Performance Artist – Lotty Rosenfeld

Lotty Rosenfeld

Chilean Artist- Public Art, Visual Arts, Video Art, Socially Engaged Art

Lotty Rosenfeld (born Carlota Eugenia Rosenfeld Villarreal) is known primarily for her work in printmaking, video art, and socially engaged art practice. From 1967 to 1969 she studied at the Escuela de Artes Aplicadas, Universidad de Chile, in Santiago. As a printmaker, L. Rosenfeld founded in 1979 the artists’ collective CADA (Colectivo de Acciones de Arte) with the poet Raúl Zurita, the sociologist Fernando Balcells, the writer and artist Diamela Eltit, and the artist Juan Castille. CADA’s antitotalitarian imagery reached its apogee in 1983—exactly ten years after a military junta had staged a coup d’état that overthrew the democratically elected president Salvador Allende—when the group designed the political symbol “No+” [No more], which was soon employed by artists, activists, politicians, and others to denounce a wide variety of social injustices. Thot same year, 1983, the feminist group Mujeres por la Vida invited L. Rosenfeld to design the set for a rally that would bring together for the first time representatives of all oppositional parties. She incorporated the “No+” symbol into her set design, and it was later adopted by other women’s groups and social causes.

CADA is a collective activist and artist group that used interventions and performance to challenge the Pinochet regime in Chile throughout the 1970s and 1980s. She has also been involved with Fluxus, an experimental international interdisciplinary group related to visual arts, music, and literature. Rosenfeld and CADA’s work dealt with transforming and intervening in public urban space with the use of symbolism in order to question society’s political and authority status. During this period Rosenfeld’s work involved performances and video installations.

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