If we want to tie the threads that cross the edges of the scar, we would meet two works separated by a distance of more than twenty years historically and geographically. The work titled Imbunche, exhibited in Santiago, Chile in 1977, subverted the daily publicity with which the newspaper El Mercurio attempted to routinize its empire of lies, scheming a risky filigree of deaf evocations to the regularly hidden deaths and disappearances apportioned by the military dictatorship. The work Run Away! Run Away!, in this exhibition, resorts to the pages of the New York Times (1999) in order to subject the news of the arrest of the Chilean ex-dictator Pinochet in London, to the lacerating and torturous associations of memory. Between both dates and works, not only have individual and collective memory worked to recall, but also the work with memory performed by Catalina Parra has pulverized the layers of news of the Chilean and international present, bursting their hidden or denied foundations.

The repressive violence and its graphic representation through techniques of breaking up the body of the news, the homogenous discourse of the official press (El Mercurio, The New York Times) whose blocks of words are hardened by the typographic regime of their monopoly of the truth; domestic chores-to saw, to patch-that confront the monumental letters of the political and financial headlines from the physical precariousness of the trace made by hand, are the forms and the contents of an insistent and constant labor. It is a trek from the historical localization of the memory of the victims in the Chilean press to the current compromised globalization of the information, documenting the arrest of the murderer, connected by the same thread of tenacious and vigilant memory: a thread that doesn't loosen.

Free of false dramatics, but with the meticulous rigor of an artistic and political solidarity with the broken and the damaged, the mutilations of the surface, the opposite of the plainly triumphant, the dismembering of the unit blown into fragments, the hand sawing of Catalina Parra has resisted, thanks to the single force of a stitch, which holds memory in a thread: dangerously suspensive, intermittent, discontinued, without the final assertion of a conclusive finish that promises to maintain the memory definitively free of new assaults and blackmails.

The memory (in capital letters), the social and political history that documents the news, have been repeatedly interrupted by the associative or dissociative fragmentation of images that retain the memory (lower case) of a personal biography (Germany, Chile, United States). Subjectivized by memories and lived experiences, social and political history allows itself to be affected by the residual of certain details that form the subtle or cruel twists and turns of the itinerary to rebuild the past, mixing the grandiloquent story of the general with the vague rumors of the particular. Patches, seams and bandages configure the operational syntax of a work that uncovers the memory, not as a complete story (sutured) but rather as a hole, a perforation-like a tear. The cut up images interrupt each other in order to impede forgetting their past mutilations (those caused by the brutality of military power), but also, so the senses learn how to distrust the false homogeneity with which the ideological configurations of the present aim to place us in instrumental complicity with the alleged candor of the capitalist axiom. Cuts and slices are the way in which the work of Catalina Parra furrows the face of today's news so that the present has memory of the shadows of the past and so that memory will recall that the slogans of advertising hypervisibility hide the secrets of multiple deletions and betrayals that daily form new scabs of shame.

The support on which Catalina Parra's work intervenes-pages of newspapers and clippings that she disassembles and reassembles on paper-come from the information and advertising universe of the printed press. Her artworks dialogue and argue with a visual mode made of several visualization techniques of collective and stereotyping perceptions, using as critical weapons the same significant techniques that manufacture the common place of public opinion reproduced daily in the media. The work doesn't take refuge in the inwardness of the "I" in order to oppose the world of the capitalist visualization from a language supposedly not contaminated by its amassment procedures, but rather, it builds meaning of opposition from the same materiality that the visual rhetoric of the information and advertising market uses, in order to formulate their messages of domination. Typography and pictures are what the work breaks into fragments, selects and reassembles according to procedures of cut and assembly that define their graphic-textual intention. These procedures alter the relationships of denotation and connotation of the headlines with fractures of perception and conceptual gaps that open breaches of defiance in the uniformed reading. The work of Catalina Parra knows that ideology is not a repertoire of content, but a grammar of signifying production that ties codes and subjectivity to certain chains of representation. Further, it knows that tactics of emancipating the senses that set an art of opposition and critical resistance are required to interrupt and disorganize such chains that seek to univocally obtain meaning and relevance.

The work of Catalina Parra subjects to difficult tests and questioning the pacts of legibility on which common sense bases its efficacy by breaking the body of the typographies that aggrandize the power of the word; by changing the scale of the graphic figures that dictate authority; by fractioning or dispersing the syntagmatic continuity of the power-to-name; by confronting among themselves the headlines that the power-to-name aims to isolate so the systematicness of their regime of arbitrary acts, censorship and exclusions is not noticed; by altering the hierarchy of the front pages and disarranging the guarded order of the performance between text and image, to create chaos in the rules of the illustrative subordination. Parra fiercely introduces doubt and suspicion into the naturalizing habits, thanks to which, the doxa (Barthes) carries out its work to render invisible the codes of manipulation of common sense, calling on the eyes-accustomed to naively trust the tricky equivalences between looking and seeing-to stay alert before all functional superposition on the transparency of power.

