17

Conversación de Campo
(Field Conversation)
Rosario Carmona, Catalina Matthey,
Maria Rosario Montero, and Paula Salas

CDC [Conversación de Campo] is a working system, a strategy to learn and commu-

nicate. We use art and ethnography as tools to create meaning and share it, not as
ends in themselves.
Our fundamental method is the conversation, defined as a horizontal exchange of
subjectivities: open, not hierarchical and not preset, free and not intended a means to
solve problems. Each CDC project arises from the communication and collaboration
between all participants. We begin with a conversation in which we fix the parameters
to continue, and we finish with another conversation where we look back on the
process and its consequences.
We want to reach a global audience, limited only by the properties of each project
and not by the constraints of any specific field, such as anthropology or contemporary
art. CDC seeks to involve people from different fields of knowledge, occupations,
cultures, age and interests, in interdisciplinary dialogues.
Our aim is to create conceptual and non-conceptual knowledge about the ideas,
preconceptions, stories, actions, and feelings that constitute our societies. For every
society, the manners in which people interact generate a cultural identity that not
only justifies those group relations, but also defines the behaviors and perceptions
of each social subject. CDC explores and reflects about the existence and changes
of those cultural identities in different contexts, looking at them methodologically to
understand how we relate to them and how those relations modify us.
Starting by observing the social, cultural, and geographical context, CDC attempts
to open up new possibilities to relate through art, ideas, and experiences. Moreover,
through our practices we want to propel changes in the power relations among
individuals around us, including ourselves.

9781474231251_txt_print.indd 217 13/10/2016 12:14

 218 ALTERNATIVE ART AND ANTHROPOLOGY

We write this manifesto today to fix a point of departure from where to travel.
CDC is based upon the idea that identity is a flux of relations and context, which can
be seen only at specific times and spaces. Therefore, this manifesto is a “here” and
“now” from where to observe our own flow.
Conversación de Campo (Field Conversation) Manifesto, January 2012

CDC (as per its initials in Spanish) is defined as a system of analysis, discussion, and
learning, which explores the presence of anthropology in art and the relevance of art
in anthropology. Considering its social, cultural, and geographical context, CDC seeks
to propose reflections that enable the opening of possibilities to relate to each other
through art, ideas, and experience.
The following discussion is an exploration of the crossing of methodologies carried
out by a group of four Chilean artists, Conversación de Campo (CDC). The aim was
to establish an approach to anthropology from each of their respective disciplinary
fields and various countries of residence (Chile, Mexico, U.K., Netherlands) through
a series of conversations, literature reviews, and audiovisual responses discussed
regularly via Skype. Thus, from January 2012, CDC became a collaborative research:
a system of analysis and discussion that explored the relationships between art and
anthropology. First CDC created a digital platform to share readings, images, videos,

FIGURE 17.1  Rosario Montero, Copia Conflictiva (Conflicted Copy), from the series “No
Way Out,” 2011. Photo © Rosario Montero/CDC.

9781474231251_txt_print.indd 218 13/10/2016 12:14

 CONVERSACIÓN DE CAMPO (FIELD CONVERSATION) 219

theories, and impressions. There, we articulated a personal strategy to activate our

experience in the fields of both disciplines. In 2012 CDC participated in an exhibition at
the Gabriela Mistral Gallery (Santiago, Chile) with the work “En la Otra Cuadra.” Later
that year Montero presented the experience in the conference “Imagined Landscape”
(University of Barcelona, Spain.). In 2013 Carmona presented the project in the interna-
tional seminary “Estudios y Encuentros entre Antropología y Arte” (PUC Lima, Peru),
published in a book in 2016. Currently the authors are working on different projects
related to the issues discussed during the CDC experiences.
The purpose is to now present a dialogue between the participants, who do
not intend on having a single viewpoint or the same answers, but to establish an
exchange in the present situation, which considers the elapsed time. Thus, this new
conversation looks into the productivity of the methodological crossing between
anthropology and art.

RC  Well, I think to start this discussion it is relevant to note that our starting point is a
question, which we will attempt to address together. This question has to do with the
ways of making productive methodological crosses between anthropology and art. To
try to answer it, we decided to establish the conversation as the work methodology,
and base it on the definition proposed by Ricardo Basbaum:

Conversations are a way of thinking, where the self opens to the outside, producing
a special social space where no single language of truth is prevalent. It enables
the transformation of the voice of the other […]. “Conversations” are a sort of
dialogue that have their own dynamics, always surprising the participants […]
a permanent state of awareness and change (flexibility) […] when they finish a
particular dialogue—they just cannot go back to the same places they left before
(some transformation might have happened). Therefore, “conversation” is a modality
of movement.1

