A city orientation tour can be helpful when travelling; to set your bearings, get to know some of the important landmarks and whereabouts of some of the particular things you want to see during your stay… many travellers take them and those of us who went on these tours might have overlooked, as I did, the term in their billing; “… roaming performance”. I just assumed this guy had been in Santiago a while and was offering this as a service to participants in the symposium, perhaps with emphasis on the whereabouts of places we’d be gathering, perhaps galleries or markets…. good eating places, maybe.
Kaleb and the cab driver he’d hired for the day are pictured left and centre in this photo. Sticky vinyl letters on both pack passenger windows spelled out “tur por santiago gratis” meaning free tours of Santiago…. how nice of this young man to do this for us.
Once we got underway there was a lot of static and feedback, a bit of white noise buzzing through the speakers behind us – just like any other tour I have ever been on, the audio always needs a bit of fine tuning… but this was actually the point – the feedback, white noise, obscuring what was really being said to us about Chile. Before long it was clear that the only things we could hear clearly were comment on what we have always been told, and that’s not much, of the obscured truth about the dark period not too far back in Chile’s history. What this tour about really was not the fine architecture and beautiful parks and plazas we were crawling past in heavy city traffic, but the recent political history including the Pinochet dicatatorship following the Allende regime, and how these events, and the events leading up to them, in one way were just one more layer in the fairly noisy history of the region that is still dealing with groups of people not fitting together smoothly or trouble free, even now. The Mapuche indigenes being just one of many cases challenging modern governments of Chile. Just on the news this morning was footage of current Chilean President Batchelet visiting a new memorial to The Disappeared, dissidents often students, who vanished from prison and torture chambers during the dicatdura of ’70’s and early ’80’s. She herself went into exile as did many of her age peers.
One of the issues behind the symposium is the common one most southern countries have of a colonial past. Many also have a recent history of dicatatorship – and most countries have not managed satisfactory closure on these times. Truth and Reconcilliation in South Africa has perhaps gone further than an other contry’s effort. There is still unease in this country, Uruguay, about the late 70’s and the early 80’s military period, and there are some Disappeared here, too. I haven’t much factual knowledge, but I sense the reluctance of people to discuss it – no, call that Fear. At times on the street I see faces that reflect a history of pain, and find myself wondering about their part in the recent history of this country. Artists and artesans can have a role in bringing these acknowledgements forward through this work if they chose. I have often wondered how I could do this, and have concluded that only by changing medium to pictorial words or by actual drawing…food for thought. 
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