News
Lotura Mekanikoak – Mechanical Bonds. Patrick Hamilton performs at ARTIUM
18.10.2025
The Red Letter (2025) is a performance piece created and produced especially for the Mechanical Bonds series at the Basque Country Museum of Contemporary Art (ARTIUM).
The action consists of reading a letter constructed from fragments of other letters and texts that recount the process of implementing the ideological and economic model that turned Chile into the first laboratory of neoliberalism on a global scale after the military coup of 1973. The authors cited are economists and politicians such as Milton Friedman, Joaquín Lavín, Orlando Letelier, and André Gunther Frank. The text is displayed inside a transparent red methacrylate box. The color red (which refers in a double entendre to the photographic development process and its spectral sensitivity, and at the same time to critical revelation) reminds us in chromatic terms that neoliberalism was savagely imposed with blood and fire in a devastated Chile. But the high temperature associated with red also functions as a heat transmitter of supportive rescue energies.
The action consists of reading a letter constructed from fragments of other letters and texts that recount the process of implementing the ideological and economic model that turned Chile into the first laboratory of neoliberalism on a global scale after the military coup of 1973. The authors cited are economists and politicians such as Milton Friedman, Joaquín Lavín, Orlando Letelier, and André Gunther Frank. The text is displayed inside a transparent red methacrylate box. The color red (which refers in a double entendre to the photographic development process and its spectral sensitivity, and at the same time to critical revelation) reminds us in chromatic terms that neoliberalism was savagely imposed with blood and fire in a devastated Chile. But the high temperature associated with red also functions as a heat transmitter of supportive rescue energies.