Dear compatriots

Not only football has given memorable gestures to this country. The “finger of Lagos” has been, in this line, one of the great contributions of politics. It was in 1988 when the right index finger of the future president pointed to the Channel 13 camera to question Pinochet: “It seems inadmissible to me that a Chilean has such an ambition for power to pretend to be in power for 25 years”, that memorable phrase is part of Dear compatriots, a work built from speeches, interviews and public statements by the presidents who have governed Chile in the last 40 years.
Words by Michelle Bachelet, Sebastián Piñera, Ricardo Lagos, Eduardo Frei, Augusto Pinochet and Salvador Allende are played by the four actors in the cast. In the work you do not hear the original recordings, but rather the tones and gestures of the performers characterize the speeches. They are different voices that, from their nuances, expose the musicality of the words, transforming the texts into scores. “I am interested in thinking about music from the sound possibilities of the spoken word,” says José Manuel Gatica, creator and director of the montage. He and his team have worked with the audiovisual archives of the Memory Museum, which supports the project.

There are emblematic speeches, such as that of Aylwin upon receiving the Rettig Report, or less memorable things, such as statements by Pinochet about his private life. With them the work tries to put together a history of Chile in reverse, “stopping at phrases and small episodes that perhaps help to understand how we arrived at the present and when many of the problems that we complain about today appear,” says Gatica. "There are the promises that as citizens we believed in, we trusted. The proposals, the accounts that were given to us, the achievements that we were proud of. The anger. Observing that with the perspective of time allows us to perhaps delve into what we are or at least what we were told we were." 

Technical sheet
Director and composer: José Manuel Gatica. 
Cast: Jorge Arecheta, Macarena Rozic, María Francisca Riquelme, Felipe Lagos.
Assistant director: Diego Nawrath. 
Production and Assistance: María Paz González. 
Scene design: Javier Alvarado
Photo credit: Cristóbal Valenzuela