Stadium on the move
The Chilean contribution for the Venice Biennale caused a stir. From April 2nd 2019 Stadium. An Event, a Building and a City will be shown in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Quinta Normal in Santiago de Chile. The centerpiece is a compound of the National Stadium and a visualization of an unique event in Chilean history. In 1979 it became «a building and a city for one day», as the curator Alejandra Celedón stated.
Text: Julian Bruns – 26.3.2019
The exhibits main attraction is a 7 x 5 measuring stadium made of rammed earth, divided into 60 mysterious fragments. But instead of the stadium ranks fine elevated settlement structures can be seen. Stadium. An event, a building and a city, as the show is called, addresses a politically and socially topic of the economic globalization of Chile in the 1970s under the Pinochet regime. The urban development was liberalized: The governments investments in housing had been cancelled, planning instruments and regulations had been softened, and city expansion areas were released without a bigger plan. This «program» also included the relocation of informal settlements and the legalization of these areas in a major propaganda act. 37 000 people, whose names had been announced weeks before in the newspapers in a kind of cartographic blueprint of the stadium plan, arrived there on September 29th 1979 to receive new land tenure certificates, which declared them real estate owners. But these areas were on the frayed outskirts, lacking the necessary infrastructure. The blueprint map visualizes «another city» marginalizing from its center.
With the exhibition and the catalogue Stadium. A Building That Renders the Image of a City curator Alejandra Celedón wants to conserve this specific aspect in the history of the Chilean National Stadium, which was a building and a city at the same time for one day in 1979 and also has a tragic role to play here: The Stadium, which is supposed to be a public space, becomes the epitome of exclusion for one day.
The exhibition Stadium. An Event, a Building and a City will will be shown in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Quinta Normal in Santiago de Chile from April 2nd till June 23rd 2019.