ESTA LÍNEA ES MI ARMA
Lotty Rosenfeld
20. September 2025 – 25. January 2026
Overbeck Pavilion

Exile, feminist, urban choreographer, political activist, and conceptual artist—Lotty Rosenfeld was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1943 into a family whose history was marked by flight and the struggle for survival. Her father, Ernst Rosenfeld, left Nazi Germany in 1935 as part of the first wave of Jewish refugees seeking safety in Latin America. Her grandparents, Rudolf and Charlotte Rosenfeld, who once owned the Hotel Rom in Breslau, survived in Siberia and came to Chile after the war. In exile, the Rosenfeld family built a new life in Santiago – and a café – based on memories of their life in Europe.
Growing up in the shadow of the trauma of the Holocaust and amid the contradictions of postwar Chile, Rosenfeld developed into an artist who questioned not only the prevailing political systems but also the grammar of everyday space. Her practice emerged at the height of the Pinochet dictatorship, when public protests were punishable by law and state violence had become the norm. Against this turbulent backdrop, Rosenfeld claimed the street as both a medium and a message.
In 1979, Rosenfeld began her iconic series of works, Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento. Using white tape and a portable stencil, she transformed the lines that regulate traffic into crosses, into plus and minus signs of rupture and refusal. She described this as a “symbolic act of disobedience,” which she performed throughout her career in front of various centers of power, including the Palacio Presidencial La Moneda, the White House, the Atacama Desert, the Chilean Stock Exchange in Santiago, and the German-German border. These works—ephemeral and site-specific—intervened precisely where bodies had been erased and systems of meaning had been imposed.
In 1979, Rosenfeld co-founded the Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA), where she joined forces with poets, sociologists, and artists to redefine art as social intervention. Her aesthetic was minimalist, but her politics were expansive—for her, art was a weapon. She stamped the back of some photographs with the words: “Esta línea es mi arma” (“This line is my weapon”).
The exhibition LOTTY ROSENFELD: ESTA LÍNEA ES MI ARMA is the first major retrospective of her work in the German-speaking world. It brings together archival material, documentation of performances, early installations, and previously unpublished works. It traces the life of an artist who lived between expulsion and resistance, erasure and sign.

Curated by Paula Kommoss

OPENING
Saturday, September 20, 5 pm
Welcome – Christian Klawitter
Introduction – Paula Kommoss

PROGRAM
Thursday, September 11, 6 pm
The Sound of the Lotty Rosenfeld Archive
with Alejandra Coz Rosenfeld
(in English)

GUIDED TOUR
Thursday, November 13, 6 pm
Guided tour of the exhibition
with Talia Walther

LECTURE
Thursday, January 22, 2026, 7 pm, online
VANISHING POINTS: Paths and Resistance of Jewish Exile in Latin America
by Prof. Dr. Liliana Ruth Feierstein

WORKSHOP
Sunday, January 25, 2026
with Alejandra Coz Rosenfeld