Image: Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Santiago
Bernardo de Castro Saavedra will open ‘En mi memoria están’ at the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende on 8 September 2026. Remaining on view through 13 September, the large-format work comprises 119 woodcuts dedicated to the victims of what the DINA called Operación Colombo. The work entered the Colección MSSA this year.
Each woodcut represents one of the 119 people affected by the case. De Castro Saavedra uses portraits, expressive linear backgrounds and multiple coloured stamps across the work. Some of the seals ask, “¿Dónde estoy?” Others refer to the Taller de Artes Visuales, where the woodcuts were made, or denounce institutions and media outlets linked to the operation.
In 1975, the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) carried out a media operation intended to conceal the forced disappearance of 119 militants and adherents of left-wing organisations during Chile’s civil-military dictatorship. The operation involved false reports of the victims’ whereabouts in media outlets in Chile and countries of the Southern Cone.
Among those depicted is the artist’s father, Bernardo de Castro López. In 1974, when De Castro Saavedra was five years old, DINA agents detained De Castro López and seized graphic-propaganda materials in his possession, including matrices and sheets of paper. He was a Fine Arts student, a union leader, a socialist militant and a member of the MIR.
‘En mi memoria están’ was originally made in 2023, during the commemoration of 50 years since the coup d’état. That year, the work was presented in ‘Acontecer, 50 años. Colección MNBA y organizaciones de memoria’ at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, under the curatorship of Paula Honorato. It subsequently appeared in ‘¿Dónde estoy?’ (2025), De Castro Saavedra’s solo exhibition at the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, curated by Paula Solimano.
In 2026, De Castro Saavedra expressed an interest in donating the work to the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende through the Museo de la Memoria. The request was approved by the museum’s acquisitions committee. Macarena Goldenberg, coordinator of Public Programs, noted that two of the people represented in the work had been students in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Chile; the faculty’s former premises now belong to the University of Los Lagos.
A commemorative event will take place in the exhibition on 11 September at 11am. The artist will attend, and several groups of relatives of the 119 people portrayed have been invited.
Also on 8 September, at 6.30pm, De Castro Saavedra will hold ‘Memorias para mañana’, a printmaking activity in which participants can make prints using linoleum and MDF matrices. The results of the workshop will be exhibited at the museum on 11 September.
