Carlos Soto-Román in conversation with Leanne Tory-Murphy
From left to right: Carlos Soto-Román, Soto-Román's book “11,” and Leanne Tory-Murphy.
Drawing from archival state documents and other found materials, 11 is an experimental work of documentary poetics addressing the dictatorship and its aftermath in Chile starting from the military coup on September 11, 1973. The work lives in the space between memory and forgetting, between the conceptual and the material, between presence and absence.
I met Carlos Soto-Román in Santiago this January not long after Ugly Duckling Presse’s publication of the English translation of his book 11 . Drawing from archival state documents and other found materials, 11 is an experimental work of documentary poetics addressing the dictatorship and its aftermath in Chile starting from the military coup on September 11, 1973.
At the opening
The mouth opens. It burps and yowls, gasps and laughs, mumbles and yawns. The mouth sings —loudly or quietly and can do it with a shimmer. The mouth whispers. The mouth SCREAMS. The mouth speaks, stutters, and stops.