NICOLÁS FRANCO

(Santiago, 1973)

Chile: Ayer Hoy was one of the many publications propagated by Chile’s dictatorship to praise the achievements of the regime. Using a before-and-after logic, the album’s book form promoted the drastic changes implemented by the military in Chile during the Cold War. Photos and short texts, translated into English and French, tried to suggest the universality of the regime’s message, yet ironically used a visual language associated with Russian constructivism. In his work, titled Ayer y Hoy (Yesterday and Today, 2013), Franco appropriates the regime’s publication and performs a very simple cut-and-paste operation: after removing the central images on each page, he then folds the pages in order to expose the words “Yesterday” and “Today.” Through this simple operation, the artist strips the images of their ideological content, forcing them to acquire a new, unstable meaning.