PS  One aspect of the conversation that seems essential is the movement effect
mentioned by Basbaum. Conversing requires, on the one hand, setting a starting
position and defending it, but also involves opening to the possibility of changing
position, moving. It is an exercise that requires strength and flexibility at the same
time. When we started the conversation as CDC, doubt reigned among the group,
there was uncertainty over conviction, therefore the exercise of appropriating a
viewpoint and defending it often felt forced. However, we engaged time and again
in dialogues that led us to confront ideas, analyze them thoroughly, combine them,
and reformulate them to then end up, on several occasions, with more questions
than answers. As in a game, everything that happened while conversing—including
triumphs, defeats, and clashes—remained in the sphere of the conversation, like
a secret between us four. However, the effects of these dialogues exceeded by
far those of a game, not only changing our initial convictions, but also our artistic
and anthropological practices, and even the way we felt in the contexts in which
we were.

9781474231251_txt_print.indd 219 13/10/2016 12:14

 220 ALTERNATIVE ART AND ANTHROPOLOGY

RM  Yes, as Paula rightly says, I think CDC was established from the exchange and
the problematization of points of view. It is more about a dialogue that does not seek
to find answers but rather understand the questions. At first, I did not consider the
conversation to be an end in itself but instead a means to reach a place, a means
that as time passed became the end … a bit like the classic cliché that says the path
becomes the destiny …

CM  The conversation was established as a work methodology because it is a funda-

mental means for the collection of data within anthropology, which would also allow
us to think freely, based on our experiences and points of view, despite the physical
distance from one another. More than a structured work plan, we were looking for
a tool that could lead to the improvisation and deployment of ideas, in order to start
giving shape to topics of discussion and research that we thought were necessary to
formulate—to the extent that our interests and concerns required it—without major
planning in advance and trying to avoid pre-established ways of thinking within the arts.

RC  The approach we took to guide our conversations comes from the crossing
of our disciplinary fields—painting and photography, fundamentally—and personal
circumstances that led us to become interested in anthropology. Particularly, I think
the feeling of personal change that is experienced in a context different from the
one of origin, and the need to address it in one’s artistic production, is key. To me,
what motivated me the most was to try to structure a critical view of the systems of
production and circulation of contemporary art.

CM  For example, my artwork was always closely linked to the concept of how, through
visual repetition, the same sign could change its initial meaning. And, the irony was
that when I went to live in Mexico it was art itself that changed definition. My work
was seen and explained differently and I was seen as exotic, as strange, as the
“other.” I realized that there was a cultural codification that went beyond my theoretical
concepts of art and that inevitably permeated all production. I understood that in order
to comprehend and use such codes I would have to first understand Mexican culture,
its particular dynamics, and accept the versatility and dynamism of the culture as such.

PS  For me, my artistic production led me to seek other means to represent human
groups beyond painting. In ethnography, I found a way of creating community portraits
based on anthropology. So I started to use it in conjunction with art tools in order to
portray the communities with which I worked. However, it was not a coincidence that I
discovered ethnography while in Holland, instead of Chile. With the optimism brought
by this new instrument also came the awareness of its imperialist tendency, as a
Western mechanism of categorization of the “other” non-Europeans, like me.

RM  In the same manner as Paula Salas, the experience of perceiving oneself as an
“other” led me to modify certain approximations of my artistic practice, which has
always been linked to the gaze of an “other,” the relationship established between the

9781474231251_txt_print.indd 220 13/10/2016 12:14

 CONVERSACIÓN DE CAMPO (FIELD CONVERSATION) 221

object / subject observed and myself as the observer. But despite the fact that it has
been a constant, I had not always had the clarity or ability to name those processes
until migrating to London. When I arrived, there arose a need to understand what
involves working with ethnographic tools, and based on these creation processes
problematize the notions of identity and territory.

RC  In my case, through a journey that began in the field of art, I realized that
sometimes, as artists, and as a product of a system and market that demands a
so-called originality and visibility, we forget that art is the product of a given context,
that works of art are not completely original, that our interests come from external
influences and that these somehow influence us, consciously or not. This motivated
us to try to understand and rethink what we did, from a perspective constructed
on the basis of our motivations, limitations, and appreciations that determine such
actions, as well as from the interpretations we make of them and their processes. In
this sense, I believe that addressing one’s own biography under Bourdieu’s notion of
habitus as incorporated history, which becomes second nature, and so forgotten as
such,2 allowed us to reconstruct the path that we were in at the time.

CM  Reconsidering the personal experiences described above, each one of us wanted
to approach art anthropologically, and in a way that would enable us to resolve our

FIGURE 17.2  Paula Salas, Conversación de Campo, “Study of my habitus.” Drawing

on paper. Visual exploration of the influence of family and institutions on an individual
identity. The Netherlands.

