How to Appear? Writing art history in Australia after 1973

When people realise that I am Chilean, and that I migrated to Australia as a child during the Pinochet dictatorship, there’s always a set of mostly unspoken, but sometimes spoken, queries: Why did I move? Did my family seek asylum in Australia? Were my parents torture victims? Are they of the left, or right?! Do I speak Spanish? Do I still have family in Chile? Do I return? I ask: what does it mean to perform being a ‘Chilean’ in ‘Australia’ from the year I arrived, 1987, until now? What does it mean to be an ‘authentic’ Chilean, often conflated with the subjectivity of exile, in Australia? What does it mean to perform a Chilean-Australian? After spending over a decade writing about migration and contemporary art, I realised that I had never properly positioned myself in my work. In part, this has been due to my training in a stuffy art history department within a sandstone university where Kantian ‘critical distance’ dominated. But it has also been a result of never knowing how to situate myself as a Chilean-Australian, or as a Chilean in Australia. When I arrived here, I quickly absorbed the country’s assimilation culture, wanting to fit in. I learned to let go of things that didn’t fit the mould.⁠1 Recently, I have been re-connecting with my heritage and history, first returning to Chile to visit family, and then beginning to conduct archival research both on my kin and ancestors and Chilean history and art history more broadly. All of this eventually led,my development of a n which lead to new research project, focussed on cross-border collaborations between Chilean conceptual artists during the dictatorship, including across Australia and Chile. I can no longer escape situating myself in my research. In this essay, I do not discuss my new project in any depth. Instead my focus is on situating myself in my writing, and across the borders of Australia and Chile, memory and archives, history and autobiography. Building on the works and discourse of diasporic artis