Diamela Eltit, Zona de Dolor II / El Beso, 1981
Diamela Eltit
Zona de Dolor II / El Beso

Diamela Eltit (*1949, Chile) is a writer and co–founder of the Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (CADA), an interdisciplinary Chilean activist artistic collective which used performance strategies to oppose Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile (1973–1990) during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Her politically charged works examine issues of power, oppression, violence, femininity, and corporeality in Chilean society by combining literature and performance, action art and video documentation, urban intervention and poetry. Eltit was awarded a Guggenheim Fellow- ship in 1985 and became the Chilean cultural attaché to Mexico from 1990 to 1994. She has received numerous Literature awards including the Premio Nacional de Literatura de Chile in 2018 and both the Premio Carlos Fuentes and the Premio FIL de Literatura en Lenguas Romances in 2021.

In the performance El Beso (The Kiss), the artist again reverses the logic of everyday behaviour and kisses an old tramp in the street for free.

Performance: 1980, Santiago, Chile
Camera: Lotty Rosenfeld
Editing: Lotty Rosenfeld, Diamela Eltit

Courtesy Diamela Eltit

Format
Live performance documentation

Document media
Video, colour, sound, 3:05 min

Issue date
1981

Tags
intimacy, normativity, precarity, public space