Track II
Interdisciplinary installation that reviews the historical memory of the 1973 coup d'état in Chile and the control mechanisms installed by the United States.
Daniela Contreras, Valentin Jadot
2025Starting point
- Since the 1990s, the United States has declassified thousands of documents revealing CIA intervention and U.S. foreign policy in Chile, thanks to the systematic work of the National Security Archive and Peter Kornbluh in The Pinochet File.
- The archives attest to the breadth and depth of U.S. intervention in the years leading up to the 1973 coup, with Henry Kissinger as the central figure in its planning and execution.
- Kissinger, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, died with impunity; his official biography denies any link to the 1973 coup.
- In 2023, Alfredo Jaar presented Buscando a Kissinger in Santiago, a work that articulates declassified archives and intervened photography to directly address the power responsible for the destruction of democracy.
Hypothesis
- A fragmented truth: despite declassified archives and archival evidence, the work of History remains undone and the role of the United States and Henry Kissinger remains widely unknown.
- The Monroe Doctrine is resurgent in Latin America, showing how historical dynamics of intervention and control remain at work in the present.
- Daniela Contreras Flores, weaver and visual artist, invites a collaborative work on the relationship between the U.S. and the coup in Chile for the exhibition "Interweaving the Archive" at Soil Gallery, Seattle (USA).
- A structural parallel exists between the shredding and manual weaving of documents and their algorithmic fragmentation, indexing, and recomposition through AI: two ways of operating on remains to produce meaning and dispute the writing of History.
Creative architecture
After reading The Pinochet File by Peter Kornbluh, the first step was writing code to download all declassified documents on Chile from the National Security Archive. A script that traverses the site, finds each PDF, and downloads it systematically.
Documents in hand, the double process begins.
Daniela Contreras shreds the declassified archives and reconstructs a lost voice through tapestry technique, inscribing a phrase from Salvador Allende's last radio address, minutes before his death in the bombing of La Moneda Palace, September 11, 1973: "social progress cannot be stopped either by crime or by force".
Valentin Jadot fragments those same documents into "chunks" stored in a "vector" database, ordering each piece in an abstract 1056-dimensional space by semantics, then training an artificial intelligence that, through a dedicated app, makes Henry Kissinger speak about the assassination of a democracy.
track-two.app: visitors dialogue with an AI that impersonates Henry Kissinger, opening an impossible conversation between his voice, the declassified documents, and the wound still open.
Printing: meanwhile, the conversations print onto a thermal paper roll. An algorithm strikes through the content. After several hours, along the roll, a phrase from Kissinger in 1970 emerges: 'I don't see why we should stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people'.
