Dignidad

Dignidad is an artist’s book that documents a two years research-based project on Colonia Dignidad, which highlights the human rights violations committed in an isolated settlement established in the 1960s by Nazis in Chile before and after the dictatorship of Pinochet. Multiple crimes against humanity, including torture, execution, and child abuse were committed inside the enclave. Today the various criminal cases remain primarily unprosecuted and unresolved, due to the lack of political will, unresolved issues of legal jurisdiction, statute of limitations, the death of most of the principal offenders and the questionable legal status of the Colonia Dignidad which had been recently re-incorporated as an autonomous agricultural production center and renamed Villa Baviera.

“I define this artist’s book as a political abstraction, which refers to the history of Colonia Dignidad through the construction and deconstruction of symbols of power. The spaces of segregation and repression can be imagined spatially and conceptually through the architecture of the bunkers of the Colonia Dignidad period. The physical transformation of the sculpture manifests as the history’s relevance and resonance of the ideologies evoked by symbols and spaces”

This project is a collaboration with the National Archives of Chile, The Association of Memory and Human Rights Colonia Dignidad and Winfried Hempel.