9781474231251_txt_print.indd 221 13/10/2016 12:14

 222 ALTERNATIVE ART AND ANTHROPOLOGY

concerns. We realized that the context in which our biography was developing was
also changing and being constructed. Regarding this, Clifford Geertz’s definition of
culture as “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms”3 helped
us understand this idea as something extraordinary, linked to a specific social reality,
just like our notion of artist and artwork.

PS  In relation to the question of how we situate ourselves in our new contexts,
personally, I was interested in envisaging my agency as an artist around the foreign
society in which I was. I wanted to find out how far I could take using art to under-
stand, explain, or modify this context. The idea of culture as a reality constructed by all
members of society made me see the organic, permeable character of communities,
including their cultural identity. At this point, I found useful Hall’s idea of cultural
identity4 as a position from which one speaks. This position, according to the author,
is connected to the locations of other cultural subjectivities and it is flexible—that is
to say, one may adopt various identities, even simultaneously.

RM  In this sense, the collective’s experience is what enabled me to ask questions
about my place in this new territory, where my identity was being affected. It was then
that Foucault’s texts on the idea of the monster as a localized group construction,5 as
well as Hall’s understanding of identity as a flux,6 helped me comprehend my place
in a new context. These theoretical approaches led to ways of addressing these
problems through visuality. One of the ways of addressing the problems of identity
was the question of what is an original in relation to a copy, where the aim was not
only to understand the definition and materiality of these concepts, but to consider the
marginalizations that arise when designating something as a copy; or those occurring
in discourses regarding center–periphery in the postcolonial context.

CM  So, every week in CDC, a conversation topic around a specific text was proposed.
Some of the issues discussed were the idea of identity, translation, the exotic, the
monster, and so on.

RC  We are aware that a central theme in our research was the notion of identity,
considered by different authors, such as García Canclini and Gutierrez,7 as a process of
constant change, registered in practices and cultural expressions that refer to different
contexts; also, it arises due to different motivations and can be interpreted by others
in multiple ways. On the other hand, returning to the idea of Paula Salas, Stuart Hall
points out that “identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think […] we
should think, instead, of identity as a ‘production’ which is never complete, always in
process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.”8 This definition
is discussed through multiple works and images, like this one from Catalina Matthey
(“animalito”) (Fig. 17.3).

CM  Regarding that response, the “animalito” or “little animal” in question, which
appears in the photograph, corresponds to clay pieces made by people of southern

9781474231251_txt_print.indd 222 13/10/2016 12:14

 CONVERSACIÓN DE CAMPO (FIELD CONVERSATION) 223

FIGURE 17.3  Catalina Matthey, Conversación de Campo, “Another on Hall.” Picture,

Mexico. Visual exploration on the notion of self. Photo © Catalina Matthey/CDC.

Mexico, which are characterized by personal creations that combine their imaginary
with parts of different real animals. The relationship with identity is in the construction
work, which can be seen both in the figure and in the concept of identity itself, as
both are made from the overlapping of ideas, beliefs, and norms, reconfigured in new
environments. Subsequently, these reflections were linked to the beginning of our
own identity crisis as artists.

RM  What Catalina Matthey indicates, demonstrates how the CDC processes and
dialogues were not static but a path of constant change. In this sense, I believe the
words of Ingold in his book Lines (although not part of the references examined by
CDC) summarize quite well this path we took collectively, and the way we now try
to tell a story like a drawing, where “we weave a narrative thread that wanders from
topic to topic,” just as in our walk, where “we wandered from place to place.” “This
story recounts just one chapter in the never-ending journey that is life itself, and it is
through this journey—with all its twists and turns—that we grow into a knowledge of
the world about us.”9

RC  So by understanding identity as a production, we attempt to show through our

work the ability to assign to multiple identities. The images we produced aimed to

9781474231251_txt_print.indd 223 13/10/2016 12:14

 224 ALTERNATIVE ART AND ANTHROPOLOGY

challenge stereotypes and highlight the importance of the “other” in the construction
of social and personal identity.

PS  At this point we also explored the politics of cultural identity by focusing on
the mixture and hybridity rather than the purity or authenticity of each culture.
According to García Canclini (an author we did not read together but who addresses
hybridization as a methodological standpoint), this approach reveals the creative
processes—sometimes peaceful and sometimes conflictive—through which today’s
Latin American identities are articulated.10

RM  This concept of Latin American identity led us to rethink the notion of otherness,
taking into account the experience of becoming an “other” in a context where such
cultural mixtures are often excluded.

