CENTRO CULTURAL TALLERSOL
Centro Cultural Tallersol
Chosen by the Team
The Cultural Centre Tallersol was founded in 1977 in Santiago de Chile by a collective of artists and activists who used culture and politics to resist military repression by creating a space for creativity and artistic experimentation under the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Pinochet. During this time, they produced around thousands of posters, pamphlets, and other documents for human rights organisations, as well as political, social and cultural organsiations. To this day, the role of graphic art in networks of countercultural resistance during the dictatorship is little known and studied (translated from UCLA’s summary).
As part of Thinking Inside the Box: 1973, we have been working with one of the founders and current director of Tallersol, Antonio Kadima who is an activist and artist. His artworks and practices have inspired us in the project by providing artistic inspiration. We have tried to do Kadima justice by reawakening the power of his political artworks and sharing with others the visual symbols and techniques we learned from him.
Our project logo draws directly from Kadima’s artworks.
Below you’ll see some examples of some of the posters
we were looking at when we designed the logo.
Can you see the visual symbols and styles we were inspired by?
Speaking to Antonio Kadima also inspired students to think about the motivations, limitations, and urgency of creating political artworks. Kadima himself had been driven by urgent causes - such as spreading awareness of disappeared persons. He was often limited in terms of resources, but also in terms of censorship, and had experience working with and guiding others who did not have the artistic training and background that he did. Students thought through the practical implications of all of this, deciding to provide prompts for participants (What is urgent to you? How would you communicate your message if you couldn’t use words?) as well as providing visual elements and symbols taken from Kadima’s posters for visitors to rearrange in new ways. You can read more about our workshops here.
It is also relevant that Kadima is himself an archivist. Through Kadima, Tallersol has amalgamated a vast collection of posters, leaflets, bulletins, and other printed matter - over 8000 items. While he has contributed significantly to the construction of memory around state terror in Chile, Kadima’s personal mission is rather to preserve, promote, and raise the profile of the anti-Pinochet resistance movement. In this way, Kadima’s work speaks specifically to our them of Hope, Struggle, and Solidarity. Tallersol, like many other archives of resistance, is currently under threat of closure - it risks being assimilated into a societal oblivion driven by gentrification. This is why a project has been set up to begin the work of cataloguing and digitising the collection, to democratise access for the public and researchers.
The selection of posters here are just a few of the 150 Tallersol artworks that have recently been digitised as part of a project between the University of Leeds and the University of California. You can see the collection here:
https://digital.library.ucla.edu/catalog/ark:/21198/z1cz7hzc
