Architecture and Territory

Cancha: Chilean Soilscapes, the Chilean pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by María Pilar Pinchart and Bernardo Valdés, puts the tensions between architecture and territory in Chile at play.

Find a piece of land and take it. Then, associate this piece of land with a set of rules that will define the behavior of its participants. Finish by establishing a series of measures that will determine the spaces for each type of behavior. This regulated and ruled piece of land, is now a Cancha — an active space where different interests come into play.

This is the invitation that the Chilean pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale offers: an invitation to test out the relationship between architecture and territory. And it does so starting from a broad set of rules that provide the visitor and the participating architects enough leverage space to absorb — rather than repress — and communicate the contradictions inherent in the productive relationship between architecture and territory in Chile. By establishing this set of rules and spaces, it not only questions the international reading of Chilean architecture, but also of how it takes over its territory.

In the words of the curators: "Chilean architecture has been noticed for being an architecture of five facades, with good angles for camera shots and framed by a landscape that — referencing the antipoem of Nicanor Parra — dilutes Chile as a country and makes it only a landscape. But in actuality, there is an internal need for architecture to address that landscape. It has to think it through and design an artificial landscape. [In that sense], rather than a call to view Chilean architecture through a new light, Cancha is a call for Chilean architecture to think globally, ecologically and politically."
<i>Cancha: Chilean Soilscapes</i>, the Chilean pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale
Cancha: Chilean Soilscapes, the Chilean pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale
This call has been picked up by Pedro Alonso, ELEMENTAL, Juan Pablo Corvalán (Susuka), Genaro Cuadros, Germán del Sol, Ivan Ivelic, and Rodrigo Tisi, the architects invited by the curatorial team to develop original research for the exhibition, each of them presenting different aspects in the relationship between architecture and territory in Chile. Given that the material of each one of these investigations is mounted on a lamp within the assigned space of the Arsenale, it is literally through the support of these backlit investigations, that we can recognize the primary operation of the pavilion: the construction of a second land made out of salt and salt blocks brought directly from the grounds of the Chilean desert.

"The pavilion is a symbolic atmosphere that delivers an interpretative frame for its content," the curators explain. They continue by saying that, "from an atmospheric perspective and the visitors performance in the space, the pavilion is a light-controlled space: from the exterior you enter a foreroom where a neon light sculpture shaped as a salt crystal receives you, then you access a space in which the protagonist is the floor — a floor made out of salt from the Salar de Tarapacá and five rocks weighing half a ton each, and all of this lit through seven lamps, each of which presents the participating architect's essay.
<i>Cancha: Chilean Soilscapes</i>, the Chilean pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale
Cancha: Chilean Soilscapes, the Chilean pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale
The interpretations of this strategy can be many, and in the words of the curatorial team, "many of the ambitions of the pavilion's reading have decidedly been left loose." This loose interpretative strategy makes the Chilean pavilion a space to discover and read tensions between architecture and the intervention of land in Chile, as a resource, as heritage, and as landscape.

The design decisions that define the experience of the pavilion establish a dialogue with previous uses given to architecture in the international representation of Chile. According to the curatorial statement, the shipment of desert salt to the pavilion references the Chilean pavilion in the Seville 1992 World Expo, which "marked the first aspiration of a democratic Chile — without Pinochet — and that wanted to show a cold and efficient Chile through the shipment of chunks of icebergs from the Antarctic Ocean. In that showing, next to the ice was a series of supermarket-style shelves with carton boxes with printed images of Chile, which one could purchase and take. In front of this reference — and as discussed with Pedro Livni and Gonzalo Carrasco, members of the Vostokproject and curators of the Uruguayan pavilion — Cancha's salt suggest the melting of such ice."
Rather than a call to view Chilean architecture through a new light, Cancha is a call for Chilean architecture to think globally, ecologically and politically
<i>Cancha: Chilean Soilscapes</i>, the Chilean pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale
Cancha: Chilean Soilscapes, the Chilean pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale
In this sense, while melting the 1992 ice, Cancha attempts to "dilute the mask of the 'Chile for sale' and put forward a transparent reading of architecture and its territory." Transparency allows the critical revision of the opportunities and risks of the relationship that Chile has established during the last twenty years with the global exchange of the resources that make up its land. Cancha's salt — shipped to Venice through logistical processes proper of the global commerce of natural resources — puts in evidence the urgency and architectural proximity towards the commercialization of territory in Chile, presenting a space regulated for interpretation.

Finally, the pavilion also marks the entry of new players, a result of changes in cultural public politics in Chile. For the first time, the proposal of the pavilion was chosen through a open call, which gathered in its handling a series of public institutions that work towards promoting and disseminating Chilean architecture. It is hoped that the experience and discussion put forward by Cancha ignites and confirms the pertinence of new cultural institutions, and of their role in the construction of public debates. Fernando Portal (@FPORTAL)
<i>Cancha: Chilean Soilscapes</i>, the Chilean pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale
Cancha: Chilean Soilscapes, the Chilean pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale
Cancha: Chilean Soilscapes
Elemental, Germán del Sol, Pedro Alonso, Juan Pablo Corvalán (Susuka), Iván Ivelic, Genaro Cuadros, Rodrigo Tisi
Commissioner: Cristóbal Molina Baeza.
Curators: María Pilar Pinchart Saavedra, Bernardo Valdés Echenique.
Sculpture: Iván Navarro y Pedro Pulido.
Documentaries: Cristóbal Palma.
<i>Cancha: Chilean Soilscapes</i>, the Chilean pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale
Cancha: Chilean Soilscapes, the Chilean pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale

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