CM  In regard to this idea of the “other,” I thought of Lévi-Strauss, who talks about
how identity is shaped in relation to the construction of an “other.” He speaks about
how humanity ends at the borders of the tribe, of the village, to the point that many
primitive peoples called themselves a name that means “men” and therefore the
others are not men, and are “bad.”11 It is from the idea of the “other” that we shape
ourselves; this is why seeing ourselves as the “other” caused such a stir among us.

RC  For me, the response of Paula Salas is very illustrative of this; moreover, she takes
as reference the work of another Chilean artist, Magdalena Atria, as well as the work of
Catalina Matthey, “Fuera de lugar: Situaciones concretas de un extranjero en un país que
no es el suyo” (Out of place: Specific situations experienced by foreigners in a country
that is not their own) made from photographs taken during her father’s visit to Mexico
City. They both felt completely surprised by all the customs they observed in such an
intense and diverse city. Due to their awe, they did not go unnoticed as foreigners.

PS  I think that the foreign outlook and seeing yourself as Latin American from the
outside (as a foreigner) contributes to the construction of a local identity, even more so
than the outlook from within. Prejudices and stereotypes, even if they are ridiculous,
shape identity. According to García Canclini, “What it means to be Latin American,
is not just observing what happens within the territory historically defined as Latin
America. The answers regarding the Latin American way of being also come from
outside the region.”12

RM  Taking what Paula Salas states, I have always found it ironic that I was only able
to understand the relevance and impact of the construction of foreign stereotypes in
local reality once I left Chile.

RC  On the other hand, this also led us to think about the idea of abnormality that often
involves otherness, or the idea of the monster, understood by Foucault as a legal–
biological construction that combines the impossible and forbidden, and therefore
must be submitted to the devices of domestication of the body and discipline,

9781474231251_txt_print.indd 224 13/10/2016 12:14

 CONVERSACIÓN DE CAMPO (FIELD CONVERSATION) 225

designed by and for a society that craves a so-called normality.13 These devices are
evident in places like prisons and psychiatric facilities but fade into the background in
other places they usually inhabit, such as schools, universities, or even just the street.
We also perform works around these reflections. The responses of Rosario Montero
in relation to this idea and the migration laws in countries like the U.K. reflect on the
imposition of paradigms and stigmas under which we can be categorized; to the first
ones we must submit, while the latter are attributed to us.

CM  Regarding this notion of the “other” linked to the abnormal, Foucault also defines
the monster as a transgression of “natural limits, transgression of classifications,
[…] of the table, and of the law as table.”14 For instance, in the conversation about
the monster I replied with a reflection in regard to how we could see as monsters
those who did not adjust to our idea of “normal.” For example, the men who dress
as women in Mexico for festivity dances in post-indigenous towns surrounding the
Federal District, which for them is an honor.

RM  We observed otherness while being part of it, becoming something like an
exotic landscape, where we could visualize that expressed by Gregory: “The central
representational predicament was to find a way of conveying the otherness of other
natures (and other cultures), of bringing them within a European project of a universal
‘earth-writing’, that would make them intelligible to metropolitan audiences without at
the same time destroying the very sign that marked them as other.”15

RC  I think sometimes it is not very comfortable to feel like the “other,” to be part of
a minority, as we are used to feeling safe in our context, not perceiving the power
exercised over us invisibly in our daily lives. I think that somehow this idea of imposing
categories and stereotyping can be applied to the art system—and the knowledge
production systems in general—which tend to establish paradigms and perspectives
from which not only to produce, but also from which to perceive art and knowledge,
thereby mediating and limiting experience.

PS  Nevertheless, I feel that the position of “other” is not always a disadvantage,
especially in the field of art. Several contemporary artists use their ethnic, sexual,
and national identity as a standard, making their personal and cultural subjectivity
the theme behind their work. Gerardo Mosquera speaks of this strategy in his book
Caminar con el Diablo (Walking with the Devil). According to the author, particularly
non-European or non-U.S. artists need to create their own tools to compete in the
international field of art, a field created by and for Europeans and U.S. Americans.
Mosquera states that there is an international language of art, which consists of
“certain canons of encoding in art that are disseminated in the central circuits and,
under their legitimizing aura, they are imitated or appropriated by the peripheries […]
It is in reality a language of initiated members that allows an international communi-
cation between members of the same sect.”16 In this context, “otherness” provides a
strong position from which to speak this sectarian language.

9781474231251_txt_print.indd 225 13/10/2016 12:14

 226 ALTERNATIVE ART AND ANTHROPOLOGY

CM  Regarding this, Pierre Bourdieu says that objects, which are socially designated
as art, are imposed by the institution, referring not only to academia and museums,
but also to family and school. Society dictates, through its institutions, what to see
and how to see it. The work of art “only exists as such for who is in possession of the
means to appropriate it by deciphering it, that is to say, for who possesses the histori-
cally constituted code.”17 There is a sort of knowledge that categorizes, compares,
discriminates; knowledge that due to the fact that it has always been there becomes
logical and natural, but that basically corresponds to a system that comes from the
social sphere, from the idea of order that each society proposes.

