Playing with Dissent: Music in Political Detention Centres in Pinochet’s Chile
Part of a series of colloquia hosted by Music on behalf of the Royal Musical Association featuring national and international guest speakers, along with staff and postgraduate students.
School of Culture & Creative Arts
Date: Wednesday 20 March 2019
Time: 17:15 - 19:00
Venue: Room 2, 14 University Gardens, University of Glasgow, G12 8QH
Category: Academic events
Speaker: Dr. Katia Chornik, University of Manchester
Over a thousand centres for political detention existed in Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). Tens of thousands of people were held in these centres, and subjected to gruesome human rights violations. Inmates often used music as a vehicle to express dissent against their captors, through original pieces created with deliberate intent to protest or incite actions, and through pre-existing pieces repurposed or turned into emblems of subversion by the context in which they were performed.
This session will explore music pieces and testimonies of musical experiences collected from survivors through ethnographic work and online crowdsourcing, using examples from Cantos Cautivos (Captive Songs, www.cantoscautivos.org), a bilingual digital archive directed by Dr. Katia Chornik and developed in collaboration with the Chilean Museum of Memory and Human Rights. Drawing on the conceptual framework of the current British Museum’s exhibition I Object: Ian Hislop’s Search for Dissent (Hislop and Hockenhull, 2018), the session will discuss the variety of musical settings used by Chilean political prisoners for dissent.
This is a free, unticketed event which is open to the public. Spaces subject to seating capacity of venue. Refreshments provided.
For more details please contact Iain.Findlay-Walsh@glasgow.ac.uk