ibid., 14.
35
mañana, their protests were broadcasted on national television and reported in newspapers,
reaching wider audiences.
86

Furthermore, Taylor continues her conceptualization of the repertoire by expressing that
writing is the “recognized weapon in the colonial arsenal.”
87
In her book, she describes how
Spanish colonizers in Latin America imposed a hierarchy of knowledge that disregarded
Indigenous cultures, one that prioritized archival records such as books and codices over pre-
Hispanic oral traditions. Taylor’s point is relevant in the sense that No+ can be considered, both,
as part of the repertoire and written records. For example, one of the flyers advertising the March
8th protest portrays women protecting themselves from water hoses, a common tactic used by
the military to dissipate public protests (fig. 6). Printed in large, bold letters, No+ appears at the
top of the page standing as a symbol easily to recognize. Women could easily distribute these
flyers among each other and embody the repertoire on the day of the protest.
More interestingly, the back of the flyer listed the names of Mujeres por la Vida’s 240
members, including Rosenfeld and Eltit. Suddenly, No+ no longer had a single author; rather, it
had become part of multiple Chilean women’s embodied experiences and, by extension, took on
an enhanced collective meaning. Without a physical remnant from the protest, it would have
been difficult to understand the multilayered meaning that No+ gained over the course of three
years, from its inception in 1983 until 1986. In a relatively short period of time, it escaped from a
single statement on a white page in order to become easily reproducible by the general
population. Due to its multiple adaptations, No+ lived on in various protests and other collective

86
Josefina Morandé, directed. Hoy y no mañana, DVD.
87
Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 41.
36
actions. Therefore, despite CADA’s dispersal, No+ continued to fulfill the collective’s main goal
of blurring the boundaries between art, life, and politics.
As a written record, No+ could be easily duplicated on all surfaces: banners, poster
boards, walls, and concrete floors. Additionally, its abbreviation allowed its translation to
different languages. “No+” has the same meaning in English as in Spanish, thus it could be
appropriated by Spanish-speaking countries as well as North American ones. Thus, No+
experienced a sudden transformation. It could be considered as, both, an archival record, and an
oral account of public protest art.

Section III: Erasing the Boundary Between Life and Art
In Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor raises two crucial questions: how does
performance transmit traumatic memory? And how can people who have not endured traumatic
events come to understand them? In searching for answers, the performance theorist looks to
HIJOS, an activist organization founded by the children of people who disappeared during
Argentina’s dictatorship in the seventies. For Taylor, the protests organized by HIJOS not only
made “visible the crimes committed by the dictatorships of the [seventies and eighties] but also
the lasting trauma suffered by families of the disappeared and the country as a whole.”
88
In this
section, I utilize Taylor’s theory of trauma-driven performances to demonstrate how Mayer and
Rosenfeld transmitted El tendedero and No+ to succeeding feminist generations.
In her book, Taylor emphasizes that “trauma, like performance, is characterized by the
nature of its repeats.”
89
Ephemeral gestures such as performances, protests, or oral folklore—all

88
Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 165.
89
Ibid., 167.
37
which form part of the repertoire, according to the author—gain value when they are reproduced
on more than one occasion. She borrows this concept from evolutionary biologist Richard
Hawkins, whose work investigates humans’ ability to transmit ideas through the spoken and
written word.
90
In Hawkins’ book, The Selfish Gene (1976), he introduces the concept of
“memes” to describe the evolutionary advantage that cultural transmission has over genes:
When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. We are built
as gene machines, created to pass on our genes. But that aspect of us will be forgotten in
three generations…But if you contribute to the world’s culture, if you have a good idea,
compose a tune, invent a sparkling plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after
your genes have dissolved in the common pool.
91

