I first encountered the work of Gloria Camiruaga in the winter of 2018, as one of the 29 artists featured in the exhibition ‘Niepodległe: Women, Independence, and National Discourse’ at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Following the source of a low droning sound at the back of the gallery, I found Camiruaga’s film on a single-screen, brightly saturated, pixellated video on loop. It was vibrant in the way that ‘80s videos are: citric lime green, blue drool, and pink lips, made it stand out among the collages, watercolours, and black-and-white photographs. In the film, a chain of girls and women speak in a rapid monotone, sucking and licking away at a succession of popsicles. Embedded in the neon ice are forest green plastic toy soldiers, gradually revealed as the speakers continue to eat. When you step closer to the screen the words become just about decipherable: a series of muttered Ave Marias that rise exponentially with the number of featured speakers (the filmmakers’ daughters) before swirling to a frenzied chorus and repeating (like the work itself) over and over, ad infinitum. These partial portraits of dark-haired speakers are complemented with quick cuts through a concrete courtyard that show the image of a rosary strewn across the Chilean flag, a toy soldier at its centre. At one point the sounds are muffled by the crackling of a man’s voice through a loudspeaker as he recites the same prayer. Something about hearing this prayer at a distance feels hollow next to the clarity and proximity of the video’s female speakers, whose performances alternate between apathy and an exaggerated, sardonic sexuality.

This video is Popsicles (1982-1984), a film of under five minutes that has become Camiruaga’s best– and at times only – known work, featured in exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Brooklyn Museum in New York, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. A small curatorial note tells us: “Gloria Camiruaga was a Chilean visual artist and documentary maker, regarded as one of the pioneers of South American video art.”¹ A pioneer? How had I never heard of her before? Who were her contemporaries? The (re)search began. 

Though I was intrigued by the symbolism of Popsicles, I was mostly ignorant of the film’s context. Visual metaphors and provocations that would be overt to those familiar with recent Chilean history required significantly more work from me . A decade before the film was made, Chilean President Salvador Allende and his democratic socialist regime had been abruptly and violently overthrown by a military junta, a coterie of Chile’s frustrated air force, army, navy, and national police officers set to restore privatisation to the country. General Augusto Pinochet had been named to lead the replacement government for its first year, to be replaced eventually by an annually rotating officer from each sect of the military government in turn. In a dictatorial manoeuvre, Pinochet quickly vetoed this agreement, cementing his leadership of the country until his ousting in 1990. Camiruaga made Popsicles against this backdrop – the omnipresent toy soldier signals the insistent menace of Pinochet’s military regime. Symbolism like this was the only means of criticism because  censorship was central to the maintenance of Pinochet’s power. Books were burned and banned outright, celebrated artists were tortured and killed, as in the case of famous folksinger Víctor Jara,² and television was transformed into a 24-hour propaganda machine for Pinochet’s government, oscillating between government broadcasts and glitzy, sanitised, highly escapist “game shows and contests hosted by big name brands”.³ Like other totalitarian regimes, a schism became quickly evident between official, government-sanctioned forms of expression – “grandiose performing art (opera and ballet) […] nationalist, […] and populist art”⁴, and the work of radicals openly critical of Pinochet’s rule, though this took some time to materialise. 

In 1980, a new Constitution was ratified, establishing eight more years of Pinochet’s reign before he would be up for re-election. With renewed vigour, beginning in 1983, counter-Pinochet protestors bravely took to the streets. The possibility of a post-Pinochet democracy offered space for the development of dissident art in Chile: “a surprising effervescence” bloomed through the arts, inspiring creative innovations visually, verbally, musically, and conceptually.⁵ Spontaneous ‘art happenings’ (acciones de arte) took on a particular significance in this environment, transforming unexpected public spaces into flash theatres, galleries, and lecterns, unpredictable occurrences which would elude the looming threat of Pinochet’s censors.⁶ One of Camiruaga’s films from this era, Performance San Pablo-San Martin (1986-1988), is a rare glimpse into the Santiago of this time. In her signature style, handheld, observational shots of women in the city are paired with vibrant, upbeat music. The women peer from behind barred windows, and the only men depicted in the piece are Lavin (Camiruaga’s co-director), a cartoon of Pinochet, and military soldiers and watch guards. This juxtaposition makes a not-so-subtle jab at the daily imprisonment of Chilean citizens – and, significantly, the experience of Chilean women – oppressed under the military government. In Performance, Camiruaga threads an interview with a middle-aged woman with interventions enacted by women in the Santiago streets. These are both playful and sorrowful: her subjects beg and look mournfully through the barred windows of their homes as if imprisoned, or dance naked in front of their open windows, their faces covered by the floral curtains.

