Isabel Allende, in The House of the Spirits, writes a fictional account of the 1973 coup, which she witnessed. Because of the coup, her uncle lost Chile to Pinochet, and the entire Allende family fled.

The following text is transcribed from the envelope accompanying the artwork:

The faces in red fluorescent paint were drawn directly onto the work by Margarita Dittborn at my request, when she was eight years old. The printed and sketched faces are:
1. Six mug shots of Chilean women thieves published in a criminology magazine in the 1930s, which Dittborn encountered 14 years ago in Santiago, Chile.
2. Four faces of members of the Selknam, Yamana, and Alalakwulup tribes from Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost region of South America. Martin Gusinde, a German anthropologist who lived among these aborigines in the 1920s, photographed the faces. Dittborn found them in a book written by Gusinde.
3. Four faces drawn by schizophrenic patients at the Psychiatric Hospital in Santiago. They are part of a series that Dittborn requested from the director of the hospital.
4. Five faces Dittborn commissioned from his neighbor Rodrigo Salazan.
5. Five “identikits” made by the Chilean police in 1989 and lent to Dittborn in 1991.
6. A face Dittborn discovered in a book called School Handiwork.
7. A photograph of a face–actually the profile of a skull wearing a fur cap–that Dittborn found in an archeology book dealing with the Arica culture, which flourished in northern Chile 6,000 years ago.
8. A computer-generated face commissioned by Dittborn and drawn by Margarita in 1990.
9. The profile of a face found drawn on a telephone book. Dittborn enlarged the image by photomechanical means, printed it on thin, non-woven fabric, and later stitched it onto the work. He did this for all black and white faces in the 10th History of the Human Face.

Between 1983 and 1996, Eugenio Dittborn produced 119 Airmail Paintings and put them into circulation between remote points on the globe: Santiago; Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, and Melbourne, Australia; Wellington, New Zealand; London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Southampton, England; Glasgow, Scotland; Berlin, Cologne and Kassel, Germany; Amsterdam and Rotterdam, Netherlands; Antwerp, Belgium; Madrid and Seville, Spain; Rome, Italy; Caracas, Venezuela; Cali, Colombia; Cuenca, Ecuador; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Lima, Peru; Havana, Cuba; Montreal, Banff, Edmonton, and Vancouver, Canada; Miami; Chicago; New York; and Boston.

On a map of the Earth, this movement is like large-scale writing: these miles and miles of brushstrokes are paint hanging from the sky in an aircraft that never stops arriving.

“I would say that my work consists of two forms. The first occurs while they are being moved from one place to another through the international airmail network, folded and in envelopes. The second occurs once they arrive at their destination, when they are unfolded, hung up, and exhibited next to their empty envelopes. The Airmail Paintings are not conceived for only one space that acts as their support. They are conceived to be doubly supported: in the first instance by the international airmail network through which they circulate (the airplanes, customs checks, and postmen serve as their support producing their circulation). The Airmail Paintings are also supported by the receiver or destination: the walls of the exhibition space to which the works have been sent. The Airmail Paintings generate a problem in the exhibition space, since every exhibition takes place in a fixed spot. In this regard they are different from the tradition of artwork produced for a specific site. Airmail Paintings were conceived for at least two specific sites: that of the sender and that of the receiver, as well as for overcoming/producing the distance between the two.”
–Eugenio Dittborn, 1992