We Paint to the Sky: Mural Making and Social Action in Post-Dictatorship Chile

Abstract

For over 50 years, the Brigada Ramona Parra, the muralist brigade of the Chilean Communist Youth, has used muralism to spread political ideology, protest the Pinochet dictatorship, and demand justice for dictatorial violence across Chile. The Brigade employs a particular focus on collective and participatory mural-making, bringing communities, schools, strangers, and relatives of the disappeared together to paint. Grounded in intergenerational interviews with current and former brigadistas of the Brigada Ramona Parra, I draw from a body of interdisciplinary theory, including social practice art and social action art therapy, to examine how the Brigade’s collaborative mural-making process aims to activate political, social, and organizational impacts in local communities. I further explore how this participatory process works as an act of trans-generational, political memory-making for murals painted in honor of Chile’s detenidos desaparecidos, thirty years post-dictatorship. Rather than only analyze the Brigade’s murals, this thesis explores the contemporary Brigade’s mural-making process as social action in and of itself.