Infrastructures of Solidarity, Infrastructures of Totalitarism

Between 11 September 1973 and 11 March 1990, the silenced voices of many were dissolved into electromagnetic waves so they could be transmitted and heard in Chile. For sixteen years, the broadcasting house of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) – the Funkhaus in Nalepastrasse in Berlin– broadcast, every day, a radio programme with information, music, and news from Berlin to Chile. Hundreds of Chilean exiles and cultural and political figures passed through the Funkhaus to talk back to their distant country. Broadcast at night, ‘Chile al Día’ was listened to attentively and secretly from the beginning to the end of the dictatorship. Far from being an ephemeral phenomenon, the desire for global hegemony over the production and transmission of information through radio demanded large infrastructures and sophisticated buildings that were conceived as technical wonders as much as political agents. In this presentation, those buildings are analyzed and the programme is contextualised within the broader set of conflicts and political disputes that characterized the Cold War and still haunt us in the present.