“Chile is a small country traumatized by a long dictatorship with an island mentality and powerful natural barriers: a high mountain range blocks us off the East while the country ends with the Pacific in the West.” (Catalina Mena) Born in Rome, Italy, in 1977 where her family lived in exile, MANUELA VIERA GALLO came back to Santiago Chile in 1984 when the military regime was strong in power.
„The armed fraction of the Communist party (Frente Patriotico Manuel Rodriguez) were preparing an (unsuccessful) assault to kill Pinochet and the situation was tense. I had mixed feelings because Italy was my childhood country and my parents were political figures. They were still frightened but happy to come back to their country, even though Pinochet was still in power.“ (MVG)
In 1989 Chile had its first democratic election since the putsch and a coalition of center left wing formed the government.
„It was a slow and complex transition process where Pinochet and the conservatives still had a lot of control over the country. I finished high school in a liberal English institution. When the dictatorship ended, it felt like a great time, where Chile was changing, and all the young people stormed the streets and a cultural breach was possible. Then I studied art in college, and all the critics and curators called us the ‚post-dictatorship generation from 2000‘.
We were the first generation with internet access, digital art and multi-media languages, and the feeling of a future, of globalization, of ‚looking over the mountain‘. But we also did not forget the recent past and quite some of us refer to it in our works and theorization.“ (MVG)

Manuela Viera Gallo’s recent video works CAIDA LIBRE (FREE FALL 2006) and UNFINISHED BUSINESS (2006) are uncannily aestheticized images of destruction. They deal with the fall of ideologies and in particular the dictatorship in Chile. In her work the artist manipulates the processes of political and social memory by using aesthetic interventions as intensifier of charged imagery of former political iconographies such as the photographs of Pinochet in UNFINISHED BUSINESS. Here the surfaces of the historical photo material dissolve slowly in front of the camera as the artist pours out Clorox over them. The chemicals slowly lift the color from the papers surface, carrying them off screen as the liquid flows from view (not unlike in ‚spiritualist‘ photography of the turn of the 19th century). The portraits‘ representational content and power disappears in an unsettling grotesque way in front of the viewer eye, while at the same time they start to look almost painterly and abstract. There is a quiet beauty of the destruction, as well as a politically critical but still ambiguous tone in this video. The process of destruction and thereby ghostly abstraction marks these now fragmented portraits as archeological sites. The artist’s act of pouring out chemicals over them seems to be - not simply a symbolic re-enactment of the assassination of the dictator (although there is quite some of this anarchistic energy and humor in Viera Gallos‘ works) - but foremost an allegorical impulse to keep the processes of memory critically active by deconstructing and transforming its notorious objects and sites.

„UNFINISHED BUSINESS was made for a show called „Contragolpe“ (back strike) for the anniversary of the failed assault to kill Pinochet. I also made it coincidentally the year Pinochet died, in 2006. The video is an expression of the latest feeling of the Chilean public about the dictator’s immunity and the victims’ impotency until he died. It is a domestic action, a somehow raw but essential revenge to his portrait that where everywhere as an official representation during the times of fake glory of his regime. The Clorox, a suitable cleaning appliance, dissolves portraits downloaded from the website of Pinochet’s still current foundation. It also works reversing the photographic concept of emulsion, where the image appears, making the picture actually disappear.“

Written by Anke Kempkes Gallery BROADWAY 1602

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