SACO9 Now or never

I DEMAND AN EXPLANATION! | Rodolfo Andaur Antofagasta is the epitome of neoliberalism. This city located in the Atacama Desert crudely exposes –in each and every part of its urbanity– the calamities of an economic system walking on a tightrope.

In light of this precipitous prelude, the effects of the psychopolitical crisis and the syndemic have spurred on a social movement that has produced a number of signs and slogans that reflect a time of discord, not only within Chile but from around the world.

Emerging from a general feeling of dissatisfaction within a majority of the population, we are able to see the slogans of a cultural revolution that has constructed a graphic image stemming from both the insipidness of capitalism, as well as from the civic, collective and collaborative hopes that have sprung up in many of the neighborhoods and informal camps around the city.

Within this convulsive landscape, the creative drive of the Canarian artist Acaymo S. Cuesta appears. Revisiting these street symbols in a solo show, he installed a series of images dealing with the rift that exists between the ideal of a market economy and its actual performance in the midst of an unprecedented health crisis.

I demand an explanation! The well-known phrase of the comic book character Condorito became the title of the exhibition, as well as the starting point for a reading of the epistemological processes of transformation that the world is undergoing. Acaymo Cuesta used the words and symbols of demands made in the streets throughout Latin America –tangible and incomparable mantras– to give an account of the fraud of economic power, and of its main promoters and detractors, who emerge in the stories at every second, their struggles, songs and poetics made visual.

The overall context of I Demand an Explanation! is characterized by the environmental footprint of extractivist practices, which was also one of the triggers of the recent protests. From this situation, the symbols and slogans that the artist collected are amalgamated with the (d)effects of the 1980 Constitution enacted

by Pinochet. That charter has been the main political resource used to justify the indiscriminate expansion of neoliberalism into the ecosystem of one of the driest deserts in the world.

Recently though, a fired up community has, through an historic plebiscite, initiated a democratic process to replace the destructive Constitution that was installed by the Pinochet dictatorship some four decades ago. As such, this historic moment 118