As a contribution to the world's culture, El tendedero prevails due to its reproducibility. Three
decades after its debut at Museo de Arte Moderno in 1978, a group of female students from the
Universidad Iberoamericana—also known as "Ibero," one of Mexico's well-known private
academic institutions—reproduced Mayer's installation on March 11th, 2020, three days after
Women's International Day (fig. 1). On this occasion, the students acted independently without
the artist's participation, which characterized previous iterations of El tendedero. The students
named the installation "Cuelga a tu abusador," which roughly translates to "Hang your [sexual]
abuser" in English, a possible reference to the original clothesline.
"Cuelga a tu abusador" followed Mayer's framework: women anonymously wrote down
instances of sexual abuse on sheets of paper and hung them on a clothesline, wrapped around a
pillar on the school's main courtyard. Without an initial prompt, the responses varied greatly.
Some listed the name of sexual abusers while others shared words of encouragement such as “Yo
sí te creo” ("I believe you") and “Nunca tendrán la comodidad de nuestro silencio otra vez”

90
Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2016
91
Ibid., 258-259.
38
("They will never have the comfort of our silence again") (fig. 2).
92
While most of the accounts
pertained to instances of abuse on campus, others raised instances of abuse during childhood. For
example, an anonymous participant described the traumatic experience of being inappropriately
"kissed" and "touched" by her local church's pastor as a child, proving that feelings of unsafety
permeate inside and outside the home.
93

In response to the almost 100 responses received, Ibero released two public statements
that initiated a dialogical exchange between the school’s administration and student community.
On March 11th, the school acknowledged Mexico’s socio-cultural context and named violence
against women a national emergency.
94
It also committed itself to implementing a “zero
tolerance” policy for any future reports of abuse, assembled a group of women right’s specialists,
and encouraged victims to present a legal complaint to the school’s attorney. The following day
on March 12th, however, the school’s message shifted in tone. While it assured students that
“Cuelga a tu abusador” would remain on display, it emphasized that it would not penalize any
faculty member or student whose name appeared on the wall. Instead, it stressed the importance
of contacting legal authorities as well as the Department of Critical Gender Studies.

92
Diana Juárez, “Cuelga a tu abusador, Quadri aparece en tendedero de UIA; él lo niega,” La
Silla Rota, March 11, 2020, https://lasillarota.com/lacaderadeeva/cuelga-a-tu-abusador-quadri-
aparece-en-tendedero-de-uia-el-lo-niega-/369760
93
Ibid.
94
In a government report by the Comisión Nacional de Búsqueda de Personas (National
Commission for the Search of People, CNBP), approximately 3,093 women disappeared between
2013 and 2018. Although 1,816 of the cases have been resolved—meaning that some bodies
have been found dead and others alive—the rest 1,277 are still pending. In Mexico, at least
twenty states have implemented the “Alba Protocol,” a legal measure that ensures the immediate
search for women in cooperation between the police force, government, and public media. Still,
the CNBP confirms that only 26% of these cases have been regarded as femicides, the killing of
a woman by a man based on her gender. “Violencia contra las Mujeres en México. Informe del
OCNF, CDD, y REDTDT al Comité CEDAW,” Observatorio Feminicidio México, February 23,
2021, https://www.observatoriofeminicidiomexico.org/post/violencia-contra-las-mujeres-en-
méxico-informe-del-ocnf-cdd-y-redtdt-al-comité-cedaw
39
One of the names in "Cuelga a tu abusador" was Gabriel Quadri de la Torre, a former
professor at Ibero and candidate in the presidential election of 2012.
95
Quadri de la Torre denied
the accusation on Twitter, describing it as "infamous, cowardly, and infamous slander" driven by
political motives.
96
The professor continued to teach at Ibero until 2020, the year that he re-
launched his political campaign and won a seat in Mexico's Chamber of Deputies, representing
the right-wing party, Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party, PAN), known for their
support of anti-abortion rights. Simultaneously, the Gender Committee opened an investigation
into the male students whose names appeared repeatedly on the clothesline. After a year of
gathering evidence and listening to women's testimonies, the committee found the student Memo
Aponte guilty of sexual harassment and suspended him from school in 2021.
97

In the aftermath of “Cuelga a tu abusador,” students reflected upon the school’s situation.
In the study Hacia la interculturalización de la Ibero: aportaciones desde nuestras estudiantes
(Towards the interculturalization of Ibero: contributions from our students; 2021), a group of
students from Ibero’s Research Institute of Education Development organized dialogical
exercises to understand the ramifications of sexual abuse on campus from an intercultural
perspective. They explain their methodology as follows:
Each week, students wrote a reflection paper, which we returned with our feedback. It
was interesting to see how students articulated theory with reality and, in this sense, there
is no doubt that the critical and decolonial approach to interculturality was very useful for