Though the symbolic undertones of Performance are far from lighthearted, the moments where the naked women dance and laugh before open windows reclaim a kind of joy – and, by extension, a kind of autonomy – in the face of the extreme violence and oppression of Pinochet’s regime. In fact, the ‘NO’ movement that would later dramatically mobilise the Chilean populace to vote against – and ultimately oust – Pinochet in 1988 perceived joy as such a liberating force that it centred itself around the slogan La Alegría ya viene (“Joy is coming”). But until then resistance had to be subtle. As in Soviet Russia or Communist China, art critiquing the government was often abstract, relying on symbolism and coded referents. In ‘Performance’, the film opens with funhouse mirror images of the filmmakers paired with an unflattering cartoon of Pinochet, bloated, sagging and redfaced. In Popsicles, the combination of the titular ice snack, plastic soldiers, and Ave Maria prayer express the oppression and dissidence of the Pinochet era via a deceptively simple movement. The quick shot of the mutated Pinochet cartoon is the closest Camiruaga comes to a mode of direct political caricature, although it is paired with video documentation of contemporaneous, everyday citizens – something which brings the careful language of metaphor into unflinching conversation with the present. The same trick happens in Popsicles: the viewer is suddenly transported from the predictability of the frantically praying speakers to an unidentifiable outside. Concrete. A crumpled Chilean flag. The voice of a man for the first time. These juxtapositions show two worlds forced together under totalitarianism: public submission and private dissent; ciphers and gestures.
The Catholic Church was another bastion of safety for dissident voices, as well as being one of the (perhaps the only) prominent voices of resistance against Pinochet’s regime: assisting “numerous community organizations and research institutes”⁷, providing meeting spaces for dissident groups, and allowing continued access through workshops to otherwise suppressed writers through the Academia de Humanismo Cristiano.⁸ Camiruaga explores the duality between the Church and sexuality in several of her films. In Popsicles, the partially-visible women suck and lick at their frozen popsicles while the sticky red syrup melts down their chins. This sucking is sometimes nonchalant, sometimes sexual. The symbolism here is ambiguous – is Camiruaga implying that the symbol of Catholicism in this particular film is not as ‘pure’ as it seems? Or is she highlighting the feigned ‘innocence’ of the public through subverting our expectations of the young, feminine subject? She returns to the juxtaposition of Catholicism and sexuality – as well as the Church and the brothel – in Casa Particular (1990), a short experimental documentary featuring transgender sex workers in Santiago who describe their experiences of violence and abuse. In one striking scene, Camiruaga cross-fades from a reproduction of da Vinci’s Last Supper to a tableau of her subjects, elaborately costumed and enacting the sacrament ritual with bread and wine. She also addresses the role of the Church as a political safe haven. The frantic recitation of the Ave Maria in Popsicles, the rosary beads, and the imposing voice of a man over a loudspeaker reciting the prayer all evoke feelings of panic or guilt, but at the same time convey the position of Catholicism at the time as a last refuge.
While many of Camiruaga’s contemporaries across the arts in 1980s Chile are well-documented, it is almost impossible to find full or even fragmented versions of Camiruaga’s films online, let alone academic coverage of her work.⁹ Basic facts, including the names of her films, the dates of their production, and even their running times differ from one archival site to the next. The few, incontrovertible truths are these: born in Santiago in 1941, Camiruaga went on to study philosophy at the University of Chile and visual arts at the San Francisco Art Institute in the US, graduating in 1980. Over the course of her career, she made 21 films, receiving a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship to complete La Venda in 1999.10,11 Many, if not all, of Camiruaga’s works centre on narratives of women, girls, and transgender people. Camiruaga collaborated with well-known Chilean dissident artists such as Pablo Lavin and Lotty Rosenfeld, and she died in 2006. The more I learned about Camiruaga, the more I wanted to know. She had been at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) until 1980, and could have studied with faculty members and video art luminaries like George Kuchar, Paul Kos, Gunvor Nelson, or Howard Fried.¹² Is this how she got into video art, rather than the ‘visual arts’ in which she received her degree? Was her interest in video always linked to her passion for feminist causes, to an ongoing discourse on postmodernism? When had she left Chile, and why? Did she leave when President Salvador Allende was still president, before the Chilean military mutinied on 11 September, 1973, and overthrew the government in a bloody coup? And when did she return? 

Unlike the more celebrated artists of the era, Camiruaga’s work during the Pinochet years merges a spontaneous approach alongside taped documentation. How ironic, then, that a poetic preservationist like Gloria Camiruaga can be so infuriatingly ephemeral today. This is the injustice of the obscure archive, hungry historians presented with nothing more than the crumbs of their own conjecture, hopeful home-sleuthing and speculation. Under dictatorship, the subjectivity of the individual – their personhood, their body, their history – is subsumed by the larger narrative of state violence. To view Camiruaga’s films today – with their gaps and in their fragments – is to glimpse the hard work of a carefully recorded history: the steadfast resilience of the individual in the face of systemic injustice, documenting and refusing to forget.

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1. ‘Gloria Camiruaga’, from ‘Niepodległe: Women, Independence, and National Discourse’, at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 2018 (online).

2. Paula Thorrington Cronovich, “Out of the Blackout and into the Light: How the Arts Survived Pinochet’s Dictatorship.” Iberoamericana: September 2013, 120.

3. Ibid. p. 132

4. Manuel Alcides Jofre, “Culture, Art, and Literature in Chile: 1973-1985.” Latin American Perspectives: Spring 1989, 76-77.

5. Cronovich, p. 121

6. Marjorie Agosín, “Art Under Dictatorship.” Agni: 1990, pp. 34-35.

7. Cronovich, pp. 132-134

8. Ibid.

9. Here, I am grateful to Professor Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, who generously shared additional links and research materials about Camiruaga for this project.

10. ‘Popsicles (1984) by Gloria Camiruaga’, Vivo Media Arts Centre (online).

11. La Venda in English means ‘The Blindfold’. This film tells the stories of several different women who were brutalised under Pinochet. The titular blindfold refers to how they were first blindfolded before their torture.

12. ‘San Francisco Art Institute’, Wikipedia (online). 

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The Chilean video artist and documentarian Gloria Camiruaga was born in Santiago in 1941. After obtaining a bachelor's degree from the Universidad de Chile in Santiago in 1971, Camiruaga studied video art at San Francisco Art Institute, graduating in 1980. As one of Chile's first video artists, Camiruaga dedicated her life to creating a space for women and transgender people to express themselves.