“Stadium: an event, a building and a city”, the Chile Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale

Chile’s National Stadium was for a day a building and a city. On 29 September 1979, the building was filled by 37,000 people for a massive operative which provided ownership titles to dwellers (pobladores) fixing 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 matches, religious events and concentration camp, the exhibition recreates and revisits the stadium’s freespace condition, 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 by freespace: that of a building (with its dissimilar uses) and that of a city (with its housing development), overlaid in a single event.

Commissioner: Cristóbal Molina (Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage) 

Curator: Alejandra Celedón

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