The public institution “Correos de Chile” (Chilean Post Service), besides being a source of knowledge, travel and transportation, has censored an art piece that has a close relationship with themselves and the artwork of the visual artist Cristóbal Cea, Hawker Haunted, by what should give the audience the chance of thinking, questioning and conflicting through them without feeling fear of the repercussions.

And today is when such public service and the State that governs it, deny the possibility of this dialogue. It hinders and makes invisible part of the history told by an artist who challenges the dictatorship in a poetic way. People must understand from where and how we see the history of our recent past. We cannot be blind agents to deny ourselves what happened in Chile and in the world. Dictatorships are historical facts, which entail a lot of pain. Cea, from the irony and beauty achieves to question the linear thinking of history.

The art or an artwork has several layers of interpretation, versions and displacements. Cea in Hawker Haunted plays with the notion of confusion of what we think we know. The end of the Second World War and the Holocaust marked a before and after in the history of the humankind, because when the Cold War (1945-1989) came, the duty of rebuilding a nation-state no longer existed as such. The war devastated and fulminated the societies, as much in the architecture as in the politics, the economy and the soul of the society. Then there was a significant growth in the post-war industrial era, time when the “Hawker Hunter” were designed and built, used for the Royal Air Force and then were exported to several countries in the world.

The Cuban Revolution in Latin America (1959) tried to change the course of the history, in contrast to that Europe that was looking for a new path after the war. Cuba was trying to raise a new ideology. But it did not last long. President John F. Kennedy arranged the Alliance for Progress program, which meant financing health, economics and education to all the Latin American countries that were in the OAS, in order to block to Cuba. This program was accepted in 1961 in the Punta del Este conference. Under the Alessandri government comes this program to Chile, partly to support agrarian reform and in other areas (there were also scholarships for art).

I mention these historical events for understand the complexity of the art piece of Cristóbal Cea. One of the ways to read his work is stopping in the title: Hawker Haunted. Short and direct, alluding to a words play and a double sense in the reading. By one hand it points us to a haunted plane, enchanted and seductive, and at the moment when we see it, the work captivates us, and in another sense, ironically diverts us of its real meaning. So also these airplanes directly evoke the cold war and the European post-war, as was already mentioned.

Another point of view from which his work can be read, is the quote to wars in places that have never ended in decades, used as constant and regular experiments of countries of the first world in order to demonstrate their latest military technology, an example is what is happening today in countries like Syria. The violence in terms of war has been normalized and the words of Walter Benjamin reflect this very well: “The soldiers arrived mute from the battlefield”[1], a quote comparable to the exhaustion of the images of the misfortunes. Another element that fulfills an essential function in the work of Cea is the biographical thing. As a Chilean artist, he questions the existence of this type of plane in the country to bombarding the most sacred for the politic: La Moneda. The beginning of the military dictatorship in the country. The artist, who was not born at that time, heard all this through other persons.

There is something common about how the dictatorial stories were told (not only in Chile, also in other countries): it was hidden and many persons thought that everything was still as normal, even that life was safer. His work questions this idea, with a moving image of a Hawker Haunter airplane, designed by the British in the 50s and 60s, the Cold War time. These planes were bought and used by several third world countries for civil wars, such as Somalia, Zimbabwe or Pakistan. What raises the suspicion about a way to colonize and extend power, and at the same time, it was not interesting for press of that time. The planes arrived to Chile in the government of Eduardo Frei Montalva in 1967, some of them were used on 1973, September 11 to bomb La Moneda, beginning with this the darkest history of our country: the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte.

Almost 30 decades after this happened, Chile is not yet able to discern or fully agree on what the civilian military coup meant, although happened in fact and still is part of our history. Art must and can reflect about this. Is the platform to produce a dialogue on topics that we have not sorted in Chile yet.

A plastic covers the Hawker Haunted, denying and hindering the history of this (haunted) plane, which flights without any direction, with a strange but at the same time a pleasant noise. The piece, not only represents to Chile and the cold war, but also appeals to the criticism of military use, wars and how we have normalized the violence. The artist asks to himself in a very subtle way the story about the dictatorship that he heard when he was a child. Once adult, he understood what happened and that reflection is embodied in this work. Censorship is a word we do not like, but it persists because of fear and criticism of openness to issues that are still open. The question is: Can be censored a personal history? Of a whole country? The answer is no, we must take responsibility of what we are.

Montserrat Rojas Corradi
Curator and researcher

[1] Walter Benajmin. Taurus Editions,1991. Madrid, Spain.

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