RM  If we take into consideration the notions gathered by Bourdieu as to how the
habitus plays a fundamental role in the creation and appreciation of the work of art,18
we can say that the role played by the context in the work of CDC is decisive. Every
encounter, dialogue, and response originated from the inputs created by the different
contexts in which the four of us were.

RC  Indeed, the context first determines the experience of the artists and their
production, then the multiple readings that can be made of the work. Now, this idea,
although it attempts to question the way we traditionally produce and interact with
art, it is heavily promoted by the same methodologies that art has installed in the
twentieth century. We cannot ignore that fact.

RM  Following the idea about the relevance of the context, I think that, at this stage, it
would be productive to discuss the issues around our digital form of communication,
and how this material form has shaped the way we have communicated through
the whole process. In this sense, I wonder how a context such as the internet, and
specifically our website, defined our production. Do we think our ideas, images, and
responses in the conversation were somehow prefixed by the fact that they were
made for the Web? Following Bourdieu’s reasoning, I guess society also dictates what
and how to see art on the internet, but it is hard for me to imagine in which ways this
could have affected our own project.

PS  I definitely think the internet did define the shape of our conversation. In my case, I
feel that at the beginning this materiality did act as a restrain. I mean, that the material
form of my responses in the Web were limited by the technologies given by this
format, technologies that allow to experience only two senses: things can be either
watched or heard—touch, taste, and smell are excluded from the equation. Some
of us were used to making corporeal objects—paper sculptures, oil paintings, dark
boxes, silverprints, etc.—so we had to adapt our creative process to invent immaterial
objects for the Web. We were forced to translate our experience, our know-how,
into another language. Thus, we pushed ourselves to confront an unknown territory
and come up with experimental solutions. The fact that we knew our responses
were made for that particular website, with a particular interface and architecture, at
the very least, defined their shape, if not also the content itself. For example, each

9781474231251_txt_print.indd 226 13/10/2016 12:14

 CONVERSACIÓN DE CAMPO (FIELD CONVERSATION) 227

response needed a written title, and also had to fit within pre-established labels and
keywords. Moreover, we had to assign all the metadata to describe the images, so
that they could be found through search engines (e.g.Google).

CM  We decided to create this digital platform with the aim of reaching different
audiences. Our intention was to explore but also to share our experiences around
this crossing of fields between art and anthropology. In this sense, the fact that we
chose to use .com instead of .cl [the web domain for Chile] for our site reflects a
certain degree of awareness about the audience we wanted to reach. As we stated
in the manifesto, we wanted to reach people beyond the limit of our geographical
and historical contexts (friends and acquaintances). We aimed to create a space for
dialogue that wasn’t limited by the personal network of the transmitter, but by a
shared understanding with the receivers. Of course, this is a utopia, nonetheless a
productive one, because it forced us to produce concepts and images outside our
comfort zone, beyond our common sense.

RC  Maybe our aim to reach global audiences was naive considering that the Web
is full of noise and brands with PR strategies pushing to gain visibility. We didn’t put
much energy into reaching a new public or people in other fields. But the Web allowed
us to create a point of intersection where all that we had done could be visualized and
organized (or unorganized) and seen by the few who share our interdisciplinary views
on art and anthropology. For example, in my case, while working as an anthropologist,
many people have approached me to comment on our website. I’ve been contacted
through social networks, and even been to some international institutions that have
asked me to participate in seminars. This is the case with Universidad Católica de
Lima, which, after seeing our website, invited CDC to present our project in their
seminar about Art and Anthropology last year. Both in Lima and Santiago, I heard of
colleagues in the academy who use our website as case study for interdisciplinary
work between art and anthropology. I’m not suggesting we are an example, but I do
think we raised some questions that other people in the field were asking too, and
because our website is in itself a materialization of that experience (not only the art
practice-documentation that many websites offer), it allows us and others to observe
and discuss our findings.

CM  Besides, we saw the website as a way to escape the local art circuit, eluding the
distortion of meaning that places like commercial art galleries or national museums
produce on works of art. For sure, the fact that our responses were uploaded to CDC’s
website, including the .com domain, the system (WordPress based) and the economy
of the digital environment (Google and social media) had an impact on the meaning of
our outputs, however we managed to use it to get people who would never visit an
art space (in Chile) to see our conversation.