The flow of news from the compromised global network circulates images and words at a rate of exchange that forces them to volatility. Values and contents make common sense disposable as the messages are displaced and replaced by each other at a communicative speed that leaves no time to discern their effects or measure their consequences. Without pauses to interrupt that continuous, distracted, and thoughtless flow, the social gaze doesn't have the opportunity to examine itself and look back critically at the automatisms of vision, presuppositions and impositions of the dominant regime of display that organizes the real to make us believe that such reality speaks for itself, not noticing the selective and controlling compromises of their fictitious versions and perversions. Realized from the minimum unit, discreet, in the act of buying and reading the newspapers daily, Parra stops in what she sees and then retains what is seen between the lines, to visually expose her reading in a new daily mural, inviting the eyes of the spectator to share her same investigative curiosity toward all that is hidden between the lines of the power of the media. This minimum gesture of thwarting the speed with which the media aims to suppress, the temporality of the experience and the historicity of the event with the subterfuge of the instantaneous and of the simultaneous, that minimum gesture of intercepting the vertiginous flow of accelerations of the compromised contemporaneousness, from taking the time to reread, to disassemble and to expose what was read, reverts the common disposition that the news plummets into the tomb of the obsolete, because of the changing frenzy of novelty. This gesture, at once minimal and expansive, obliquely ushers in attention to the sums of frauds and disappearances with which the present renders the past irrelevant. It reveals the multiple obliterations and camouflages of the nexus between history, event and understanding, with which the ideologies of communication want to avoid a critical reading that uncovers their assemblies of perception and conscience. The way in which Catalina Parra's work criticizes the communicational schematism of the press, confronting with careful surgeries of the truth, blackmail and imposture, is by carefully rereading what has already been read until finally everything repressed and compressed by the flatness of the news jumps to the eyes-volume, density and complexity of texture-by diminishing the sizes of advertisements, emptying its democratic rhetoric, and revealing its unhealthy phraseology.

Parra introduces sewing, knitting and embroidering into a format which the traditional masters of occidental art solemnly call "a work," the same handcrafts that this tradition has despised because of its inferior condition as both domestic and artisanal. It could be said that Parra breaks the script that divides the public and the private, gently altering the artistic hierarchy, in a modern sense, from the unraveled edges of the feminine and the popular. Parra redefines conceptually the value of the feminine and of common labor by giving it the theoretical and political efficacy of a strategic recourse that the artist frees from an inferior context of homey domesticity in order to illuminate the hidden subtexts of exploitation of invisible manual labor. She transports this means to the field of power of public discourse (the newspaper, the media, the press) where she attacks its symbols of authority. Catalina Parra's manual labor opposes the definiteness of the political tone from the fragility of backstitching and basting, which are always on the verge of breaking apart her sewing. She weakens the supposed incontrovertibly of the official truths (It's indisputable) through a stitch, whose zigzags disarrange the straight orientation forced by the verticality of the erect power. She also superimposes erasures of gauze on the typographical indicators of the newspaper, to make their dominant guidelines of legibility deal with this incidious game of concealment and unconcealment of the stated, which places under suspicion the deceptive appearance of a direct and transparent message. She presents the unraveled interiors of the social attire in gala poses in front page photographs, to denounce the artifice of its advertisement making.

Together with the feminine, the popular also takes a stand. It claims the right to transfer the Chileaness of a whole series of kinships, connected among themselves by the family attachments to the affective networks of the manual and the oral (the aunt, Violeta Parra; the father, Nicanor Parra) in a metropolitan place of an enunciative mechanism that customarily erases from its map of abstractions the critical-dissident regionalism of several sites of identity known to be too astute.

The cultural creations of the feminine and the popular in Parra's work (weaving=narratives=text) operate as symbolic markers of different characteristics of cultural marginalities, sub-alternation and peripheration, which displace and recombine the political, sexual, and ethnic meanings of the discriminated. A multi-leveled game of mobile tension where discourse and counterdiscourse are neither fixed polarities, nor homogeneous categories, but battle fields that start diagonalizing in multiple layers of internal and external contradictions. The vector of discentering and transversality of the popular and the feminine (unromanticized, disessencialized) will have to do with the multiplication of the edges with which Parra's work operates, cutting and pasting, disuniting and reuniting the surfaces of the homogeneous discourse that never stay as is (definitely still), and that materialize the collision of speeches taking place around the monopoly of official interpretation from the constant alteration of the outlines which subject ruling messages to incisive disfigurations of the irregular cut.

The will to art that makes Catalina Parras's work implacable has to do with her knowledge of leading discourse, images, subjectiveness and representations to a hand to hand combat, finally forcing the dictates of power to confess, amid tears and patches, the abusive games of antinomies (between principal and secondary, masculine and feminine, illustrative and decorative, lucrative and disposable, etc,) which regulate the economies and the succession of injustices of the dominant.

Among the daily interstices of tenacity and enjoyment, of constancy and pleasure, of exhaustiveness and licentiousness that separate the tear and the patch, Parra's work sews again and again the wounds of the senses, never pretending to reconstruct a surface immune to touch and sight, because it depends on the rough permanency of these slashes, the fact that we remember that the faces of power are not perfect, and therefore they are vulnerable to sharp criticism and the acute marks of protest and argument.

UP