Podcast
¡El Arte no Calla! - Episode 15: Art in Turmoil in Latin America
"¡El Arte no Calla!,” Spanish-language podcast of the Artists at Risk Connection (ARC), explores art, freedom of expression, and human rights in Latin America. In each episode, ARC's Latin America Representative Alessandro Zagato will invite a different guest to help analyze the varying states of artistic freedom in Latin America and the violations that artists and activists are suffering in the region.
¡El Arte no Calla! - Episode 15: Art in Turmoil in Latin America with Danny Rayman, Egly Larreinaga, and Malú Valerio
Episode 15 of "¡El Arte no Calla!” explores some of the critical issues raised in the report Artistic Freedom and Human Rights in Latin America and the Caribbean, which documents the troubling rise in restrictions on artistic freedom in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The report summarizes the key findings and recommendations from a closed workshop in March 2022, which brought together 31 artists, activists, and cultural defenders from across the region.
This podcast episode consists of three interviews with participants of the ARC regional workshop. First, we speak with Danny Rayman, a lawyer, and director of the Chilean NGO Acción Constitucional, who discusses his experience during the regional workshop and highlights the need to create clear and accessible channels for complaints and requests for support, that allow for a more active communication between artists and legal structures. Next, Egly Larreinaga, a Salvadoran performing artist and cultural activist, reflects on freedom of expression and the dynamics of repression in her country and across Central America. Finally, multidisciplinary artist and Venezuelan activist Malú Valerio shares her perspective on repressive policies and the feminist struggle in her country and reflects on the need to generate international links between artists and human rights organizations.
Danny Rayman
Alessandro Zagato (AZ): We are here with Danny Rayman from Acción Constitucional. Thank you so much for your time and for your participation in this episode of ¡El Arte no Calla! I would like to ask if you could talk about your organization, Acción Constitucional. What do you do in Chile? What are your areas of work?
Danny Rayman (Acción Constitucional - DR): Thank you, Alessandro for the invitation. I am very happy to have been invited, as I consider these wide-reaching online spaces for discussion very important. In relation to your question, Acción Constitucional emerged in Chile, shortly after the mass protests started in 2019, as a mechanism for the protection of Human Rights Defenders (HRDs). The organization was born with the mission to stand in solidarity with “artivists” that have experienced repression as a result of their creative expression and dissent. At the time of the social uprising , during Sebastian Piñera’s presidency, these artists often faced hostile reactions from governmental actors, especially when their art occupied public spaces (e.g., projecting messages on buildings). Despite the police’s nominally non-partisan position in Chile, we observed that many proceedings brought against artists and activists stemmed from displaying or employing symbols that originated from the 2019 social mobilizations. From that moment, we realized that there was a need to support targeted individuals and provide them with necessary tools to face these legal proceedings. This is a process that extends beyond the moment of social mobilization [in 2019] into the present day. Despite the time that has passed, we continue to feel, as a society, the echoes of the demands made on the streets and the government's response to these demands.
A.Z.: In fact, related to what you are explaining Danny, Chile has emerged recently from a couple of years of social instability and incertitude. Just recently, there has also been a change in government and a national plebiscite. How would you describe the current situation of freedom of expression in Chile?
D.R.: A few days ago, for example, Delight Lab put on an exhibition in the Cultural Center of La Moneda, which is adjacent to the presidential palace. Only a short time ago, the authorities of the previous government had done everything except protecting artists, and so this exposition illustrates an important change. However, while the topic of freedom of expression is subjected to a diverse set of contexts, it is principally related to the police force. There is rampant persecution of reporters, photographers, and all individuals who document social movements, as well as against individuals who create art in public spaces or as an act of protest, such as LASTESIS. As long as there is no police reform, these artists and activists will continue to face risks. Members of the police force were the main actors in the grave violations of human rights that took place during the social uprising, in fact. Additionally, the judicial action that we’ve helped propose, and that today is being considered within the Inter-American Justice System, implicates police acts, not only those of the Carabineros, or militarized riot police, but on occasions also involving police investigation itself. Whether by failing to respect and protect the fundamental rights of people, or t in enforcing censorship, in essence, the police force played an instrumental role in violating human rights during the social demonstrations. There is a change in government, but in the end, the police force functions the same. From that point of view, progress is not really visible.
A.Z.: There is autonomy between the state or the government, the armed forces, and the police. It is similar to what happens here in México, in fact.
