Lotty Rosenfeld describes the process for Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento [A Thousand Crosses on the Pavement], an action she began in 1979. It consisted of adding a horizontal white line to the broken lines painted on paved roads, thus altering the traffic markings on streets and highways. As Rosenfeld explains, she alters and challenges these signs, just as she questions all codes. She claims that hers is a global undertaking, describing her intervention in Washington, DC, and how she transferred this action (shot on video) to the Stock Exchange in Santiago, Chile. Her goal was to “cause a critical disconnect” with the economic system.

Lotty Rosenfeld (1943–2020) wrote about her art project Trazado de cruces sobre el pavimento [Crosses Drawn on the Pavement], offering a brief description of how she drew crosses on highways and how the process could be extended and replicated to express new meanings. This text appeared in Ruptura: Documento de Arte (1982), which was published by CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte), the art action group to which Rosenfeld belonged. The publication—which included "Una ponencia del C.A.D.A" (doc. no. 732133), a text that was essentially the group’s manifesto, and a selection of essays and articles by its members—provided a forum where artists and intellectuals could share their work and ideas during the military censorship in effect at the time. [For another text by the author published in this publication, see the ICAA Digital Archive: “Un filme subterráneo” (doc. no. 731801); for other texts that Rosenfeld wrote about her own work, see: “Proposiciones para (entre) cruzar espacios límites” (doc. no. 744898), and “Una herida americana” (doc. no. 744890).]

In 1979 Lotty Rosenfeld began working on Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento [A Mile of Crosses on the Pavement], her best-known and most enduring project. She took to the streets of Santiago to add white crossbars to the broken lines demarcating traffic lanes, thus creating a string of crosses or plus signs on urban thoroughfares. The first time she performed this action she spent four hours working on an avenue in an affluent neighborhood in the city. She recorded the process on video and photographs that she later used as the basis for other works. The project was designed to challenge traffic signs and other codes that regulate and standardize, thus challenging the powers that be, as she wrote at the time. Rosenfeld repeated this same action in more than a dozen different places between 1979 and 1986, transforming city streets outside the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, the Palacio de La Moneda (the seat of the Chilean government), and the Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad de Chile (1984). She also took her project to the Supreme Court building in Buenos Aires (1985), and to the White House in Washington, DC (1982). In this way she used the same strategy to forge connections between different geographical locations and realities.