Exemplo_Chilean Pavilion _2018 Venice Biennale

Rammed earth installation_Venice, Italy

The Chilean Pavilion Offers the 2018 Venice Biennale's Most Powerful Architectural Statement.

STADIUM

A BUILDING THAT RENDERS THE IMAGE OF A CITY

Chile’s National Stadium was a building and a city for one day. On the 29th of September 1979, the building was filled by 37,000 people for a massive operative which provided ownership titles to dwellers (pobladores), settling decades of makeshift land occupation and policies.

A blueprint of the Stadium with the outline of shanty towns instead of bleachers was prepared, rendering the genesis of Santiago’s current layout within the drawing of a building.

From sports venue and hosting religious events to a concentration camp, the exhibition recreates the different functions as a machine for viewing and revisits the stadium’s typology, congregating dissimilar groups and serving unlikely purposes.

This is the story told through a drawing from an event of the past, which foresaw the present of a city within a building. The exhibition narrates a double story interweaved in one drawing: that of a building (with its dissimilar uses) and that of a city (with its housing development), both converging in one event.

At the centre of Sala dell’Isoloto stands a large-scale model of a building made of rammed earth. On closer examination, the sixty pieces that comprise the building’s oval shape appear less to be made of earth as carved in it. Layers of soil with slight variations in colour and texture recall that it is land what is at stake at the Chilean Pavilion. The layering of the pavilion’s pieces is the footprint of an artisanal process of production by which a fragile, discrete material—soil, bare earth—is transformed into a stable, monolithic object. Simultaneously heavy and fragile, these objects are in turn symbolic fragments of another transmutation: one by which slum dwellers were transformed into property owners in an event at Chile’s National Stadium, and one by which a city that grew unplanned becomes visible and fixed in a plan, that of a building able to narrate its own history.

PAVILION CREDITS

CRÉDITOS PABELLÓN

Curator / Curatrice

Alejandra Celedón

Commissioner / Commissario

Cristóbal Molina (Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage)

Design / Disegno

Tomás Villalón

Leonardo Quinteros

Direction of contents / Direzione dei contenuti

Alejandra Celedón

Stephannie Fell

Graphic identity / Identità grafica

Kathryn Gillmore

Audiovisual project / Progetto audiovisivo

Javier Correa

Multimedia / Multimedia

Gonzalo Puga

Arguzia S.r.l.

Stadium Model – Patricio Arias / Quipu – Jean Petitpas