Lotty Rosenfeld: A Mile of Disobedience on the Pavement

In December 1979, six years into Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship, a woman knelt on a Santiago thoroughfare and began to alter the dashed white lines that regulate vehicular traffic. Working alone on the Avenida Manquehue, Lotty Rosenfeld (1943–2020) measured strips of white cloth tape to the exact width of the road markings and adhered them perpendicularly across each dash, transforming a sequence of regulatory minus signs into a procession of crosses. The action, Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (A Mile of Crosses on the Pavement), would become one of the most consequential site-specific interventions in the history of Latin American art and one of the most precisely calibrated acts of feminist spatial disobedience of the twentieth century.

Lotty Rosenfeld, Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (A Mile of Crosses on the Pavement), 1979–80.Performance view, Santiago, Chile, 1979. Lotty Rosenfeld.

The Gesture and Its Grammar

Rosenfeld's intervention was, on its surface, almost silent in its matter-of-factness. The economy of means was extreme: white tape on white paint, a perpendicular line crossing a horizontal one. Yet the semiotic disruption was total. By converting the dash (–) into the cross (+), Rosenfeld recoded the regimented language of urban circulation, exposing the degree to which regulatory sign systems disciplined not only the movement of vehicles but the political comportment of subjects under authoritarian rule. As the artist herself articulated, the intervention sought to interrogate the relationship between communications systems, techniques of social-order reproduction, and the formation of docile subjects. The Chilean critic and theorist Nelly Richard, whose landmark 1986 study Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile since 1973 was instrumental in theorising the Escena de Avanzada, the neo-vanguard movement to which Rosenfeld belonged, read the gesture as a form of somatised subversion. In Richard's analysis, published in the volume Desacato: sobre la obra de Lotty Rosenfeld (Francisco Zegers, 1986), the act could be understood as a kinetic gesture made by a woman who corrupts and perverts the universal order of dominant signs. The cross that Rosenfeld inscribed was polysemic. It indexed the mathematical sign of addition, the Christian symbol of suffering and redemption, the bureaucratic marker of the illiterate, and, perhaps most pointedly, the mark placed beside names on lists of the detained and disappeared.

Lotty Rosenfeld, Intervention on the approach to Observatorio El Tololo, La Serena, Chile, 1984. Photo: Paz Errázuriz. Courtesy the estate of the artist.

Site as Political Body?

What distinguishes Rosenfeld's practice within the broader field of site-specific art is her insistence on the street as a site simultaneously topographical and ideological. Where the North American discourse on site-specificity, as theorised by Miwon Kwon and others, has traced the genre's evolution from a phenomenological engagement with physical place toward discursive and institutional critique, Rosenfeld's work largely collapses these categories. The pavement is at once a material surface, an apparatus of state governance, and a zone of contested political meaning. Her body, kneeling and adhering tape in an act that mimicked manual labour, was a woman's body in a space emptied of public life by curfew, censorship, and the infrastructure of fear that sustained the neoliberal programme imposed under Pinochet.

And Rosenfeld did not perform the action once and move on. Una milla de cruces was iterated across cities and decades, spanning Santiago, Havana, New York, Berlin and Washington D.C., where, in 1982, she crossed the road markings in front of the White House. Each iteration reactivated the gesture's political charge while absorbing the specificities of its new site. In front of the Palacio de La Moneda, the Chilean presidential palace bombed during the 1973 coup that killed Salvador Allende, the crosses bore an inescapable funerary weight. In front of the White House, they implicated the complicity of U.S. foreign policy in sustaining military dictatorships across Latin America. At documenta 12 in Kassel (2007), the city's municipal cleaning service removed the adhesive crosses before the exhibition even opened. The removal presented an act of institutional erasure that only underscored the work's disruptive efficacy.

Lotty Rosenfeld, An American Wound, 1982, intervention at the White House, Washington, DC. Photo: Ana María López. Courtesy the estate of the artist.

