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Artwork Description

Chilean artist Nicolás Franco's Ayer y Hoy (Matrices originales) consists of fifty-three collages that can be arranged in variable configurations, including a grid or a straight line. They represent the artist's experimentation with remnants from the pages of the propaganda photobook Chile: Ayer Hoy, from which the work takes its name. Published in 1975, two years after the military coup in Chile that ousted President Salvador Allende, the publication is notable for its use of photography and a clean graphic identity to formally represent the bounties of the new regime. In a series of black and white photographs with a simple textual description, each double-page spread of the book illustrates scenes of disorder and chaos under Allende's government (labelled ‘yesterday’) on the left, contrasted with images of supposed peace and prosperity under General Pinochet's regime (labelled ‘today’) on the right. From this remarkable example of the genre of propaganda photobooks, Franco removed the images from each page and used the remaining pieces of paper and the ‘frame’ of the original images to create geometric shapes, folding the sheets into different formations. In all cases, Franco made sure that the words ‘yesterday’ and ‘today’ remained visible. By reusing a pre-existing object for propagandistic purposes and transforming it into abstract forms, Franco carried out a conceptual process that literally and metaphorically folds and re-imagines time and history. In a text published on the artist's website about this work, the art historian Paz López explained: By bringing these two words into view, juxtaposing them, he fractures linear time - past, present and future - to create an apparently circular time, in which past and present seem to be made of the same material. Post-dictatorship Chile is not a present experience of full democracy, but a wound in which, in every fold of existence, the tragic passions unleashed so effectively by the 1973 coup continue to exist. (López, accessed 8 October 2019).