Actualization syndrom is not a Chilean flag. It is a work that occupies the shape of a Chilean flag. It pours itself into the emptiness of its container-flag and makes use of the attention that this sign provides, in order to reveal the absence of identity which it possesses and that possesses it, which it hides. Made by Adolfo Bimer in 2021, this non-flag contains the result of a digital distortion. The identity collage is made up of three elements: a microscopic view of the examination performed on a Chilean public health patient, in red; a box of commonly used psychotropic medications, in blue; and a bureaucratic document on medical sampling, on white paper. The tricolour composition served to examine the minimum structural understanding of what is necessary to make the national sign exist based on the data of a somatic chart.
The work reveals parameters of tolerance and aperture to which institutions must respond to confront the differences that separate a work of art from a real flag. Due to this same difficulty, understanding the difference between an artwork and a flag, Actualization syndrom was censored in 2021 by order of a command within the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage of the Government of Chile, during the opening of the exhibition where it was hoisted. After an exhausting negotiation between the artist, representative lawyers and the Ministry, it was raised again, but under their own conditions.
On 27 and 28 September 2023 the flag will be hoisted again on EINA Bosc’s mast, leading to a public conversation by the artist. This structure supported other institutional flags in the past, again in the context of a dictatorship and post-dictatorship, for the implementation of a biopolitical project in which the pharmacological control of bodies went hand in hand with the supervised development of national identity programs; in this particular case, through the re-education and integration of migrant and/or proletarian minors. In the talk with Bimer, we will work on the intersections of biopolitics and the institutionality of signs, their potential dissidents, and their forms of violence. We will trace the history of flags crafted or hacked by artists, and the parallel development of biopower in nation-states. This will allow us to rethink, from a syndemic perspective, the different levels of this regime, from cognitive narcocapitalism and psychodeflation (Bifo Berardi) to pharmacopornography (Paul B. Preciado).
Image: Adolfo Bimer, Actualization syndrom (2021). Digital print on cloth. Photograph by Felipe Ugalde.