When Solidarity Became Art. The Museo Internacional de la Resistencia Salvador Allende (1975-1990)

International audienceAs evidenced by the exhibition "Past Disquiet: Narratives and Ghosts from the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, 1978" (Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti curating), the proposal of forming a museum of solidarity for Palestine in the 1970s was not an isolated case. This cultural and artistic project was inspired by the Chilean museum-in-exile, pointedly named the "Museo Internacional de la Resistencia Salvador Allende" (MIRSA), whose ambition was to contribute via the arts to the struggle against Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Other international artistic initiatives were also modeled on the Chilean museum, in particular the exhibition "Art pour le peuple du Nicaragua", which was presented at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris from December 4 to 14, 1981, before being integrated in 1982 into the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Managua, Nicaragua, to celebrate the Sandinistas’ rise to power; and the traveling exhibition Art Contre/Against Apartheid, which was shown in a multitude of countries around the world between 1983 and 1995 to denounce the segregationist regime in South Africa.As a prefiguration of these museum initiatives, MIRSA thus demands to be studied as a nodal point of the visual arts solidarity movements of the 1970s. Therefore, this article aims to delineate its political and artistic project, its international presence, and its collection, as well as the meaning of the particular notion of the “museum-in-exile,” in order to understand the first stages that enabled the emergence of the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, which is the central subject of this publication