95
Gabriel Quadri ran for president in the general election of 2012 against Andrés Manuel Lopez
Obrador (AMLO), current present of Mexico. Although both candidates lost the election, AMLO
ran once again in 2018, winning the presidency of Mexico.
96
Diana Juárez, “Cuelga a tu abusador, Quadri aparece en tendedero de UIA; él lo niega,” La
Silla Rota, March 11, 2020.
97
For further information on students expelled from Ibero, see Rosalía Vergara, “La Ibero
expulse a “Memo” Aponte, acusado de acoso sexual,” Proceso, January 5, 2021,
https://www.proceso.com.mx/nacional/2021/1/5/la-ibero-expulsa-memo-aponte-acusado-de-
acoso-sexual-255663.html
40
them to analyze and interpret what they observed, noted in their notebooks, debated in
class and they reflected on their writings.
98

For student Luis Carlos Zavala Calderón, these exercises further illuminated the socioeconomic
and ethnic-racial tensions within the school. Although all women were invited to participate in
“Cuelga a tu abusador,” it is possible that at least some of them felt hesitant to come forward.
Female professors, custodians, or security guards—many of them who come from lower
economic backgrounds in comparison to university students—could expect retaliation from the
administration, private funders, or family members when filing a complaint.
99
As suggested by
Taylor, protests allow individuals to heal from traumatic events by animating political
denunciation.
100
The denunciations that emerged from “Cuelga a tu abusador” allowed women to
demand campus safety; female students re-gained ownership over their bodies and built a
community of support, backed up by the Gender Committee. Thus, women initiated a dialogical
exchange between professors, students, and authorities without the guidance of the artist, proving
that El tendedero is an intergenerational tool against gender-based violence.
As suggested in previous sections, Rosenfeld’s No+ emerged as an ephemeral gesture;
members of CADA and Mujeres por la Vida introduced the political slogan to their communities
as graffiti, flyers, and posters, making it difficult to trace its genealogy in the same way as El
tendedero. In the essay “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” Audre
Lorde defines poetry as the most “economic” art form. It is a secret activity, one that “requires
the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the

98
Marcela Gómez, Casandra Guajardo and, Stefano Sartorello, Hacia la interculturalización de
la Ibero: aportaciones desde nuestras estudiantes, Institution de Investigaciones para el
Desarrollo de la Educación, (Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2021) 102.
99
Ibid.
100
Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, 165.
41
hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper.”
101
I connect Lorde’s definition
of poetry to No+, one of the most accessible political gestures during Chile’s dictatorship. People
can reproduce it without needing additional materials besides pen and paper; they also do not
have to enter institutional settings to learn about it, which, in the case of El tendedero, stands for
Ibero, UNAM, MUAC or MAM.
Accessible to the masses, the reproducibility of No+ transcended geographical frontiers
during Chile’s government transition from an autocracy to a democracy. The shift occurred in
1988, when the National Congress put forth a plebiscite, allowing people to decide, for the first
time, whether Pinochet should remain in office for the next eight years or not. With a 55% to
43% margin, most voters rejected Pinochet's reappointment, pressing the government to organize
a presidential election the following year.
102
The candidate elected, Christian Democrat Patricio
Aylwin, dissolved the Military Junta and allowed publishing houses to flourish without fear of
political harassment or military raids. Meanwhile, Pinochet continued to serve as the Army's
Commander in Chief and, upon retiring in 1998, served as senator until 2002, leaving a scar
Chile’s history of cultural expression.
In post-dictatorship Chile the feminist movement split into two branches: the institutional
and the autonomous. On the one hand, some women began to notice the lack of public funding
that the government gave to grassroots organizations, inspiring them to advance women’s rights
via policymaking. On the other, women also distrusted Chile’s new administration and sought
non-institutional ways to effect change, such as organizing marches, conferences, and

