Pedro Lemebel

I’m not sure if this person is the greatest Chilean ever, but I really like him and I had the chance to actually meet him, even though it was fast and full of people, he made and effort to listen to us and talk about everything we wanted with him.

Pedro was an artist that I really admire, because he is one of the main characters in our history that spoke for the gay and transsexual community, and not in the typical tragically way that it’s portrayed, but in a raw and honest way. He wrote a lot of chronicles and novels, like “Tengo miedo torero” (I’m afraid bullfighter) and Zanjón de la Aguada, in this texts he shows the Chile of 80’ and how the double standard worked in our society, connecting this with the dictator ship and the brutal power of control that dripped from it. In the other hand, he also worked with performance art as a way of political intervention, as we can see in the performances he did with the Mares of the Apocalypse. In one time, both artist (Lemebel and Casas) enter this campus fully naked and riding a white mare, as a symbol of the re foundation of the university, I think it’s really touching to know that he used this space as a canvass for his artwork.

Now that I’m older, I would really like to ask him how he perceives art in Chile, and how we could change this stoic paradigm that makes art, in my view, something really dead and full of European influence, and not in the good way, but in the sense that we are used to replicate it and not question its influences and political statement.