Diamela Eltit

Avant-garde Chilean writer who was co-founder of and a performance artist in the radical underground group Art Actions Collective (CADA) in the late Seventies and early Eighties. She mutilitated her arms at a reading of her work in a brothel in 1980, published the first of her experimental novels ("Lumpérica") in 1983, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985 and worked as Chilean cultural attaché to Mexico (1990-1994). She lived in an asylum for a time while researching the stunning collaboration with photographer Paz Errázuriz, "El infarto del alma" (1994). Her interdisciplinary endeavours continue to deal with complex issues of femininity, marginality and corporeality in Chilean society.