CADA, Collaboration, and the Feminist Commons

Rosenfeld's site-specific practice cannot be understood in isolation from her collaborative work. In 1979, the same year she first performed Una milla de cruces, she co-founded the Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA) alongside the poet Raúl Zurita, the writer and artist Diamela Eltit, the artist Juan Castillo, and the sociologist Fernando Balcells. CADA pursued collective actions that designated the entire city of Santiago as an exhibition space and all of its citizens as artists. Their 1981 action ¡Ay Sudamérica! involved convincing six military pilots to drop 400,000 leaflets over Santiago proclaiming that materially improving life was the greatest work of art. Their 1983 slogan NO+ (No más / No more), designed as an open syntactic form to be completed by anyone; No more fascisms, No more disappearances, No more fear, was rapidly adopted by civilians across Chile and became one of the most potent visual symbols of resistance to the dictatorship.

The curators Julia Bryan-Wilson (Columbia University) and Natalia Brizuela (UC Berkeley), who organised the first U.S. retrospective of Rosenfeld's work, Disobedient Spaces, at the Wallach Art Gallery in 2025–26, have framed Rosenfeld's practice through the lens of feminist care, solidarity, and, most notably, friendship. Their curatorial thesis foregrounds what they call "disobedient space" as feminist space, which presents a conceptual framework that reveals the degree to which Rosenfeld's interventions were, beyond being acts of political resistance, gestures of relational repair in a social texture afflicted and torn by state violence. The retrospective drew particular attention to Rosenfeld's long collaboration with Diamela Eltit, including their jointly produced films, and to her involvement in the women's collective Mujeres por la Vida (Women for Life), active between 1983 and 1989.

Lotty Rosenfeld, No +, 1983. Audio-visual installation, 11’49”.

No + Miedo (No + Fear), undated action staged by activist group Mujeres por la Vida (Women for Life). Courtesy the estate of the artist.

The Video Eye

A crucial and often underexamined dimension of Rosenfeld's site-specificity is her use of video as both document and medium. She is widely credited as the first woman in Chile to work with video, and her engagement with the technology was never merely archival. The footage of her street actions, which was shot, edited, and later montaged with appropriated media imagery, became autonomous works that doubled the intervention's reach. In 1982, she staged an action at the Santiago Stock Exchange, installing two video monitors displaying footage of Una milla de cruces among the screens of live exchange rates. The juxtaposition of the cross and the ticker was an incisive commentary on the entanglement of aesthetic signs, political coercion, and the market logic of Pinochet's Chicago School economics. This footage was later incorporated into her video work Una herida americana (An American Wound, 1982), compounding the temporal and spatial layers of the original action.

Her later video installations, including Moción de Orden (Point of Order, 2002) and El empeño latinoamericano (The Latin American Commitment, 1998), extended her investigation of sign systems into the domain of mass media and neoliberal globalisation, interrogating the ways in which televisual spectacle disciplines perception in ostensibly democratic societies.

Lotty Rosenfeld, Esta línea es mi arma, 1985, Filmstill, Courtesy Fundación Lotty Rosenfeld.

Legacy

Lotty Rosenfeld died in Santiago on 24 July 2020. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and Tate Modern, London. In 2015, she represented Chile at the 56th Venice Biennale alongside the photographer Paz Errázuriz, in a pavilion curated by Nelly Richard under the title Poéticas de la disidencia (Poetics of Dissidence).

To encounter Rosenfeld's work now, particularly in the context of a site-specific practice led by and about women's claims on public space, is to reckon with how a single perpendicular line can fracture a system of control. Her crosses were not monumental. They did not occupy space so much as re-signify it, performing what Natalia Brizuela has described as a transformation of singular lines into plural ones, of negative signs into positive, of masculine forms into feminine. In the bleakest conditions, Rosenfeld demonstrated that the most radical act available to an artist might also be the smallest.

Bibliography And Further Reading

• Brizuela, Natalia. "Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento and NO+." Critical Times 3, no. 1 (2020): 165–177.

• Brito, María Eugenia, et al. Desacato: sobre la obra de Lotty Rosenfeld. Santiago: Francisco Zegers, 1986.

• Diamond, Sara. "Art after the Coup: Interventions by Chilean Women." Fuse 11 (April 1988): 15–24.

• Pottlitzer, Joanne. "Lotty Rosenfeld: Visual Artist." Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 36, no. 66 (2003): 62–73.

• Richard, Nelly. Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile since 1973. Melbourne: Art & Text, 1986.

• Richard, Nelly, ed. Poéticas de la disidencia: Paz Errázuriz—Lotty Rosenfeld. Barcelona: Polígrafa, 2015.