Last Thursday, September 14, at 6:30 p.m., the writer Ariel Florencia Richards gave a lecture at Il Posto Documentos on «Destruida a martillazos», about the work «Lonquén» by Gonzalo Díaz.

Lonquén, which in Mapudungún means «in the low», is -at the same time- the name of a place, of a tragedy and of an exhibition. But this simultaneity, this thickness, rather than making Lonquén clear, makes it diffuse and ungraspable. That is, at the same time, its virtue and its trap. Because Lonquén, the rural locality in the district of Talagante, was the place where the tragic death (1973) and appearance (1978) of the bodies of fifteen men murdered by the military government during the dictatorship took place, which in turn gave rise to Lonquén (1989), Gonzalo Díaz’s already canonical exhibition at the Ojo de Buey gallery. The years that mark the displacements between each of these places and events are not in vain either. They are determined by a certain delay that contributes to generate an impossible memory. Through the analysis of the performance Diré tu nombre (1989), which closed Díaz’s exhibition in 1989, researcher Ariel Florencia Richards seeks to find a reversal of that impossibility. And to consider that by means of the hammering destruction of part of the work and the verbalization of the names of the disappeared (who later appeared and disappeared again) an unsuspected space for mourning and even for a beginning of reparation could be opened, even if only temporarily.