Broken glasses

At 475 Av. Republica in Santiago is the De la Solidaridad Salvador Allende house-museum, a space that since the early 1970s has been collecting donations of contemporary works of art made available by great international artists with the aim of creating a “museum of the people”, son of the democratic government of Salvador Allende, repressed by the cruel dictatorship of the Pinochet regime. From a hedge that surrounds the garden emerges a sculpture in the shape of a broken eyeglass, it is a sculpture, and it is the symbol of freedom.

Then one day in Valparaíso an artist friend shows me one of her creations. Her work, the bronze bust of Salvador Allende, has the same eyeglass frame glimpsed in that garden in Santiago.

If on the one hand, for those with poor eyesight, broken glasses are the manifestation of darkness, darkness, oblivion, terror; however, it is not, and never will be, a sign of defeat.

Where the cracks in the crystal converge in the center of the lens, there is a physiological focus that makes not only the evidence clear, but also the desires and genuine intentions of honest and generous people, concentrated within the perfect picture – albeit sometimes utopian – of the future.

Somehow, I like to think of the broken eyeglass as a special lens capable of seeing into the future.

After all, glasses are worn by those who study and are defined as intellectuals, and what about dictators? The real ones, you know, never wear glasses.

Pity.

Luca Periotto

NP Ottobre 2022