Lotty Rosenfeld


Carlota Eugenia Rosenfeld Villarreal, known as Lotty Rosenfeld, was an interdisciplinary artist based in Santiago, Chile. She was born in Santiago, Chile, and was active during the late 1970s during the time of the Chilean military coup d'etat. She carried out public art interventions in urban areas, often manipulating traffic signs in order to challenge viewers to rethink notions of public space and political agency. Her work has been exhibited in several countries throughout Latin America, and Internationally in places such as Europe, Japan, and Australia.

Art movement and involvement in art

Rosenfeld's involvement in art happened during the Chilean military coup d'etat period. Under this regime, she utilized her artwork to demonstrate how official power and conflict zones submit bodies to the margins and borders. She wanted to be separate from the guarded spaces of art and its market therefore she used the streets to perform her work, ultimately interrogating political and cultural spaces. With her art, she hoped that she could change the mentality of people by altering history of her country. The initial medium in which she worked was video recording. She then associated herself with Neo-vanguardism and the Escena de Avanzada, a movement of artists and writers that appeared on the Chilean art scene after the 1973 Chilean coup d'état. In 1979, along with poet Raúl Zurita, sociologist Fernando Balcells, writer/artist Diamela Eltit, and artist Juan Castillo, she formed, CADA or.
CADA is a collective activist and artist group that used interventions and performance to challenge the Pinochet regime in Chile throughout the 1970s and 1980s. She has also been involved with Fluxus, an experimental international interdisciplinary group related to visual arts, music, and literature. Rosenfeld and CADA's work dealt with transforming and intervening in public urban space with the use of symbolism in order to question society's political and authority status. During this period Rosenfeld's work involved performances and video installations. One of her more recent works is titled Mocion de Orden. This work is a large multimedia installation that was exhibited at the

Una Milla de Cruces Sobre el Pavimento, A Mile of Crosses on the Pavement (1979)

Rosenfeld is best known for her 'art action' entitled Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento . Influences of the social reality that frame societies' routines became the physical foundations of her creative interventions. It was begun in Santiago, Chile in 1979. it is one of Rosenfeld's most famous art action pieces. She altered the lines on the pavement, ultimately creating crosses.
With the help of anonymous people on the street, they transformed the painted lines that divide streets into crosses with a perpendicular axis made of white tape. Rosenfeld used straight lines on the pavement as a metaphor for the tightly held control of the Pinochet regime. By altering these often-used markings, she transgresses this subsystem of control and confronts the public with an unexpected subversion of meaning. She converts a minus sign into a plus, to create the + sign, challenging the idea that signs are fixed, static markings of meaning. The work itself was a performance piece that disrupted every day traffic under the Pinochet regime.

Artwork