Lotty Rosenfeld

Focus on Lotty Rosenfeld

Lotty Rosenfeld (1943–2020) was a multifaceted figure of female resistance during the dictatorship in Chile Her work is marked by operations of meaning that problematise the intersections between language(s), body, voice, materialities and archives as counterhegemonic means of agency, resistance and political and social denunciation. Although she is primarily known for her urban interventions and public art actions, such as A Mile of Crosses on the Pavement (1979) or No + (CADA, 1983), l’Alternativa Hall is eager to shed light on some of her lesser-known work as a pioneering video artist in Chile and Latin America.

These short pieces reveal her strong connection to social reality as raw material and tease out revealing relationships between the artistic, experimental, performative, documentary and even informative sides to her work. Rosenfeld was a relentless collector of public images, often appropriating television footage to recycle and resemanticise, venturing into editing operations that prompt a rethinking of the fertile relationships between art, language and politics, and opening up new critical imaginaries about reality. In these configurations, the dimensions of sound and language are essential factors in creating correspondences and tensions between what is visible, audible, sayable and understandable (the difficulty of speaking, the difficulty of translating).

Her role as an artist was inseparable from her activism and her identity as a female body offering resistance, challenging hegemonic powers, normative bodies and all kinds of genres. This certainly included audiovisual genres, as she reinvented new forms for each of her works. Rosenfeld's female body—always in collaboration with other female bodies—transcended the boundaries of individual practice to open up to the communal through participatory work methods that embraced other peripheral and subaltern subjectivities.

Accompanying the screening of the pieces in this focus on Lotty Rosenfeld, there will be an open dialogue between Alejandra Rosenfeld, Lotty’s daughter; Victoria Sacco, independent curator; and Paola Lagos, PhD and researcher in audiovisual communication and cinema.

Tuesday 19 November, 8.30 pm
Hall CCCB
Screening of videos followed by open discussion
40 min
Free admission

Alejandra Coz Rosenfeld

Alejandra Coz Rosenfeld (Chile, 1972) is a writer, artist and therapist. She studied literature and aesthetics at the Catholic University of Chile and art at Palazzo Spinelli (Florence). From 1994 to 2020, she worked as a production assistant for her mother, Chilean visual artist Lotty Rosenfeld, and since 2022 she has been the executive director of the Foundation that bears her mother's name. She has organised and taken part in numerous screenings, retrospectives and panel discussions about Lotty Rosenfeld's work at festivals, biennials and film archives in Chile and worldwide.

Victoria Sacco

Victoria Sacco (Argentina, 1977) is an independent curator and university professor. She is editor-in-chief of the digital contemporary art magazine exibart.es. For ten years, she worked at LOOP Barcelona festival, where she served as artistic director in 2023. She was project coordinator and later codirector of the Quo Artis art and science foundation and has worked in research and exhibition production for MACBA, the Tàpies Museum and the Miró Foundation. She edited Muntadas. Con/Textos III, una antología crítica (Virreina Centre de la Imatge, 2020) and A Sea Change: Political, Natural, and Cultural Ecologies of the Mediterranean (Quo Artis, 2024).

Paola Lagos Labbé

Paola Lagos Labbé (Chile, 1975) holds an MA in Creative Documentary and a PhD in Audiovisual Communication from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is also a postdoctoral researcher at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Her research focuses on contemporary nonfiction cinema, the film essay, autobiographical documentary, experimental cinema, Latin American documentary and the sonic and oral dimension to the documentary essay, among other topics. She currently lectures at the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya. She recently wrote the book David Perlov. La imagen bisagra como pensamiento cinematográfico intersticial (Shangrila, 2024).