Rebellious bodies and gazes in the landscape of protest. Mutilating, commemorating and erasing. Santiago, Chile

Abstract

It reflects on the eye mutilations that occurred during the social uprising of October 18, 2019, in Chile. The argument is that the mutilation of eyes by Chilean police forces operated as a repressive device, of control and intimidation of bodies in protest spaces. The biopolitics of repression was imposed as an exemplary punishment. The questions that guide the description and analysis are: How to understand the massive ocular traumas in the context of the social explosion in Chile? How do the survivors of ocular traumas remember, testify and live their experience today? How does street art enunciate, denounce and commemorate the facts of ocular mutilations?   It is concluded that the amalgam between these artistic expressions and the demands of economic and symbolic reparation of the survivors was strategic for the reconfiguration of the partition of the sensitive and the realization of mourning (Ranciere, 2004; Quintana, 2020). Today, only the stories and images of the survivors remain, with little possibility of an experience of mourning, symbolic reparation and resignification of their presence in the social fabric. What is observed today is the progressive revictimization of the survivors and the denial of the legitimacy of the claim.