Testimonial spaces
500 testimonies transformed into 500 paintings are the main piece of the Pavilion of Chile at the Biennale Architettura 2020: How will we live together?
Based on a set of formal rules and collective work, in which the authorship dilutes within the community, painters and historians gathered the stories of the emblematic settlement José María Caro and turned them into images. These latter go through different spaces recalling past and present lives within said community.
The question: How will we live together? Implies on its own a reflection of the experiences on how we have lived as a community, the different historical and political cycles that are on the territory one dwells and how the memory allows us to look at our past and therefrom to prospect a joint view.
The settlement José María Caro is located south of the central peripheral beltway of Santiago in Chile. It is remembered as an example from an experience with great urban connotation as part of a social integration process. By the end of the 50’s and early 60’s, the government implemented a Housing Plan, through the Housing Corporation Office. It planned and visualized an urban imaginary composed of different social class groups living together within the same territory: from informal settlements, independent or middle class workers, armed forces and governments employees in eight sectors organized in relation to the development of the railway that connects the country’s central region to the south one.
“Testimonial Spaces” is an exhibition focused on pursuing memories, yearnings, space tactics of an integrated life; on a city that is the output of an inventory filled with stereotypes, on a biographic city where architectures, the imaginary routines, common spaces and circumstances rebuild an already inhabited and imperfect city, longed and idealized: a house, a park, a street-market, a sport court, the neighborhood, the fact of living next to each other.
Title: Testimonial spaces.
Curators: Emilio Marín and Rodrigo Sepúlveda.
Commissioner: Cristóbal Molina (Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage of Chile)
Direction of contents: Pablo Ferrer, Emilio Marín and Rodrigo Sepúlveda.
Pavilion design: Emilio Marín, Rodrigo Sepúlveda and Alessandra Dal Mos.
Historian: Juan Radic.
Graphic identity: María Gracia Fernández.
Museography: Pablo Brugnoli.
Ligthing consultancy: Victoria Campino
Organizer: Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage of Chile.
With the support of: Direction of Cultural Affairs (DIRAC) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chile.