D.R.: Precisely, yes. The fact is that the police as we know them, at least in Chile, has a history of being outside the mandate of civic authorities. This results in a police force that lacks the necessary knowledge and capacity in matters relating to human rights, and one that views human rights as being in conflict with their work. They view human rights as an ideology, so it is a very complicated issue.
A.Z.: We have seen the scale and impact of the repression that took place during the social uprisings. To wrap up, reflecting on your experience participating in the ARC regional workshop and the findings highlighted in ARC’s new report, Art in Turmoil, could you tell us about the importance of organizations working together and with artists on the regional level in addressing the challenges faced across the different countries of the region.
D.R.: The work of the Artists at Risk Connection, especially the compilation of this report, is extremely important in my view. The report collects the experiences and fears that artists have lived through. It highlights the dual role artists play in society, as creatives as well as human rights defenders. While reading the report, a few important elements spoke to me: for instance, the different types of risks and threats faced by women artists as public activists and family caretakers. In addition, the report highlighted the distinct mechanisms for the protection and safety of artists that are needed. The report tells a diverse set of experiences from the region and articulates recommendations that are absolutely necessary for artists, human rights organizations, and governments to take into account. It is important and critical to connect with each other and with artists to create more visibility on artistic freedom. Generating visibility is a fundamental tool to exert pressure against aggression and threats. I believe the report has succeeded in highlighting different perspectives and offering an invaluable learning opportunity that must not stay in words but must translate into action.
A.Z.: Yes, this is true – and visibility also allows us to express our lived experiences and process the trauma that is caused by fear, threat, and persecution. Sharing our experiences with each other and the world helps build community, and solidarity and reflects positively on our mental health. Thank you, Danny Rayman, for your words and your notable participation in the workshop and in this report.
Egly Larreinaga
Alessandro Zagato (AZ): We are here with Egly Larreinaga, a performing artist from El Salvador. Welcome to this episode of ¡El Arte no Calla! First, I would like to ask you if you could talk about yourself and your work.
Egly Larreinaga (EL): To start off, thank you for the invitation and for taking this initiative. I am Egly from El Salvador. I always like to present myself as a daughter of war, in the sense that my way of making and experiencing theater originates from there. It comes from the fact that both my mother and my father fought with weapons for their country—because that was the option at hand at that moment. I don’t like and don’t believe in war and in weapons, but I do believe in fighting and being an activist. In that sense that theater has been a tool for me.
I migrated away from and later returned to El Salvador in 2011. Upon my return, I reunited with a group of friends who are actresses. With them, I was able to develop certain common concerns and themes, even after 8 to 10 years of absence. And so we asked ourselves: why don’t we do something among ourselves? We had already started talking about our observations on the state of the country, and as a result, we founded the Azoro Theater Company. In parallel, I also hosted workshops in a neighborhood that has always been marked by a lot of violence,. There I began to work with women who belong to the so-called “informal economy,” who tend to be domestic workers and street vendors lacking stable employment. Day to day, they have to “hustle.” They operate within a very fragile and precarious daily economy. I proposed a theater workshop for them, which resulted in the creation of another theater company, La Cachada Theater. We chose cachada because in the language used by street vendors, cachada means “opportunity.” Afterwards, both theater companies, Azoro and La Cachada, came to be part of the Cultural Association Azoro that we founded and that is now a platform to promote ourselves and others as artists. Since 2020, we are based in a physical space in the historic center of San Salvador, known as Nave Cine Metro, which is an abandoned cinema. And so far, it has been two years since we started converting it into a cultural center.
A.Z.: Thank you, Egly. Now I would like to ask you, taking into account your activism in theater and your artistic perspective that converges with activism, how do you view freedom of expression in El Salvador? What is the current situation in your country?
E.L.: This is precisely the topic that I was discussing with my colleagues the other day. The fact is that it is visible that at a regional level—Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador—we are going towards censorship. Regarding journalism, it is much more evident, because I think journalists are, perhaps, even more so on the frontlines. However, censorship is already beginning to make its way into the artistic sector. In El Salvador, this emerging trend became clear when the government passed a censorship law that carries a 10 to 15-year prison sentence penalty. The first time we had work censored under this law was a film that premiered in 2017 that speaks about gang warfare and the relationship between the government and gangs. It is already legally prohibited to discuss gangs in the country. Currently, in El Salvador, we continue to be under a “state of exception” after many months, during which our rights are threatened as well as those of the general population. We feel censorship in our engagements with organizations that finance some of our projects where, at times, we are told to avoid certain topics. This was unheard of before.
