A Monument within Another Monument: A Conversation with Gonzalo Díaz on Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte (1997)

Gonzalo Díaz (1947-2025) was one of the most relevant figures in contemporary Chilean art, known for a body of work that has persistently explored the links between art, politics and institutions and which was recognised with the National Prize for Plastic Arts in 2003. This conversation was recorded at the artist’s home, where he kept his studio. In the residential Santiago neighbourhood of Providencia, at the rear of the house, his studio is occupied by boxes, works in progress, and shelves full of books and documents. The interview focusses on Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte  (United in Glory and in Death) (1997),⁰¹ an installation presented at the Matta Hall of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, also in Santiago. The work, for its scale, technical complexity and political resonance is still regarded as a milestone in the relationship between art, history and infrastructure in Chile. Throughout this conversation, Díaz reflects on the monumental condition of the work and its site-specific character, which binds it to the architectural heart of the museum and the efficacy of law as a political problem.⁰²

Antonio Echeverría: Gonzalo, before we go into detail, I’d like to start with a general question. It’s been more than twenty-five years since you presented Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. What do you remember about that initial experience, and how do you see the work today, within both your own trajectory and the wider landscape  of Latin American art’s international visibility during that decade?

Gonzalo Díaz: Well, the first thing I’d say is that it was a very self-contained work. Despite its magnificence, it went unnoticed: there’s no memory of it. And yet, I still think it’s the most forceful work that has ever been done in the Matta Room.

I never had much interest in an ‘international career’, as they say. That term disgusts me. I never went around handing out business cards or asking curators for favours. I did my work here, and with that, I built a trajectory. But, to go back to the monument: I always saw Unidos as a monument within another monument. The text itself is a monument: Andrés Bello’s message to Parliament presenting the Civil Code.⁰³It’s not the Code itself, but his message, and that makes it even more powerful. The text is lifted up by the scaffolding, which in turn supports the museum. All of it – the text, the scaffolding, the building itself – are monuments reflecting one another. This is the beauty of the work.

AE: Along those lines, when you speak of the work as a ‘monument within another monument’, what material and symbolic dimension were you seeking to highlight through that gesture?

GD: That everything in the work is material, not just a metaphor. The text, the scaffolding, the building itself: they are matter that sustains and reflects. The museum, as a state building, celebrates itself through that monumental façade. I’ve always thought it’s one of the most beautiful buildings in Santiago, even if it’s a reduced copy of the Petit Palais in Paris. That play with scales was also part of what I wanted to show. But that puts into perspective the scale of this country, which is very small, etc. So there is that reflection, because one refers to another in terms of the monumentality that is present in the work. But all this, I insist, is thanks to the materiality of the work and its assembly process. In that sense, metaphors stop being metaphors and become material.

AE: And it’s important to say that the work began to take shape five years earlier, in 1992, right?

GD: Of course. I started looking for spaces, applying, requesting dates. I wanted to make it in the early 1990s, but it only came to fruition in 1997.

AE: And regarding the text, why did you choose that particular paragraph from Bello’s address?

GD: I chose that paragraph for two reasons. First, for its wording: it reflects Bello’s nineteenth-century formality, a literary aesthetic that played a formative role in shaping the Chilean state and republic. Before that, there was no Civil Code: it was like the Wild West, people were getting into fights; there was no common reference for appropriate behaviour.

On a second reading, you see that Bello was rather reactionary: everything was written for the aristocracy or the professional middle class, who could inherit, marry or maintain their privileges. But I didn’t want to highlight that. What mattered was that the paragraph referred to the efficacy of the law: it is only effective if there are citizens to obey or disobey it. That’s the key. If not, it is bypassed in a couple of minutes. And we still live this today: the ‘me first’, and the ‘I don’t give a damn about my neighbour’.

The work came about thanks to what I would call a counter-institution. It wasn’t because of a museum director putting themselves on the line, but because of a woman working in a patronage corporation associated with the museum, called Amigos del Museo, which no longer even exists.⁰⁴That’s why I never really knew how much the installation cost: everything was done on impulse, with enthusiasm. I was 49 years old, full of energy. I practically made it alone, with help from Nury González,⁰⁵my wife. It was a very difficult work to carry out.

At the time, Chile had better conditions, in terms of craft industry, than today. There were still people working with neon, silkscreen and bronze casting. There were carpenters and welders. Today all of that is gone, and on top of it, fame works against you: you can’t just go and ask for favours anymore or for someone to get excited for a project. In 1997, it was still possible.

AE: In previous years, there were works that today seem to anticipate Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte: El jardín del artista (The Artist’s Garden, 1993) in Montevideo, El padre de la patria (The Father of the Nation, 1994) in Havana, El estado de derecho (Rule of Law, 1995) in Caracas and later in Santiago Estado de Derecho (Rule of Law, 1996). Do you think they relate to Unidos—in form, concept or politics?

GD: Yes and no. All previous works, in some way, influence what you do later, even if not directly. They modify your imagination; you discover things you use later. But it’s not that linear.

For example, in El jardín del artista there was already the use of neon on the façade.⁰⁶In Caracas,⁰⁷on the other hand, I worked the façade the other way: I brought it inside, returning Bello to his place of origin. Neon became a practical and efficient resource to give body to a text: visible, cheap and direct. I don’t see it as a signature, but as a medium. This is why I ended up making that work El neón es miseria (2012–13): because the use of neon had become like using a brush or a pigment.

As for how to monumentalise a text, there’s the work with the turtles, made with grass—El tratado del Entendimiento Humano (The Treatise on Human Understanding, 2001). At the 51st Venice Biennale, in Muerte en Venecia (Death in Venice, 2005), something similar happened, too. The texts flicker with those oscillating machines that project the word in motion… it’s different from casting a word in lead or bronze, or painting it with stencils that I designed myself. It’s a more or less conscious exploration of efficient and specific ways of monumentalising a text.

