Estación Central, Santiago, Chile .

Maritime container on abandoned square

2017

“El lugar de la visibilidad” is an eight-month residency project commissioned by the Chilean Ministry of Culture and Arts in the borough of Estación Central in Santiago, Chile. The project was constituted by three different stages and its aim was, through art, to try to convert two geographical spaces into a neighbourhood, territories into communities.

In the process of the residency, I did different activities with the community in Gabriela Mistral and La Palma. These two contiguous neighbourhoods are in the borough that has a population of 3000 inhabitants, 38% of which are migrants from Haiti, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. The abandoned square called “with no name” emerged as the most important public space for the community.

In the third month of residency, it was inaugurated the “Cultural Container”, a maritime container in which was installed an open communal art space, in the square “with no name” former informal rubbish space. The “Cultural Container” generated a physical and temporal space and hosted the different manifestations of the neighbours, artistic and non-artistic that as a whole, help to build the cultural identity of the community. This space is now running and managed by the neighbours and they have a legal body “Cultural Container” that owns it.

The following list is a symbolic summary of the project:

345 knocked doors in order to disseminate activities.

18 communal “onces” (shared meals)

23537 digital photographs taken

57 hours of video recording

170 hours of workshops

103 times the containers door was opened (during the residency)

4 public spaces intervened

2 squares were recovered

6 links with other neighbourhood associations

45 ideas of how intervene public spaces

15 trees planted and growing

40 flowers planted and growing

1 “new artists club” created

1 legal personality “Cultural Container”

125 meters of garlands created by the community

1248 square meters recovered

1260 new swing movement

1260 new swing movements