Poner en su Lugar: Colonial Gazes in Visual Artefacts of Constituent Chile #1011834

This excerpt is part of the volume Visual Narratives, Aesthetics and Decoloniality: Imagery and the Construction of the ‘Other’. Vol. 1 – Decolonial Aesthetics, Ontologies and Epistemologies, edited by Tomás Cajueiro and Estevão Bosco, published by Ventura Edizioni.


In October 2020, the Chilean feminist collective LASTESIS invited women and gender dissidents to participate in the intervention Hoy, hundimos el miedo (Today, we sink the fear) in the city of Valparaíso. The performance staged the funeral procession of the Chilean Constitution, and participants were asked to carry visual artifacts, such as books, which through words and images on their covers would represent fears, inequalities, and oppressions that they wished to transform through a process of constitutional change. This action is significant because it was part of the reactivation of the protests of the 2019 Chilean popular uprising, which had been paralyzed after the COVID-19 lockdown, and because it was part of a series of actions promoted by the arts and social movements that supported the Approve Constitutional Convention option in the plebiscite to enter the first Chilean constitutional process (2021–2022).