Ya no son pilares: infrastructures and meanings that haunt the object plane

My ethnography takes place at the Rocas de Santo Domingo, Chile. During the socialist government of Salvador Allende, a worker’s union owned a beachside plot of land with several cabins. Labor organizers were offered free summer vacation rentals in the cabins as part of a “right to vacations” program. After a CIA-backed coup and installation of military dictatorship, the beach was re-occupied by the Chilean military. 

From 1974 to 1976, the Dirección de Inteligecia Nacional (DINA; think Chilean Department of Homeland Security) tortured dozens of leftist activists in the remnants of the summer vacation cabins. DINA tested and developed protocol for torture that would be used against detained migrants, political prisoners, Indigenous people, and labor leaders. After the dictatorship ended, the cabins were destroyed, leaving only their cement pile/pillar foundation.

My research recounts and represents how these materials enter and shape the object fields of post-dictatorship Chile and beyond — to Trump’s America. Using words, I try to pay justice to the pillar’s materiality and agency, promise as infrastructure, and life beyond state violence.