The Chilean Pavilion has transformed 500 testimonies into 500 paintings that have been hanged on the walls of the pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale which opened to the public on 22 May in Venice, Italy.

The exhibition, titled Testimonial Spaces, located at Arsenale Novissimo, is curated by architects Emilio Marín and Rodrigo Sepúveda. 

The paintings tell the story of the José María Caro settlement which is located south of the central peripheral beltway of Santiago in Chile and is part of a carefully planned social integration process.

Based on a set of formal rules and collective work where authorship is diluted within the community, painters and historians have brought together the stories of the emblematic José María Caro settlement and turned them into images.

These latter go through different spaces, recalling past and present lives within this community.

Hashim Sarkis' question "How will we live together?" implies a reflection on the experiences of how we have lived as a community, the  different historical and political cycles that are part of the territory we inhabit, and how memory allows us to look at our past and hence put forward a joint view. 

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the government’s Housing Corporation Office implemented a new housing plan that would bring different social classes together within the same territory. 

The territory would include informal settlements for freelance or middle-class workers, members of the armed forces and government employees in eight distinct sectors organised along the railway that connects the country’s central region to the south.

Testimonial Spaces is an exhibition that focuses on pursuing memories, yearnings, and the spatial tactics of an integrated life; on a city that is the end result of an inventory filled with stereotypes; on a biographical city where architectures, imaginary routines, and common spaces and circumstances rebuild an already inhabited and imperfect city, longed for and idealised: a house, a park, a streetmarket, a sports area, the neighbourhood, the fact of living next to each other.

The 17th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice has opened to the public on 22 May 2021. The exhibition will be on view till 21 November 2021. 

This year’s architecture biennale is themed as "How will we live together?" by the curator Hashim Sarkis, the theme explores a widening context that helps architects to "imagine spaces in which we can generously live together".

We invite our readers to find out WAC's detailed coverage about the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale on our Italy page. 

Testimonal Spaces exhibition facts

Pavilion of Chile

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.

All images © gerdastudio

> via Chilean Pavilion