At the end of 1978, fifteen human remains were found in the ovens of an abandoned lime mine in Lonquén, southwest of Santiago. They were the bodies of fifteen peasants from the area who had been detained by the police in October 1973, a little less than a month after the military coup. Almost exactly ten years later, on January 12, 1989, Gonzalo Díaz exhibited for the first time his installation «Lonquén» at the Ojo de Buey gallery (Santiago): «Only after ten years of metabolic retention, of looking at what those half-point photographic jaws hide -architecture adequate to the magnitude of a massacre- has it become possible for me to directly face the Via Crucis of this dreadful affair» -said the artist in the catalog of that exhibition.

According to Pablo Oyarzun, the retention of which Diaz speaks «is not simply due to a will, a discipline and a conscious control, but has been forced by the blinding evidence of the ruin, of that kind of funerary monument of «stone on stone» (…) A retention that is an admirable exercise of survival in art; of survival of art, one would also say, «in the midst of the hecatomb.»