| Description: | This arpillera was made in a workshop run by the Chilean Association of Detained and Disappeared (AFDD), seventeen years into the Pinochet dictatorship era (1973 - 1990). The anonymous arpillerista refuses to hide behind her yellow curtains, instead she pulls them back while wearing an image of her disappeared loved one over her heart, unveiling and denouncing the detentions, disappearances, torture and human rights abuses. Resistance took many forms; street demonstrations; hunger strikes, music and - in the case of this woman and many others - making arpilleras. Peering through the curtains she wishes to shed her anonymity. She bears sombre witness to the atrocities of the dictatorship; the 1,192 people forcibly disappeared, the 2,995 people executed and the 38,254 victims of political imprisonment and torture. Memoria Viva - Proyecto Internacional de Derechos Humanos.
The domestic curtains in the arpillera frame the scene as the exterior of a home. When citizens searched for means of taking action from behind closed doors, the home became an alternative arena for protest. According to Rita K. Noonan (1995) ‘the conservative ideology of traditional womanhood, typically espoused by Pinochet himself, was used by women to subvert the state’. The conservative attitudes towards women in Pinochet’s Chile, though repressive, allowed their criticisms to be veiled as dutiful patriotic motherhood to Chile’s future generations. As a result arpillera making and other forms of secret dissent allowed female family of the detained-disappeared to take action from the relative safety of their homes, reducing the risk of harm to themselves and their dependents. It also allowed them a modest income when sold through the solidarity networks outside the country.
Updated by Helen Maguire 27 th March 2024 |
