The experience of observing violeta parra's arpillera against war is shared as it contributes to the ways of looking at/reading the image. it reflects on different perspectives and sociocultural conditions that influence the appreciation and interpretation of the image: the search for aesthetic pleasure, the enhancement of the work and the social prestige of the author. the image is described adopting the levels of reading that they are usually applied to literary texts: literal, inferential and critical. as the work of violeta parra is largely autobiographical, the constitutive elements of memory, individual or collective, proposed by Michael Pollak, were incorporated into the analysis.

DOI: http://doi.org/10.47725/RAV.030.02