The hardest part is when self-censorship emerges, a fear I was discussing with another director from Nicaragua. We start telling ourselves: “we should leave this out.” It's hard because we have to come up with strategies on how to speak in light of the current situation. We know that not doing anything is not an option, but we also want to stay safe and take care of ourselves. We try to work and build alliances with other organizations as we deal with these challenges. For example, the other day, I invited three directors to speak about their work, and I found myself telling them that I did not want to censor them, but we needed to take precautions. The situation is building up, and we are unsure in what direction we will go. We hope by working together, and building strategies together, we will be able to continue doing and saying what we care about.
A.Z.: It is interesting and very particular what you speak of, the fact that it is not possible to talk about gangs through art. This is especially true given that this is a topic that the government has appropriated for its own propaganda and communication campaigns. And in regard to censorship and self-censorship, you mentioned, it was a key part of ARC’s regional workshop organized by LaboCiudadano and Amnesty International. Could you speak to the importance (or not) of these types of events and the work of creating networks between individuals, artists, and organizations at a regional level?
E.L.: It is extremely important. In fact, I was telling my colleagues about this situation and that of the region as well; it is a threat that is expanding in the entire region with variances and particularities, but we are all heading in that direction. That day, I spoke about the workshop and of the idea of replicating in our regional context, because there are experiences that could be helpful, such as in the case of Nicaragua, where artists have had to deal with censorship longer than us and have experimented with different strategies. Something that I really liked from the workshop was how we discussed censorship of artistic expression, not just in the context of journalists. I was happy to learn about the situation of other artists, for instance an artist from Guatemala, who is our neighbor, shared with us the situation there. To know what is happening elsewhere is necessary. What for me is most important is learning about the strategies used elsewhere and thinking of new strategies that match the realities of each context. This facilitates the creation of emergency exit plans, which I find to be very helpful. Even when we replicate and promote a second workshop because the issues persist, we should ask ourselves: how can we incorporate in-person dynamics, different from the virtual setting, which has its own merit as a practical mechanism that allows us to come together from different parts of the world? Perhaps we can start by bringing people in each country together. Reflecting on it, while I have connected a lot with foreign artists, I did not as much with artists from El Salvador. After participating in the workshop, I have these ideas for creating ways to connect with artists across my country and learn how they are experiencing this situation.
A.Z.: Thank you so much, Egly, I thank you for your words and your participation.
E.L.: Thank you, and keep up the good work!
Malú Valerio
Alessandro Zagato (AZ): Thank you, Malú Valerio, for participating with us on this podcast episode. Could you please introduce yourself and your artistic work, and how it is linked to activism and social critique?
Malú Valerio (MV): Hello Alessandro, thank you for this space, and for inviting me to join you on this podcast. I am a Venezuelan visual artist and a human rights activist, focused on working with women, communities, and the environment. My work somehow gradually entered the world of activism and human rights. Throughout my process of becoming an artist, there was always a tension, a concern, an intention to focus on topics that went beyond my personal experience. I realized I was also interested in seeing beyond myself by, for example, looking at other women starting with the women from my family. From a very young age, I started reflecting on myself as an artist, as a woman, and on the problems that women who decide to be artists face. This also led me to seek out and learn from the experiences of other women artists who have endured different types of struggles, from structural dynamics in their family environments as well as the larger social and cultural environments.
Becoming an artist is a long process of becoming aware of issues around you. I work on compiling and analyzing the issues that affect us, including current events taking place in my country and the region. In this process, I have connected with several other women, and, together, we formed feminist collectives. These collectives are diverse spaces for dialogue for women artists, activists, and representatives of independent, non-partisan, politics. In Venezuela, the country has seen a deep political polarization for over 20 years, which has led activists to identify as independents and non-partisans, giving many of us greater freedom to discuss various issues and propose actions around them.
Art permeates activism, and activism permeates art. In Venezuela, the dismantling of the artistic and cultural structure has been systematic over the last 20 years - they are dismantling museums, and we have a lack of public infrastructure to discuss and produce cultural work. In biennials, halls, events, or festivals, for example, art becomes much more enclosed. Small bubbles that belong to the private cultural structure that strongly limit the space for action, because the artist has to adapt to the limitations posed by private institutions - cultural spaces that are not public. So, of course, I believe that my space of freedom, which I have been discovering organically and freely, together with my my fellow feminist activists and environmentalists, has been the street. This has been the space in which we have discovered new possibilities of doing, of saying, of expressing ourselves freely with autonomy, and with the possibility of merging common identities in the group while erasing some other the identities and egos surface in purely artistic spaces.