101
Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in Essays and
Speeches by Audre Lorde, (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007), 116.
102
Taylor C. Boas, “Voting for Democracy: Campaign Effects in Chile’s Democratic
Transition,” Latin American politics and society 57, no. 2 (2015): 71.
42
happenings.
103
As a result, activist organizations such as Mujeres por la Vida dissipated from the
public sphere, creating a vacuum that made it difficult for an oppositional culture to flourish.
Without a common enemy to oppose, the feminist movement remained divided, unable to
articulate a unified set of demands as it had done in previous years.
104

Outside of Chile, Rosenfeld’s No+ began to gain momentum among Mexican feminist
groups in the 1990s.
105
During this period, a wave of femicides struck the country’s northern
border, exacerbated by the NAFTA agreement of 1994 and the rising cases of organized crime,
such as drug trafficking and money laundering. According to a 2020 report published by the LSE
Latin American and Caribbean Centre, at least 3,000 women were reported missing since the
mid-nineties while 913 were found murdered since 2010 in Ciudad Juárez.
106
The staggering
numbers propelled mothers, daughters, and friends to publicly protest against Mexico’s legal
court system, which seemed to rationalize femicides as a “public cleansing,” the removing of
troublesome women from the streets.
107
Under these circumstances, No+ functioned as a protest
slogan, painted on pink crosses, posters, and walls by the relatives of victims who demanded
justice from the government.

103
Feliu, Verónica. “¿Es El Chile de La Post-Dictadura Feminista?” Estudos Feministas 17, no. 3
(2009): 701.
104
Ibid., 703.
105
In 2000, PAN candidate Vicente Fox became the next President of Mexico, removing the
Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party; PRI) from office. The
PRI—a monolithic force that had been in power for seventy-one years since the Mexican
Revolution—imposed a "functional" dictatorship masked as a democracy, one that journalist
Cacho linked to Augusto Pinochet's regime. Fiona Jeffries and Lydia Cacho, “Lydia Cacho:
Dangerous Journalism,” 126.
106
Lopez, María Encarnacion. “Femicide in Ciudad Juárez Is Enabled by the Regulation of
Gender, Justice, and Production in Mexico.” LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre, May 22,
2020. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/latamcaribbean/2018/02/15/femicide-in-ciudad-juarez-is-enabled-
by-the-regulation-of-gender-justice-and-production-in-mexico/.
107
Melissa W. Wright, “Necropolitics, Narcopolitics, and Femicide: Gendered Violence on the
Mexico-U.S. Border,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36, no. 3 (2011): 713.
43
In thinking about the transmission of No+ from Chile to Mexico, Dawkins makes a
helpful observation. For him, words and ideas paralyze the brain, “turning it into a vehicle for the
meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host
cell.”
108
The phrase “no más” could be easily replicated throughout Spanish-speaking countries,
facilitating its transmissibility not just across borders but also generations. To further illustrate
this idea, I cite the story of Susana Chávez, a feminist activist and poet from Ciudad Juárez who
was raped and murdered by three men on January 6, 2011. She is credited with the phrase, “Ni
Una Más” (“Not One More”) in reference to the country’s femicides, a variation of the spelled-
out phrase, “no más.”
109
Chávez studied psychology at the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad
Juárez and was in the process of publishing a poetry book before her death; it is likely that her
academic status introduced her to Latin American feminist movements, if not artists.
When Chavez’s death reached national attention, feminist protests spread throughout the
country beyond the border. Suddenly, political slogans such as “No Más” and “Ni una Más”
became emblematic of massive protests in celebration of Women’s International Day; both
phrases carried the same symbolic grief and desperation that Rosenfeld had conveyed during her
participation in Mujeres por la Vida. Ten years after Chavez’s death, on March 8
th
of 2021, a
group of anonymous women projected both phrases against the façade of the Palacio Nacional
(National Palace), the official residence of President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) in
Mexico City. Fearing the destruction of public buildings, AMLO ordered the protection of the
building with fences about three meters high, calling it the "wall of peace." While disappointing

108
Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 250.
109
Marisa Revilla Blanco, “Del ¡Ni Una Más! Al #NiUnaMenos: Movimientos de Mujeres y
Feminismos En América Latina,” Política y sociedad (Madrid, Spain) 56, no. 1 (2019): 48.

