CANTOS CAUTIVOS

Women of the Association of Families of the Detained-Disappeared demonstrating during the Pinochet military regime || Photo: Museum of Memory & Human Rights, Chile

Cantos Cautivos, or ‘Captive Songs’, is a digital archive that combines sensory experience with the forgotten history of lost lives, seeking to contribute to the historical memory of the dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990) and to debates on human rights in other historical and geographical contexts. The main goal of the archive is to restore the individual and collective musical memories of the inmates in political detention and torture centres in Chile during the dictatorship, while also providing a public recognition to this vital historical memory. As the dictatorship branded this political detention ‘national reconstruction’, life in prison was devastating, and under these circumstances, music was used both as a torture or brainwashing device and as the voice of revolution by the inmates. While the abusers would play the radio loud to drown out the cries of the inmates, the inmates would sing songs in reply to each other; thus, a musical communication was established. Music was a way to express themselves, to conserve memories and to reduce the effects of trauma. The digital platform has 154 testimonies, of which 52 refer to songs created in detention. Officially, 20% of the archive’s entries contain accounts of composing in detention, 45% contain prisoners’ accounts of performing and 35% contain prisoners’ accounts of listening to music performed live by fellow prisoners, played on records or broadcast on the radio. Katia Chornik, the founder and director of the archive, describes Cantos Cautivos as ‘an act of retribution to the heritage of Chile and, particularly, to the community of victims of the Pinochet regime.’ The digital archive remains the first online resource on music and political detention in Latin America.