Killing the Eyes: Aesthetic and Political Interventions on Crip Gazes after the Chilean Social Outbreak

Abstract

Regarding the artivism that emerges in Chile after the social outbreak of 2019, this paper examines a set of cultural splinters produced by what we call here “the eyes’ action collective”, in charge of denouncing the ocular mutilations resulting from police repression. After briefly examining the socio-historical context of the revolt, we propose a theoretical-methodological framework that provides the necessary critical tools to examine these artistic productions. We position ourselves at the intersection between disability studies and cultural studies in order to interrogate the critical possibilities that art activates to think about politically assigned disabilities. Thus, we mobilize concepts such as the biopolitics of debilitation (Puar, 2017) or visual necropolitics (Deprez, 2023) with the purpose of understanding artivism as a way of re-training subjects weakened by state violence, and we analyze a corpus made up of literary works, photographic series or performances by authors, among others, such as Lina Meruane, Cecilia Vicuña, the LasTesis collective or Nicole Kramm.