This unsigned article reviews the works of the Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA), the art action group that took the name used as the title of the article in question: Para no morir de hambre en el arte (To Avoid Dying of Hunger [or Starving to Death] in Art). The article begins with a discussion about the emergence of a style of works that broke with customary forms of art. It goes on to describe and discuss the four simultaneous conditions that were involved in the process: a populated urban center, a mass communication media (the magazine HOY), an art gallery (Galería de Arte Centro Imagen), and an international organization (the outside of the United Nations building). The article then quotes two excerpts from the speech that was read aloud outside the UN building. The anonymous author notes that these interventions were compared with the action called Inversión de escena (Scene Inversion). The article ends with an interpretation of the actions, indicating that these works are an attempt to intervene in “real life spaces.” 

Para no morir de hambre en el arte (To Avoid Dying of Hunger [or Starving to Death] in Art, 1979) is an unsigned article, published in the magazine La Bicicleta (1979–90), about the works and activities performed by the art action group Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA, 1979–85) in 1979. La Bicicleta was an opposition magazine devoted to reporting on the activities of Chilean artists. It was active for a period of eleven years, during which time it reported on the production of Chilean and Latin American artists, with a focus on the visual arts, theater, music, and literature and the country’s range of social and political problems. The magazine states that all its articles are signed but the document under review is not.   

This publication is important because it provides detailed reports of the complex network of locations in which the CADA group presented its first project, which it associated with Inversión de escena (Scene Inversion), a second production that relied on a similar sequence of simultaneous interventions.  

CADA was an art group whose members included the artists Lotty Rosenfeld (1943–2020) and Diamela Eltit (b. 1949), who is also a writer; the artist Juan Castillo (b. 1952); the sociologist Fernando Balcells (b. 1950), and the poet Raúl Zurita (b. 1950). The group, as we have seen, was known for producing works that used the city as well as art spaces as supports. In 1983 they orchestrated one of their most emblematic projects, one that still resonates to this day, calling on all Chilean artists to scrawl the message “NO +” (NO MORE) on city walls, to be completed with urgent demands to address the rampant social problems in their dictatorial, neoliberal society. This message soon appeared everywhere in Santiago and went on to become the slogan used for citizens’ uprisings. [For other texts that discuss the group’s work, see the following in the ICAA Digital Archive: Cada día: la creación de un arte social (doc. 732411) by Robert Neustadt; "La ampliación del espacio crítico" (doc. 734883) by Milan Ivelic and Gaspar Galaz; "Cada 20 años" (doc. 740299) by Diamela Eltit; "Una ponencia del C.A.D.A" (doc. 732133) and "C.A.D.A.: A South American Art" (doc. 731898), both jointly written by the members of the group].