Anticristo (Antichrist)

Distancing itself from the social itinerary of symbolic reparation into which many artistic productions have fallen with regards to the dictatorship in Chile, Anticristo (Antichrist) seeks to restore to a mass audience the question of historical consciousness through the comic book as a form of support, assuming the need to confront the gaps in historical memory — highlighted by the action and its inversion of the sign of defeat charged by the “exfrentistas” — to build imaginaries that challenge the new subalterns in their current dispossession. To paraphrase John Berger, the task here is that of stirring up a generation for whom the end of history was signified by the order to erase the entire legacy of the 20th century, both in its struggles and in its excesses. The importance of this task would lie in the fact that, in the present cycle of capital‘s updating and submission to its individualizing ethics of consumers and employees, the generation excluded from the dictatorship as a life experience risks losing its own memory and sense of history as a collectivity in the face of it. From this perspective, Rodríguez’ work (…) reactivates those images of the armed struggle that in the years following the 1988 plebiscite — and definitively after Jaime Guzmán‘s death — were stigmatised and excluded from public debate.