PS  Nevertheless, at a certain point we were invited to make a project for an art
gallery; thus we were tempted to confront that local system of power we were trying

9781474231251_txt_print.indd 227 13/10/2016 12:14

 228 ALTERNATIVE ART AND ANTHROPOLOGY

FIGURE 17.4  Paula Salas, Conversación de Campo, “En la otra cuadra” (“On the next
block”). Mural installation. Collaborative art project, 2012–13. Galería Gabriela Mistral,
Chile. Photo © Paula Salas/CDC

to elude, giving us an opportunity to challenge the subjects we were discussing in

a specific context. This challenge made us aware that we needed to confront the
power involved in contemporary artistic production. As Chantal Mouffe says, all art is
political, because it either contributes to maintaining the social order or focuses on its
destruction or questioning.19 I then wonder if the same art tools that have been used
to maintain current hegemony can be used to dismantle it, or at least criticize it.
In light of this invitation arose the need to put to the test the ideas and questions
we talked about for months. Can identity be represented as a flux? Can something
that is changing all the time be shown? Can a community be represented without
stereotyping it?

RC  And thus originates this collaborative project, named “En la otra cuadra” (“On
the next block”), which attempts to answer our questions. Carried out in the civic
district of Santiago, it involved the direct participation of the environment in the
formal construction of the work, expanding the notion of workshop as a fixed space.
We invited different actors to participate, through visual, oral, and written accounts
that would give shape to a map. This map was different from the official ones, which
seek to put the territory in objective terms, eliminating irregularities, movements, and
the transience of what is real. The objective of this project was to introduce, in the
stories of our own artistic work, the stories of those who inhabit the territory and are

9781474231251_txt_print.indd 228 13/10/2016 12:14

 CONVERSACIÓN DE CAMPO (FIELD CONVERSATION) 229

FIGURE 17.5  Paula Salas, Conversación de Campo, “En la otra cuadra” (“On the next
block”). Mural installation. Collaborative art project, 2012–13. Galería Gabriela Mistral,
Chile. Photo © Paula Salas/CDC

commonly not part of these narratives. These stories were collected from conversa-
tions that connected with our subjectivity; they were also made public through an
installation and two talks, in the context of an exhibition, a gallery, and the street.

RM  Just to put things in context, it is worth explaining a bit about the place where the
project was conducted. We were invited by Brazilian curator Fernanda Albuquerque
to produce a project at the Gabriela Mistral Gallery from November 2012 to January
2013. This gallery is located in the middle of the civic district of Santiago de Chile; it
is a space heavily charged by social tensions and historical context where everyday
life is interwoven with poverty, business activity, and a strong police presence that
bounds the use of public space. In front of the gallery runs the main street of Santiago,
the spinal cord of the city from the mountains to the sea: the Alameda high street.
This part of the city, where the gallery is located, is also home to one of the major
underground stations, where a large number of people pass by every day. It is the
heart of the commercial district and the government, and also a hub of connection
where people from different places commute to work. It is an open area surrounded
by high buildings mainly from the 1960s that create a sense of contained openness.
The pedestrian part is highly populated with street commerce, movement, and noise.
The gallery then appears as an island, at a slower speed and isolated from the bustling
street sounds just outside the gallery doorstep.

9781474231251_txt_print.indd 229 13/10/2016 12:14

 230 ALTERNATIVE ART AND ANTHROPOLOGY

FIGURE 17.6  Conversación de Campo, “En la otra cuadra” (“On the next block”).
Collaborative pocket map of the neighborhood. Collaborative art project, 2012–13. Galería
Gabriela Mistral, Chile. Photo © Rosario Montero/CDC

PS  One of our motivations was to demonstrate the power structures that separate
the inhabitants from the artists and also from the institutions; subvert them through
an open invitation to occupy the gallery space, and position in it the story that no one
seems to care about, but that nonetheless is key to understanding local and global
processes of construction of place. By crossing tools of different disciplines, such as
maps, interviews, walks, and drawings, we decided to reorganize the meanings of
the neighborhood, eclipsing the monumental presence of La Moneda (government
palace, ministries and police force) to see the hundreds of personal subjectivities that
also articulate the identity of the civic district.

RM  Following these ideas, we started to wonder if this place could be understood as
landscape and to what extent it could be thought of as an interwoven space where
people cannot be separated from it. Landscape develops as part of human lives, not
as a container that signifies or symbolizes power relations but as “an instrument of
cultural power.”20 The experience carried out by CDC during December 2012 intended
to explore how landscape appears as a tool, a medium to access and to understand,
through established relations and symbols, the power relations that take place within
that neighborhood. This collaborative project, which used anthropological method-
ologies, was also an attempt to identify other opportunities to relate to the city, using
tools specific to the art field in order to symbolically appropriate the landscape.

