Cold Junction, 
87 Gallery, Kingston Upon Hull

ON September 11, 1973, a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet seized control of Chile. The US-backed plot deposed the socialist Popular Unity government led by Salvador Allende. The Pinochet regime embarked on an extensive and brutal terror campaign against Allende’s supporters. Many were kidnapped and tortured. Thousands were murdered or “disappeared.” 

Over the following months and years, around 200,000 Chileans were forced into exile. Among them were Luis Bustamante and Carmen Brauning Rodriguez. They left their home city of Valdivia shortly after the coup to live in hiding in Santiago. From there they travelled on to Buenos Aires.

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After several months in Argentina, Luis and Carmen learned that the World University Service had arranged for them to leave South America to continue their studies in Britain. Their destination: Hull. 

They arrived at Paragon Station on Christmas Eve, 1974. It was cold and wet but Luis and Carmen received a warm welcome from members of the Humberside branch of the Chile Solidarity Campaign (CSC). The CSC had been established in the weeks after the coup. Its founding members were from the trade union and student movements, the Communist Party and International Marxist Group, as well as left-wing Labour MPs like Fenner Brockway, Judith Hart and Tony Benn. 

The Humberside branch was initiated by academics at the University of Hull, but soon drew support from trade unionists and leftists across the region. The group sought to publicise what was happening in Chile and organised campaigns, fundraising events, and demonstrations. A refugee committee was established to focus on the practicalities of getting Chileans to the city and supporting them once they got there. A trade union liaison committee was also established, and several local branches became affiliates of the campaign.

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Luis had been interested in photography since he was child and while in exile in Buenos Aries he worked briefly as a commercial photographer. After arriving in Hull, he walked the streets, getting to know the city and capturing what he saw on film. 

Luis’s images offer a spontaneous, street-level view and vividly capture a sense of the life and temperament of the city on the north bank of the Humber estuary. “The camera had two purposes,” he later said. “It was a connection with a new life, and a shield that enabled me to look at it.”

To mark the 50th anniversary of Chilean political exiles arriving in the city, Cold Junction has brought Luis’s photographs back to Hull. But that’s not all: the exhibition also places them in dialogue with the work of his son, Sebastian. His ongoing project El Otono (The Autumn) explores his parents’ story and his status as a second-generation exile, born and brought up in Britain but deeply connected to a country thousands of miles away. “I had a country taken away from me as well,” Sebastian says in the film that accompanies the exhibition.

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Pinochet’s dictatorship ended in 1990 and Chile transitioned back to democracy. However, much of the former regime’s economic and social programme was left in place. Sebastian’s photography and film work examines the ongoing battle for memory and justice in post-dictatorship Chile. 

In 2006 he photographed members of the Association of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared (AFDD), a group of relatives who are still searching for answers about what happened to their family members. The AFDD has fought against state-sponsored forgetting in democratic Chile and continues to ask “¿Dónde Están?” – Where are they? 

The most recent work in the exhibition is a series of images by Luis, taken in Santiago in 2019. On October 23 2019, students in Santiago protested at a proposed rise in metro fares. The protests grew into a series of mass demonstrations against inequality, corruption, and police brutality. These events soon came to be known as the estallido social, the social uprising.

Luis photographed events in the Plaza Baquedano, renamed by the protesters as Plaza de la Dignidad – Dignity Square. 

Cold Junction runs until September 15. For more information see: 87gallery.co.uk