No Monument, Issue, 2022

A CCC alumna, artist and activist, Marisa Cornejo made a film on the events that took place on Santiago’s Plaza Italia, which became the Plaza de la Dignidad on the 18th of October, 2019. For several weeks, demonstrators gathered there in the face of police repression to demand better social justice and the repeal of the Constitution inherited from the Augusto Pinochet regime. On the 13th of March, 2021, the government removed the statue of General Baquedano; a symbol of Chilean divisions which stood in the centre of the square and had just been damaged. A military hero for some, a genocidaire of indigenous populations for others, Baquedano left in the middle of the night, through the back door. Cornejo teamed up with her daughter Katya Kasterine and Cecilia Moya Rivera (a CCC student) to add to the film a multi-voice essay, a diary of the protest, published in English and Spanish. Together they weave together memories of a country criss-crossed with multiple conflicts, hopes, violence and inequalities, where the absent presence of the statue of the general has become a leitmotif.