The article by Amalia Polleri analyzes the process of integrating the happenings of Uruguay within an artistic context and referencing the interventions by another Uruguayan artist, Teresa Vila. Polleri points to the trend of Latin American performance art that encourages spectators to “reflect” on stereotypes of behavior and opinion, seeking to connect these actions with new identities that overstep the limits imposed by the system. Polleri focuses on Vila’s work, whose development began with freely conceived figurative forms, in painting and drawing on paper, which were then expanded to conceptualism of a political nature, thus becoming a pioneer of happenings in Uruguay. Vila called them “actions” in which she fused body and visual language with sound, performance, and words that required the direct intervention of the spectator. Her work was based on the use of verbal language along with action, stimulating new forms of awareness, and new senses of “place.”

The vanguard of the sixties in Uruguay and other Latin American countries (still with strong ties to the artistic elites of the west) reflected a social and territorial sentiment corresponding to anti-imperialist ideas that united the political field giving rise to new explorations of the cultural environment. During this period in Uruguay, some emerging artists fled from the elitist concept of “art,” marking a rupture with the traditional value of the artistic object and carrying out practices understood as closely connected vehicles between “art and life.” Experiments began with action art, which little by little, would finally acquire a leading influential role in politics and media in Latin America. Happenings, performance, and installations were held that (consciously or unconsciously) recalled the artistic stagings introduced in Futurist events or Dadaist sessions during the early twentieth century. In the Rio de la Plata region, artists such as Argentinean Marta Minujín (b. 1943), the Uruguayans Clemente Padín (b. 1939), and or Teresa Vila (1931–2009) turned to performance as a way of or instrument for the construction of another type of subjectivity, via irony, either through questioning “the instituted” or through the vindication of minority rights.

[Please refer to the ICAA digital archive for the following texts on the subject: “Las veredas de la Patria Chica. Exposición homenaje a Teresa Vila,” by Haroldo González (doc. no. 1249835); and “Acción para meditar” (doc. no. 1250336), and “La magia de la voz,” (doc. no. 1250311), both by María Luisa Torrens].