The Chopo Museum highlights the fight of the Yeguas collective in favor of diversity

The Chopo University Museum will present the exhibition in September Runaway: Mares of the Apocalypse. Retrospective, which recovers material from the Chilean collective founded in 1987 by the writers Pedro Lemebel (1952-2015) and Francisco Casas (1959), a reference in the fight for human rights. Currently, the exhibition is successfully exhibited at the National Museum of Fine Arts of Chile.

During the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006), the duo denounced the State’s poor attention to HIV/AIDS. In addition to demanding the presentation of the disappeared alive and the release of political prisoners, they fought in favor of sexual dissidence, the feminist movement and against institutional homophobia, explained the curator of the exhibition, Gerardo Mosquera, in an interview with The Day.

The Yeguas carried out two types of actions: irruption and planned. The first were surprising, such as the one that occurred in 1988 during a protest by students of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Chile, to which Lemebel and Casas arrived naked and mounted on a mare, in order to demand the entry of minorities to the institution.

They also made performances and exhibitions, such as the photographic series What AIDS took away composed of 30 images taken by Mario Vivado, in which the writers paid tribute to popular culture figures and friends, some of them victims of the virus. The sample was part of a group exhibition mounted in November 1989 at the facilities of the Chilean-French Institute of Culture.

A debt is settled

Despite the popularity of the members of the collective, this exhibition had historically been longed for. With its presentation, “we have been able to pay off” a debt, said Varinia Brodsky Zimmermann, director of the museum, in an interview with this newspaper.

His note refers to an altercation that occurred in September 1990, when the National Museum of Fine Arts presented the exhibition Open museum. The exhibition intended, in the context of the transition to democracy, to accommodate artists of all tendencies; However, the project was fractured with the censorship of the Yeguas.

“There was a video by Gloria Camiruaga, a prominent Chilean videographer, that contained a couple of actions by the Yeguas inside a transvestite brothel. This caused the material to be removed,” said Gerardo Mosquera.

Although the duo had been invited to participate in the group exhibition, Lemebel and Casas decided not to attend. “Instead, they showed up one day at the museum entrance and made a performance not announced in response to censorship,” he added.

The heritage

Compile the material that makes up Runaway: Mares of the Apocalypse. Retrospective, According to Mosquera, it represented a challenge, because “it is considered that most of their representations are undocumented; that is, more than half of the activities they carried out were not recorded graphically.”

However, the venue had the support of photographers, audiovisual producers and the D21 Art Projects gallery, which protected material referring to the group. They also relied on the Yeguas del Apocalipsis Archive, compiled by researchers Fernanda Carvajal and Alejandro de la Fuente, which brings together hundreds of documents about the duo’s career.

Thanks to these sources, the exhibition includes photographs, videos, press clippings and reproductions of installations, a set sufficient to recover the figure of the Yeguas as a reference in the fight for sexual dissidence.

Even so, faced with the notion that there is no total collection of the collective, Gerardo Mosquera made a key decision for the exhibition: resort to collective memory. He approached those who witnessed the actions of the Mares of the Apocalypse, collected their testimonies and incorporated them into the room. “That is, in the absence of documentation, the memory of what they did is recorded,” he explained.

This retrospective seeks, according to the curator, to vindicate the figure of the Yeguas and disseminate their work, but also to demonstrate that their production is not reduced to The two Fridas, scenographic reinterpretation of Frida Kahlo’s painting (1939), made in 1989.

“They are not just a couple of emblematic actions. They have a whole corpus of work that was quite forgotten or had not received institutional legitimation.”

Space for diversity

Runaway: Mares of the Apocalypse. Retrospective It has had a broad call, Brodsky explained, which reflects the validity of the collective, “two figures greatly admired for their courage and creative freedom in very difficult and repressive times in Chile.”

The director of the venue added that this exhibition reaffirms the museum’s commitment to becoming a plural and democratic space in which there is room for everyone, especially for historically violated sectors, such as gender-based dissidents, indigenous peoples, migrants and women.

“Understanding that diverse communities are a central part of our present and our future, assuming that recognition from a public museum is an ethical obligation, even more so in a global context in which people’s rights are not guaranteed,” said Varinia Brodsky.

Before its transfer, in September, to the Chopo University Museum (Dr. Enrique González Martínez 10, Santa María la Ribera neighborhood), the exhibition will conclude its cycle at the National Museum of Fine Arts of Chile on April 19.