9781474231251_txt_print.indd 230 13/10/2016 12:14

 CONVERSACIÓN DE CAMPO (FIELD CONVERSATION) 231

CM  So, the project took as a starting point the location of the Gabriela Mistral Gallery,
as it stands on the core of this landscape—a node that will structure our perceptions in
relation to this context. The first process of collaborative landscape imaging took place
during November 2012, where we interviewed local people—a mix of passers-by who
worked or lived in the area. Each of them was asked to draw their favorite place in
the neighborhood—that is to say, how they position themselves as part of the context
rather than separated from it. The second stage of the project was about creating a
full view of those drawings. The challenge was to create a palimpsest of meaning, a
collective narrative that combines individual stories and images. With this in mind we
drew a map on the wall of the gallery that included lines representing the streets,
labeled with their respective names.

RC  Yes, we did all this aiming to position the drawings in relation to a recognizable set
of references, allowing the audience to create a narrative that could have as starting
point something they already knew how to locate. Lines were drawn with a graphite
pencil across the surface of the gallery wall in the shape of a simplified cartographic
map, a transitory way to intervene the space as an occupation rather than a habitation.
Through the presence of this line an imaginary space was created, where the relevance
resided not in the line in itself, but in the frontiers of an enclosed bi-dimensional space.
Drawings were placed with pins over the sketched map, so that street names and
recognizable features became a loose reference, reducing its importance against the
layer created by the collaborators’ drawings. The third and final phase of the project was
a public event, a walk/talk in which the path was selected from five of those narration/
drawings previously made by our collaborators. During the interviews we invited all
collaborators to participate actively in the talk. Our aim was to re-enact the narratives
surrounding all those places chosen by some of our collaborators. The walking talk took
place in the first days of January 2013, just after New Year’s weekend. On a hot summer
afternoon the talk started inside the gallery with a traditional round table with questions
addressed by the audience to the artists and, after the walk, it finished in the same way.

CM  Here again we are confronted with the questioning of concepts—the creator,
artist, spectator, workshop, institution, artwork, landscape, and so on—through the
creation of a work by hybrid means, such as the integration of the viewer in the
creation or presentation-path of the work in public space, using anthropology tools
such as interviewing and mapping. In this project we explored how the work could
become more than an object, how the process of preparation, discussions, short-
comings, set-up, opinions and contributions of those who observed, was all part of
the work too, and not in a stable, but in a voluble manner. “By reducing art to only one
of its facets, which is to convey messages, communicate meaning,” Elizabeth Araiza
states that the question about other possible functions remains silent.21 With this
project, we also tried to show these other possible functions in which art can develop,
linked not only to the artwork as a product but to variants that converge in it and that
are also part of its configuration.

9781474231251_txt_print.indd 231 13/10/2016 12:14

 232 ALTERNATIVE ART AND ANTHROPOLOGY

RM  Through this project we were able to observe how landscape as a cultural medium
can “naturalise a cultural and social construction, representing an artificial world as if
were simply given and inevitable,” and at the same time we were able, through repre-
sentational operations, to “interrelate its beholder in some more or less determinate
relation to its givenness as sight and site.” Hence, landscape as a totalizing image
allowed us to reflect about that place in which the material production of our reflection
(the images and narratives) were able to “circulate as a medium of exchange, a site of
visual appropriation, a focus for the formation of identity.”22 Therefore landscape, as a
reflection and representation of culture, appeared as a medium to reflect about power
structures and how these are constituted as a dialectic instance that is never finished
and always changing.

PS  In this sense, the experiences conducted through the physical project (“En la Otra
Cuadra”) and the website allowed us to reach different audiences, having diverse
reactions, especially from people within the worlds of art and anthropology. Generally,
both spaces of intersection were welcomed in both fields of study, giving us multiple
opportunities to discuss the two experiences. But despite the positive reception,
the physical project raised some concerns in both disciplines. For example, during
the Q&A conducted in the gallery for the exhibition, some artists posed doubts in
relation to our appropriation of data from the fieldwork and how it could be used as an

FIGURE 17.7  Paula Salas, Conversación de Campo, “A page of the field diary.” Drawing
on paper. Fictional diary based on Catalina Mathey’s diary of San Juan Tezontla and
Bronislaw Malinowski’s diary of the Trobriand islands. The Netherlands. Photo © Paula
Salas/CDC

