AAA Anonymous Appropriations of Anomie

Anonymous Appropriations of Anomie (AAA)
Online news and Google Street View are retrievable indices of normality. Collapsing distance and time, Social Media registers our normal personal lives. How might an A-normality translate into zeroes and ones?
In my temporary interventions in public space I investigate a cultural-historic specificity of use. I use digital technology to index appropriation and to register my re-appropriation of this space and use.  
AAA will index the corporeal and visceral experience in the re-appropriation of public space by two A-normalities in Santiago, Chile.
Plaza Baquedano, the epicentre of the 2019 October Social Crisis[1] (O-18) in Chile, hosted 150 nights of what were called protests – burning barricades, looting, arson and vespertine attacks on the Police. 80% of businesses were closed, all pedestrian infrastructure destroyed, 12 buildings immolated and Metro station Baquedano made a burning Proletariat quarry for projectiles and Molotovs. Now known as Ground Zero, this strategic reduction of Plaza Baquedano included Police Monuments and GAM Culture that were tactically re-appropriated through the namesake streets of O’Higgins, Mackenna and Morales.
O-18 was quarantined by COVID 19 and Ground zero has been suspended above this blank page. When quarantine is lifted, life will not return to normal because it wasn’t. The postponed triple A-normality of an extorted Plebiscite for a new constitution in April 25 was rescheduled for October 25. The foreshadowed approval will re-manifest Ground Zero, networked from One’s own digital communication, as mass memory and amnesia[2].
1990: Chile returned to democracy. Today’s digital ‘youth’ were not born. Circa 2010: violence as protest normalizes through adolescence as Chile achieves the highest Human Development Index in South America[3].  2016: Balaclava-clad students (Encapuchados), throw Molotov cocktails into public space and are instantaneously reported in social/mass media as part of legitimate protest. 2020: the alibi for three masked archetypes - Encapuchado, Pussy Rioters, Riot police – are concealed in public space and media behind COVID 19.


[1] Peña C (2020). Pensar el Malestar. La Crisis de Octubre y la Cuestion Constitucional. (Discontented Thinking. The October Crisis and the Constitutional Question) Taurus, Santiago

[2] Peña C (2019) El Tiempo de la Memoria. (The Time of Memory) Taurus, Santiago

[3] Peña C (2020)





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