The writers Diamela Eltit (b. 1949) and María Eugenia Brito (b. 1950) coauthored the essay “Descongestionamientos” (1980), which appears in a book by the artist Lotty Rosenfeld (1943–2020) about her project Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (1979). It was an experimental document that accompanied the intervention involved in that project. It was published by Ediciones CADA, the publishing arm of the Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (C.A.D.A) to which Eltit and Rosenfeld belonged.
Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento [A Mile of Crosses on the Pavement] is the title of an intervention, a video, and this publication. In 1979 Rosenfeld began working on Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento, 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 intervention 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. In June 1980 Rosenfeld returned to the place where she had performed her original intervention and provided a public showing of the 23-minute video. The project sought to challenge traffic signs and codes of all kinds, everything that regulates or standardizes, thus challenging the powers that be, as Rosenfeld wrote at the time. [For other texts by Rosenfeld, Eltit, and Brito about the process involved, see the following in the ICAA Digital Archive: “Trazado de cruces sobre el pavimento” (doc. no. 731835); “Desacatos” (doc. no. 734576); and “La economía dramática de la ciudad” (doc. no. 734565).]
