Synopsis
A cold morning in June 2005, the guards of the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts discovered that a millionaire the sculpture of Auguste Rodin, the “Torso of Adele”, had been subtracted from the main exhibition room. Because of the mastery in the robbery, detectives’ suspicions pointed to some criminal and organized group specialized in works of art. A worldwide alert was activated. Surprisingly, the piece or art was returned the next day by a young man who claimed that he found it stranded in an area near the museum. Nobody could understand how it got there. After severe interrogation, however, Luis Onfray (21), the young man who was studying art, surprised again the authorities acknowledging that it was him, with no help at all, the one who had subtracted the sculpture. An umbrella of criticism covered the young man. He was accused of irretrievably damaging the image of the country in an action that was described as a teenage blunder. The turning of the case continued the next day when, facing the court of justice, the defense attorney indicated that the robbery was not a crime but an performance of art by which Onfray was trying to prove that “the work of art would be more present by not being there”. This was the inflection point for a police case that confronted, for several months, lawyers, artists, theorists and institutions which were forced to discuss about the state of contemporary art.
Almost ten years after this event, the protagonists revive this artistic-criminal episode through this documentary, which has been articulated as an absurd detective story that allows to be sarcastic about the sense of the art and the contradictions of the artistic performance. A story, in which the figure of the young student crosses with the presence of Rodin who was also misunderstood in his time. He tried, with no success, to erect monuments in Chile, but he was rejected by the local authorities. This documentary makes a journey from present to past, from contemporary to classic, promoting new bridges between the misunderstood world of the art and the spectators.