9781474231251_txt_print.indd 232 13/10/2016 12:14

 CONVERSACIÓN DE CAMPO (FIELD CONVERSATION) 233

aesthetic tool to enrich the discourse we proposed in relation to the city. And similarly,
in other anthropologist groups belonging to academia, people tended to question this
process of appropriation in relation to the ethics and responsibility that we, as practi-
tioners, had with our informants. These two different concerns pushed us to rethink
our own processes, realizing that in this crossing of fields the perception of our work
will always differ depending on the discipline associated to the specific public viewing
it: artists or anthropologists. Finally, the collaboration with people from other fields of
knowledge (through drawing, walking, or conversing in the gallery) helped to expand
the reach of the project, transforming it in an experience of the city, an event and an
exchange that overstepped the gallery and the field of contemporary art.
Returning to the question regarding what is productive about the crossing between
art and anthropology, we can say that the work carried out by CDC opened a place
to reflect and analyze initial ideas that each member had about these two disciplines,
thus generating a collective production focusing on processes and learning. CDC
proposed a new perspective from which to critically observe the social, political, and
cultural contexts in which we live. This had several effects on the personal production
of the artists involved, and although for four of us these effects were very diverse,
methodological openness was decisive for the reformulation of artistic proposals that
consider the relationship between art and society as a matter of discourse and visual
production. In concrete terms, CDC made possible to obtain new tools to analyze the
environment, placing the production of art in a constant dialogue with the context.
Going back to the manifesto at the beginning of this chapter, this conversation
again sets a “here” and “now”, which—at the end of a cycle of over a year of conver-
sations, a joint art project, and this new opportunity for dialogue—results in new
questions that could start new dialogues, such as that question regarding identity and
its representation as a flux, or how to make the contributions of others your own in
an authorial project, considering the ethical and aesthetic implications. What lessons
from the political reflections within the anthropological field can we incorporate into
our practice? In what ways can work in transdisciplinary teams use art and anthro-
pology as a means to create meaning? What can the artistic dynamics bring to the
fieldwork, within anthropology? In short, CDC will continue to combine (interweave)
voices without trying to align within the same expression, and will aim to reflect,
through our practices, the versatility and change that we seek.

Text by Conversación de Campo: Rosario Carmona, Catalina Matthey, Maria Rosario

Montero, and Paula Salas.

Translated by Natalia Alvarez-Martínez.

9781474231251_txt_print.indd 233 13/10/2016 12:14

 234 ALTERNATIVE ART AND ANTHROPOLOGY

Notes
1 Basbaum, Ricardo, Re-projecting (Utrecht), Utrecht: Casco, Office for Art, Design and
Theory (Utrecht: Casco, 2008), p. 11.
2 Bourdieu, Pierre, La Distinción: Criterios y bases sociales del gusto (Madrid: Taurus,
1988), p. 94.
3 Geertz, Clifford, Descripción densa: Hacia una teoría interpretativa de la cultura en La
Interpretación de las culturas (Mexico: Gedisa 1973 (1987)).
4 Hall, Stuart, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Rutherford, Jonathan (ed.), Identity:
Community, Cultural, Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990).
5 Foucault, Michel, Los Anormales (Madrid: Editorial Akal, 2001), pp. 68–82.
6 Hall, Stuart, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.”
7 García Canclini, Néstor, Diferentes, Desiguales y Desconectados, Mapas de la
interculturalidad (Barcelona: Gedisa, 2004); Gutierrez García, Antonio, Identidad
excesiva (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2009).
8 Hall, Stuart, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” p. 222.
9 Ingold, T. Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 87.
10 García Canclini, Néstor, Diferentes, Desiguales y Desconectados.
11 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, “Introducción,” in Benoist, Jean-Marie (ed.), La identidad.
Seminario interdisciplinario dirigido por Claude Lévi-Strauss, profesor del Collège de
France, 1974–1975 (Barcelona: Ediciones Petrel, 1981), p. 12.
12 García Canclini, Néstor, Latinoamericanos buscando lugar en este siglo (Buenos
Aires: Paidós, 2002), p. 27.
13 Foucault, Michel, Los Anormales.
14 Ibid., p. 68.
15 Gregory, D., “(Post)colonialism and the Production of Nature,” in Noel Castree and
Bruce Braun, Social Nature: Theory, Practice and Politics (London: Blackwell, 2001),
pp. 84–111.
16 Mosquera, Gerardo, Caminar con el Diablo: Textos sobre arte, internacionalismo y
culturas (Madrid: Exit, 2010), p. 67.
17 Bourdieu, Pierre, “Disposición Estética y competencia artística,” Revista Lápiz, no.
166, Año XIX (Madrid, 2000): 2–4.
18 Bourdieu, Pierre, La Distinción.
19 Mouffe, Chantal, The Return of the Political (London and New York: Verso, 1993), p.
100.
20 Mitchell, W. J. T. Landscape and power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994),
p. 2.
21 Araiza, Elizabeth (ed.), Las artes del ritual. Nuevas propuestas para la antropología del
arte desde el occidente de México (México: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2010), p. 17.
22 Mitchell, W. J. T. Landscape and Power.

9781474231251_txt_print.indd 234 13/10/2016 12:14