44
for many spectators, the “wall of piece” did not stop women from voicing their discontent. They
wrote the first and last name of femicide victims across the wooden fence, glued purple flowers
made of papier-mâché, and lit candles during the night in remembrance.
Unable to reach beyond the fence, women projected towering phrases stretching across
AMLO’S residence, varying from “ABORTO LEGAL” (“LEGAL ABORTION”) to “UN
VIOLADOR NO SERA GOBERNADOR” (“A RAPIST WILL NOT BECOME GOVERNOR”)
and “NO + VIOLENCIA” (“NO+ VIOLENCE”) (fig. 4 and 5). Tellingly, the political slogan,
No+, which had been used to protest Pinochet’s administration was now being used to protest
AMLO’s. Its inclusion added another layer to its reproducibility and ephemerality; the Mexican
government sought to protect its building and, in doing so, magnified women’s message by
providing protestors with the social conditions to persevere. Thus, the protest of March 8
th

demonstrated that No+ can be used to protest gender-based violence outside of its original
context, used against the government in the same way as CADA and Mujeres por la Vida.
Like Ibero’s “Cuelga a tu abusador,” Mexico’s version of No+ disassociates itself from
the authorship of the artist. In doing so, it allows autonomous groups of feminist women to
transmit traumatic memory through language, sharing their pain with the mothers and daughters
of victims as well as those who have not been directly affected by gender-based crimes. To
return to Dawkins initial quote on memes vs. genes, No+ has surpassed the biologist’s three-
generation mark by becoming one of the most used slogans in the past four decades. As
explained by Dawkins, “language seems to ‘evolve’ by non-genetic means, and at a rate which is
orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution.” Rosenfield’s codified language can continue
to expand across Spanish-speaking countries and perhaps English-speaking ones, too, creating
international feminist alliances by simply understanding the meaning of the word, “no.”
45
Unlike other parts of the world, interpersonal relations in Latin America are rarely
defined by race but rather by nationality, socio-economic status, and, oftentimes, internalized
forms of colorism. Women’s self-identification as Latino has facilitated the reproducibility of El
tendedero and No+ beyond their country of origin.
110
In thinking about the artistic potential of
these two works, I end this thesis by foregrounding the importance of disseminating them outside
of the Southern Hemisphere. Here, I borrow American historian Natalia Molina’s concept of race
as a relational concept, which she defines as the understanding of “how, when, where, and to
what extent groups intersect, pushing against the tendency to examine racialized groups in
isolation, which limits our understanding.”
111
In other words, it is how people’s identities
intersect even when they do not directly intersect or cross paths. The keyword here is “directly”
because it clarifies how, even though Mayer Rosenfeld did not directly cross paths with women,
their work continues to live on.
Both Mayer and Rosenfeld proposed new ways of thinking about collective work. In the
beginning of the thesis, I communicated my interest in learning more about Mayer and
Rosenfeld’s individual artistic contribution outside the Polvo de Gallina Negra and Colectivo
Acciones de Arte, respectively. This interest inadvertently made me realize that their individual
projects created a space for women to work collectively, to listen to one another, and work
toward a common goal: women’s public safety. The transmissibility of language allowed them to
reach wider audiences, inviting working-class women who exist in the periphery of the art world.

110
El tendedero has been exhibited in other contexts outside of Mexico, including the National
Museum of Women, Japan, etc. For the purposes of this thesis, I focused on iterations that
occurred in Mexico solely.
111
Natalia Molina, “Understanding Race as a Relational Concept,” Modern American History
(Cambridge.) 1, no. 1 (2018): 101-102.
46
Drawing from Molina’s ideas, women from different Latin American countries could understand
how their histories and futures are linked.
112

In September 2021, I formed part of the online workshop Limpiado el techo de cristal,
moderated by curator María Laura Rosa and Mónica Mayer as part of the feminist group,
MUTUA.
113
In the workshop, Rosa and Mayer encouraged participants to question their
domestic roles within the context of the pandemic of COVID-19 pandemic. The participants—all
of them whom were Latino, though in multiple countries including Mexico, Argentina, Chile,
France and the United States—concluded that their experiences as Latino women were more
similar than different regardless of where they found themselves in the world. Constrained to
their homes, most women began to adopt the role of their mothers by cleaning and cooking,
while working twice as hard: at their regular jobs and at home. I appreciate this experience
because I was able to relate to women that were physically distant from me and build a system of
support even if we had not physically crossed paths, yet.
Since Mayer first exhibited El tendedero at MAM in 1971 and Rosenfeld devised No+
with CADA in 1983, both works served as tools against gender oppression, setting a precedent
for future generations of women. On the one hand, students from Ibero demonstrated to
incoming students that change can happen through collective action. On the other, women from
the norther border created a national alliance of support, coming together on Women’s
International Day to demonstrate to the Mexican government that they will not be stopped. If
language can communicate traumatic memory, then Rosenfeld and Mayer successfully used their