In El tratado del Entendimiento Humano, an installation presented at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Santiago, the words were formed in living grass and rested upon bronze turtles that seemed to hold them aloft. The text monumentalised a sentence by Novalis – ‘Wir suchen überall das Unbedingte und finden immer nur Dinge’ (‘We seek everywhere the unconditional, and always find only things’) – which to me was the complete definition of art, in every sense. It required a typography that was both levitating and alive – one that had to be watered every day; we even had a gardener who came daily to replace the dried patches of grass.

AE: In your new digital archive, there are several videos documenting the installation process of Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte. In one of them, you appear standing at the centre of the Matta Room, reflecting on how the work resonated with the time of its creation. What desires and frustrations of that period do you think are inscribed in the work?

GD: In the early 1990s there was a small group talking about how unbearable it was to keep living under Pinochet’s Constitution. This work comes from there. I chose the 33rd paragraph because, to me, it suggests that the law can only function when there are citizens willing to sustain it. That seemed fundamental.

Between 1992 and 1997 that discussion fizzled out, like much of the cultural world after the dictatorship. Many people today say that it was incomprehensible… It’s also incomprehensible that we still live with the same institutional framework. Well, not the same: the Constitution we have now isn’t the one from the 80s, because it underwent many important reforms. It’s another Constitution. But both the right and the left say otherwise because it suits them.

Back in 1992, the Constitution hadn’t been reformed yet. That Constitution allowed Pinochet to sit in the Senate. The day he entered the Senate, Adolfo Couve committed suicide.⁰⁸I remember it clearly – it was the same day. The ex-dictator’s presence there was an unbearable gesture that we all tolerated.

It was as if the dictatorship ended, Patricio Aylwin was elected and we all went home.⁰⁹Already fed up, we couldn’t take any more horror. It seems to me that in the 1990s everything fell apart: the Vicariate,¹⁰the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI),¹¹the cultural world. Everything dissolved. That’s very important, because the whole epic scale of works like Unidos ended up relegated to the list of exhibitions ‘done in the Matta Hall’.

Antonio Echeverría: The first thing you said today was that despite its monumentality, Unidos was a work that went by unnoticed

Gonzalo Díaz: Yes. The only thing I’ve had the guts to say is that Unidos is the only real installation that was ever made in the Matta Hall. I say this to stir things up, to emphasise that special and – I think – magnificent relationship between architecture, time, language and space.

Everyone talks about site-specific art as if it didn’t matter. But the conditions – especially the purpose of the space – aren’t always there. In Rúbrica (2003),¹²for example, this relationship between space and context occurred: it coincided with the publication of the national report on torture during the dictatorship. I remember José Miguel Insulza, then Minister of the Interior, went to see the installation. I was walking behind him; he didn’t know who I was. And he kept saying: ‘What the hell is this? What is this piece of shit?’ The report on tortured victims had just been published, which was very complicated because people did not want it to be made public, so many believed that information was being covered up. There was a very messy controversy. That installation had everything to do with torture. This is why it was so torturing, so oppressive. Physically too: if you restrict the eye to a chromatic partiality, to only red, it produces an overwhelming discomfort. It was suffocating.

AE: In your lecture ‘A Double Sovereign Delegation’ (2019) you ended with the question: ‘To which State will we return?’ How does Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte respond to that question, in relation to melancholy?

GD: Unidos seems to me a work that can speak anywhere in the world. If you mounted it tomorrow in London or New York, it would work just the same. Not because of its reference to Chile, but because of its formal quality.

The problem is that it’s too specific to the Matta Hall: the basement, the façade, that central axis of the museum. It’s the most site-specific piece I’ve ever made. We’d have to take the Matta Hall to the world.

As for melancholy, I don’t know if I proposed it consciously or unconsciously. In fact, I never wrote it down. I never referred to the melancholy of the lost Republic. But I get that it can be read that way. The monument itself is melancholic. By removing the text and installing it elsewhere, that melancholy disappears. That transfer, that transference of the title, is key.

For two months, the title changed the name of the building. At night you saw nothing but Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte glowing in the dark. By day, the sun’s force made the neon disappear, as if it wasn’t there. Then you saw the lapidary inscription of the museum’s name carved in stone – the ‘stone’ in quotes, since it is stucco that only looks like stone.

Inside the hall, you had to constantly adjust the scaffolding clamps because the great beam of the Matta Hall sags about half a centimetre a year. They realised it because each year when they inserted panels under the beam, they wouldn’t fit anymore unless they shaved them down. Entering the installation was like going into a nuclear reactor: there was a noise, the transformers were buzzing. I never imagined that. In the end, the sound became a fundamental element of the installation.

AE: And what about the vibration of the neon?

GD: It was more noticeable or less noticeable depending on whether there was a small leak or whether it was very cold. Because all neon tubes are in a vacuum, when the air is removed, the gas is injected at that same time. Then the little glass tube is sealed. But before that you have to put in a tiny drop of mercury. Every neon piece has a small mercury tube that makes it glow, and that mercury needs to be at a certain temperature. Sometimes it’s not, or the transformer doesn’t match the length of the neon. Then you get that flickering, like the corner bar sign, that’s where the melancholy is.

AE: More than twenty-five years later, do you think the work can still speak to an international audience, at a time when monuments, the function of museums and national narratives are being questioned?

GD: Yes. The work doesn’t require translation: just looking is enough. The scaffolding, the text, the illuminated façade: it all reads in any context. What would need to be translated is the Matta Room itself, its architectural specificity. Yet, its formal and symbolic power remains intact.

AE: In the end, it seems that Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte not only brought forth the Matta Hall, but also the very heart of the museum.