Lotty Rosenfeld (1943–2020) wrote "Una herida americana" (1982) about her project of the same title. The text appears in Desacato (Disobedience, 1986), a book about her artistic work, edited by Francisco Zegers. Other contributors to the book included cultural critic Nelly Richard (b. 1948), poet Raúl Zurita (b. 1950), writers Diamela Eltit (b. 1949) and María Eugenia Brito (b. 1950), and poet Gonzalo Múñoz (b. 1956). The book also included an excerpt from a conversation between Rosenfeld and a Cuban writer who lived in Paris, Severo Sarduy (1937–1993), with a chronological timeline of her art actions and a videography. [For other comments made by Rosenfeld about her work, see the following in the ICAA Digital Archive, “Proposiciones para (entre) cruzar espacios límites” (doc. no. 744898) and “Trazado de cruces sobre el pavimento” (doc. no. 731835).]
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 she questioned, 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.
The audiovisual Una herida americana is a complex piece that combines footage of Rosenfeld’s three interventions. The first one took place on the outskirts of Copiapó (Atacama Desert), where she painted crosses on the Pan-American highway. Three months later she painted a cross near the White House, in Washington, DC. The third took place at the Stock Exchange in Santiago, where she installed two monitors from which she screened footage of the previous two actions. The video shows the three events combined on 16 mm film, slides, and video. The audio has been manipulated to create delays between images and relevant sounds, such as traffic noises, car horns, and conversations recorded at the Stock Exchange. The work generates a mise en abyme through multiple interlacing visual registers that link financial speculation and political power. Rosenfeld thus contemplates how public matters are transacted behind closed doors, including the transfer of capital, people, and even works of art.