112
Molina, “Understanding Race as a Relational Concept,” 105.
113
“Nosotras,” MUTUA RED, accessed January 31, 2022, https://www.mutua.red/nosotras.
47
creativity to mobilize women intergenerationally across the Latin American continent and
beyond.
48
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52
Appendix of Figures

Fig. 1.1.

Mónica Mayer, El tendedero, 1978, Museo de Arte Moderno Mexico City, Mexico.

53

Fig. 1.2

Mónica Mayer, participants response from El tendedero, 1978, Museo de Arte Moderno Mexico
City, Mexico.
54

Fig. 1.3

Mónica Mayer, participants responses from El tendedero, 1978, Museo de Arte Moderno Mexico
City, Mexico.
55

Fig. 1.4

Mónica Mayer, El tendedero, 2016, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (University
Museum Contemporary Art, MUAC), Mexico City, Mexico.

56

Fig. 1.5 (a-b)

Mónica Mayer, participant responses from El tendedero, 2016, Universidad Autónoma de
Mexico, UNAM), Mexico City, Mexico, photograph by Victor Lerma.
57

Fig. 2.1

Colectivo Acciones de Arte, No+, date unknown, Santiago, Chile,
https://hemi.nyu.edu/hemi/es/hidvl-profiles/item/501-cada-no-
mas?tmpl=component&print=1.

58

Fig. 2.2

Lotty Rosenfeld, Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (A mile of crosses on the pavement),
1979, Santiago, Chile.
59

Fig. 2.3

Colectivo Acciones de Arte, No+, 1983, Río Mapocho, Chile.

60

Fig. 2.4

Vicente Huidobro, Paysage, 1917, Horizon Carré, Paris, France.
61

Fig. 2.5

Mujeres por la vida, Decimos No+ Porque Somos+ (We Say No More Because We Are No
More), 1986, Santiago, Chile.
62

Fig. 2.6

Mujeres por la vida, No+ Porque Somos+: Día Internacional de la Mujer (No More Because We
Are More: International Women’s Day), 1986, Santiago, Chile.
63

Fig. 3.1

Ibero Students, “Cuelga a tu abusador,” 2019, Universidad Iberoamericana (Ibero), Mexico City,
Mexico. https://lasillarota.com/lacaderadeeva/cuelga-a-tu-abusador-quadri-aparece-en-
tendedero-de-uia-el-lo-niega-/369760.
64

Fig. 3.2

Ibero Students, participant responses from “Cuelga a tu abusador,” 2019, Universidad
Iberoamericana (Ibero), Mexico City, Mexico.
https://lasillarota.com/lacaderadeeva/cuelga-a-tu-abusador-quadri-aparece-en-tendedero-
de-uia-el-lo-niega-/369760.

65

Fig. 3.3

Feminist activists, “Mexico Femicidia,” 2021, Palacio Nacional (National Palace), Mexico City,
Mexico.

66

Fig. 3.4

Feminist activists, “No+ Violencia,” 2021, Palacio Nacional (National Palace), Mexico City,
Mexico.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Garcia, Nahui Ollin (author)

Core Title Mónica Mayer and Lotty Rosenfeld: erasing the boundary between life and art

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere

Degree Conferral Date 2022-05

Publication Date 04/15/2022

Defense Date 04/15/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Chile,dialogical art,femicides,Feminism,gender based-violence,Latin America.,Mexico,OAI-PMH Harvest,performance art

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lin, Jenny (committee chair), Graff Zivin, Erin (committee member), Lacy, Suzanne (committee member), Molina, Natalia (committee member)

Creator Email nogarcia@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC110964920

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