Chile has five representative spaces at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, the world's most important cultural event in this discipline, which last year was postponed due to the pandemic but has just opened its doors to the general public.
"Testimonial Spaces" is the name of the exhibition that since Saturday is giving life to the Chilean pavilion in the Arsenale of the Biennial. Until November 21, Chile will be represented by these 525 paintings made on the basis of testimonies of neighbors from the José María Caro neighborhood, who from past and present experience responded to the question of the Venice Biennale this 2021: How are we going to live together?
Led by the Chilean Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage, "Testimonial Spaces" was curated by University of Chile architects Emilio Marín and Rodrigo Sepúlveda. In it, the great question of this year is approached from a local perspective to then give a global answer. The aim of the exhibition is to reflect the fact that inequalities, conflicts and tensions occur all over the planet and that it is important, as its creators said at the opening ceremony, "to learn from past experiences in order to know how to live the future".
Why Población José María Caro?
It is a neighborhood in the southern part of Santiago where its inhabitants, public employees and the armed forces worked together to transform the neighborhood and adopted actions and rules, such as "everyone helping to build each other's houses except their own so as not to put individual interests above those of others," said Marín during the presentation of the pavilion.
The objective of the Chilean proposal is to show that societies can overcome "crises, complex moments, even the absence of the State in some cases, if they do it in a communitarian way," said its curators.
Chileans presenting outside the Pavilion
In the second section of the Biennale, where the works and proposals of architects invited individually by the Biennial's management can be found, the Venice curator, Hashim Sarkis, selected the award-winning national architect Alejandro Aravena (Pritzker Prize 2016) and his office Elemental, with an architectural proposal to build places that recover the ancient tradition of Mapuche parliaments, meeting spaces for conversation and the resolution of differences. The Igneous Tectonics team led by Sergio Araya, dean of DesignLab at the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez; Estudio Base, composed of Bárbara Barreda and Felipe Sepúlveda, and Arturo Lyon, as part of the international team that will address Antarctica as a major theme, were also invited to participate.
Chile has had a long tradition of participation in the Venice Biennale, presenting pavilions since 2002 and winning two Silver Lions, with distinctions for Alejandro Aravena in 2008 for his work on social housing and the Chilean pavilion in 2014 for the exhibition "Monolith Controversies".
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