"Proposiciones para (entre) cruzar espacios límites" (1983) is an essay by Lotty Rosenfeld (1943–2020). The text appears in Desacato (Disobedience, 1986), a book about her artistic work, edited by Francisco Zegers. Other contributors to the book included the cultural critic Nelly Richard (b. 1948), the poet Raúl Zurita (b. 1950), the writers Diamela Eltit (b. 1949) and María Eugenia Brito (b. 1950), and the 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, “Una herida americana” (doc. no. 744890) 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.
Following this same rationale, Rosenfeld produced Proposiciones para (entre) cruzar espacios límites, which prompted her to write this essay. She produced this audiovisual piece—which she called a “videotape”—for Chilenas. Drinnen und Draußen. 40 Künstlerinnen zum Thema Zenzur und Exil (Inside and Out: 40 Chilean Artists on the Subject of Censorship and Exile), an exhibition held in Germany (1983). The event was organized by a Chilean artist who lived in Germany, Cecilia Boisier (b. 1943), and, as the title suggests, the participating artists were divided into two groups, “Censorship” and “Exile,” to represent artists living in Chile and those who were exiled after General Pinochet’s military coup d’état in 1973. When Rosenfeld returned to Chile, she wanted to show her audiovisual piece at the Tercer Encuentro Franco-Chileno de Video-Arte (Instituto Chileno-Francés de Cultura); she was unable to do so, however, because the Consejo de Calificación Cinematográfica, the dictatorship’s agency in charge of censoring Chilean films, confiscated the piece and classified it as propaganda against the regime.
