Eager to share and disseminate the visual work of Violeta Parra, which remains insufficiently known, we succumbed to the ambition of offering elements that would broaden the view of this area of her creativity and contribute to the understanding of one of her most remarkable works: the arpillera “Contra la guerra” (“Against War”), which dialogues coherently with her poems and songs. The keys to a pertinent reading come from the specific explanation the author gave of this work in some interviews, in brief answers in French, with difficulty expanding on them as she would have done in Spanish. Other clues are provided by the presence of the imagery that makes up “Contra la guerra” in other expressions of her work, which poetically broaden the local and literal meaning that motivated the creation of the arpillera. We find these images in various texts by Violeta Parra: letters, poems and song lyrics. All this in a context of time and circumstance: Violeta Parra in Europe, during the years 1962-1963.

She composed the arpilleras after taking part in the World Festival of Youth and Students in Finland, under the slogan “For peace and friendship!” It was 1962, the year of the United Nations Conference on Disarmament held in Geneva, the city where she set up her home-workshop; the year in which John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council and prepared his encyclical Pacem in Terris, trying to bring the Catholic Church up to date with the changes society was going through. It is the decade in which the pacifist hippie movement began. In 1962, too, diplomatic relations between Chile and Bolivia were broken off; and it was the year of the missile crisis in Cuba and the danger of nuclear war that it meant at the height of the Cold War. Violeta Parra was a pacifist, but she rejected passivity and indifference. We see her in a photograph marching in a demonstration, among the people, surrounded by placards bearing the peace sign. She looks silent. She feels that marching is not enough and that she must build a plea against war that resonates: “if I protested against war, no one would listen to me. But this way they do: everyone listens to me and believes me”. In 1963 Violeta Parra finished her arpillera “Contra la guerra”, expressing her sensitivity to these events and discussions. In it is her opinion on peace, on the Church(es), on the Mapuche people, on a country and a world in upheaval.

Violeta Parra, “flowering tree woman” as her brother Nicanor described her, symbolizes humanity in four human gardens; four diverse characters are lovers of peace. One of them, violet-colored. She used to say that every painting can be sung and every song can be painted. Let us then make the connections, evoking her own words in an exercise of observation that has avoided falling into overly sophisticated over-interpretations. It is a bold move. Perhaps the work of art needs no “explanation”; but we believe it is not disrespectful to take her work so that the public has more elements to enrich their interpretations and, with their readings, complete the work. It is mediation, in a certain sense, something she also did: “I took the popular singers to make their soul known”. Why not share our gazes to get to know better the soul of Violeta Parra, which is the song of us all?

Jorge Montealegre Iturra