A Chile

Elías Adasme (Illapel, Chile 1955) is a multimedia visual artist, graphic designer, art teacher and essayist of contemporary art, who has lived in exile in Puerto Rico since 1983.

His body of work explores a variety of conceptual work such as installations, performances, digital graphics, visual poetry and mail art. An ideology of social justice constitutes the thematic topic of all of his work; erecting signs that struggle to establish spaces for free expression, in a kind of détente to ignorance and alienation.

He belongs to the group of artists that the writer Nelly Richard called “Escena de Avanzada”, artists who were characterized by developing strategies of artistic activism and counter-narratives materialized through performance and intervention in public space.

In the second image, Adasme hangs upside down in public, at considerable risk to his wellbeing and liberty. After a series of failed attempts outside other metro stations in Santiago –aborted because suspicious people were present– he chose Salvador Metro on Dec 1979.

The artist selected the site because the word Salvador gives the viewer a multiplicity of readings, as an allusion to redemption, to rescue, and also as a tribute to the figure of Salvador Allende.

In the third panel, we see Adasme, now with the image of the map of Chile projected on his bare skin, incorporating and containing the national territory. 

For the artist, the naked body can be read as a violated, tortured and abused body, a metaphor for the country; a product of the dictatorship.

A fifth component of the piece actually documents when, where and for how long these four photographs were shown in public spaces, capturing the artist in the process of setting up the reproductions, and several passersby looking on and taking in the work. 

This body of work was exhibited at the Paris Biennale in 1982, but never in his own country, as the artist fled in exile to Puerto Rico in 1983 following several arrests and death threats from the Pinochet regime.