AZ: My second question has to do with this political polarization that you mention which affects artistic production and independent collective participation in Venezuela. Please tell us a little more about freedom of expression in your country.
MV: Yes, the case of Venezuela is quite a particular case. Since this government has been in power, there have been numerous restrictions and controls on freedom of expression. The main television station in the country was closed 20 years ago, followed by mass closures of newspapers, media outlets, radio stations, etc... We can no longer print media because the importation of paper has been controlled by the government, meaning there is no free press. Many television channels that still exist have been bought or have been invaded by state control, either directly or indirectly, for example, through the acquisition of majority shares, thus controlling content and overseeing the censorship of information.
But with street activism, something peculiar happens. Official political party-led activism is in charge of attacking the visible faces who oppose power. After the 2017 mass mobilizations, the majority of people were discouraged from taking to the streets because of the intense repression experienced by these protesters. However, there are smaller, minority groups of activists who continue to call for demonstrations and hold protests in the streets on feminist and environmental issues.
As a feminist movement, we have had some space and liberty to operate as we navigate the leftist regime. The left in Latin America and the world appeals to certain popular struggles, such as women's struggles. Therefore, it is not convenient for the Venezuelan government to say that it is anti-feminist, nor for them to attack feminism head-on.
And since the feminist movement tries to unite beyond political party lines, feminist struggles are human struggles. Therefore, they do not belong to a specific political party. In the streets, all the women who want to demonstrate come with the freedom to say what they have to say. This is why our protests are often met with less repressive responses from the government, although still closely monitored by public security, compared to opposition-led mobilizations.
This also meant the state had to create new tactics for control, such as the so-called peace collectives made up of civilian groups who do not belong to the police or the National Guard, trained on control strategies. For example, a few weeks ago, we were marching for the voluntary termination of pregnancy rights. The march was surveilled by the Bolivarian National Police, the Bolivarian National Guard, and these peace collectives. These collectives are in charge of keeping us within the state-approved space to exercise our rights. For example, we can put posters up on the walls, but we cannot transform, demolish or change a statue as a political statement - you know, things that normally happen in other countries. We are allowed to shout our slogans and put our posters up, as long they can remove them right after and cover it up.
Feminist struggles also find a lot of opposition in public opinion due to misinformation, and the power of religious institutions, like the Catholic Church, the Evangelical Church, and other minority religious groups. Through them, the state is conveniently allowing other political actors to do the dirty work, such as attacks in the streets, or attacks on social networks, without them having to do it directly.
Therefore, we take advantage of those possibilities to act and to get together. In the streets, we meet all kinds of feminists, even the pro-state feminists sing their slogans, and we sing ours, and sometimes we try to shout louder so that our slogans are heard.
Perhaps the authorities want the feminist struggle to become like a feminist street party to show public opinion that we are celebrating, or making noise, so that the importance of our discourse is subtly undermined.
AZ: As a participant in the regional workshop, I would like to know your opinion about this type of initiative and the importance of cooperation between artists and organizations at the regional level.
MV: I also thank you, Alessandro for having invited me to be part of this workshop. I think it is an extremely necessary space, a space that we normally do not have.
A few months ago, we started a campaign called "everything is a priority" - it referred to the fact that the defense of women's rights, LGBT rights, and civil rights are usually put on hold with the justification that there are many other emergencies. Since a complex humanitarian crisis is taking place in Venezuela - we are talking about troubling hunger, health, education, and so on - then, of course, it seems in the eyes of public opinion that fighting for equal marriage or for the voluntary termination of pregnancy right should not be a priority when people are starving. But we continue to maintain that everything is a priority and that no fight has to be put on hold. I found this space extremely valuable, where I, with other activists from Latin America and the Caribbean who are normally far away, even though we are so close geographically, and it was an opportunity to get a little closer.
The experiences of Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and other countries, - of other Honduran activists, for example - is illustrative of how these authoritarian systems operate and how the artists, activists, and journalists are confronting them in creative ways, and with their own strategies. I value this space very much, because it was organized with great respect and with great solidarity. Above all, it was very valuable to be able to listen to our colleagues and their testimonies, and I am also very happy to see the findings captured in the report.
I believe that these are also opportunities to find each other, to relieve ourselves, and to get to know each other, making other future actions possible.
Podcast published on December 15, 2022