Thinking Inside the Box: 1973 is a project that came to the University of Leeds in October 2022. We are the students who joined the project, and this exhibition on Hope, Struggle, and Solidarity is the result of our archival research and collaboration.
We've visited the Robert Pring-Mill Collection at the University of Liverpool's Popular Music Archive and Senate House Library's Latin America Political Pamphlet Collection. We've also worked with the artist-activist-archivist Antonio Kadima, including a sample of his own artworks which have been digitised as the Memories of Resistance Archive by the University of California.
The motto of our work has been to "think inside the box" - to reawaken hopes, struggles, and solidarities of the past through a performative engagement with the archive. To mark 50 years of the Chilean military coup, our exploration of the archive has been guided by the year of 1973, but is not only focused on Chile: in the context of the Global Cold War, 1973 marked a critical political moment for many other Latin American countries.
This exhibition is not limited to the artworks you see mounted on the walls: next to each image, you will find a QR code, which will take you to a reflective essay or some music related to the piece. Scattered around the displays, you will find boxes of postcards - we invite you to take a look inside and see which image speaks to you the loudest. We will also continue to build our own archive, through workshops and activities that generate political artworks and performances of Hope, Struggle, and Solidarity today.