Youthful Bodies and Nationalist Practices: Four Artistic Approaches Towards the Colonia Dignidad Case

Abstract

During the last recent years there has been a series of intermedial works situated between the thresholds of fiction and testimony which have considered the dramatical events taken place in the German settlement of the former Colonia Dignidad (1969-1997), where systematic rape and abuse was inflicted against Germans and Chileans. That is the case of the novel Sprinters. Los niños de Colonia Dignidad (2016) by Lola Larra, the pictorial series La Colonia (2015) by Mariana Najmanovich, the stopmotion animation La casa lobo (2018) by León&Cociña, and Un lugar llamado Dignidad (2021) by Matías Rojas Valencia. In all of them a series of ‘First World’ affective imaginaries and practices are represented, such as being in contact with nature, the practice of sports and musical development, understood as a chosen space/time for education, submissiveness, and bodybuilding of docile bodies conducted by Paul Schäfer. These artistic works realised on how these allegedly childish and familiar practices hide an unsettling and contradictory reality which gave rise to the uncanny and to a German nationalist identity linked to transnational imaginaries such as Romanticism on Chilean soil.

Keywords

• juventud, naturaleza, cuerpos, nacionalismos, romanticismo alemán, colonia dignidad.