FROM INDIVIDUAL AUTHORSHIP TO COLLECTIVE PARTICIPATION: THE MURAL WORKSHOP AT THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF VALPARAISO, 1969-1973

This work presents the Mural Workshop that emerged in 1969 at the Art Institute of the Catholic University of Valparaiso, which was led by the painter, architect and professor Francisco Mendez Labbe, with the collaboration of Eduardo Perez, Eduardo Vilches and Nemesio Antimez. During its almost four years of existence, the project was responsible for the creation of more than sixty murals in different parts of Valparaiso, all of which have disappeared, with the exception of two that are currently part of the Open-Air Museum circuit in Cerro Bellavista. This article aims to demonstrate that this project, interrupted by the dictatorship in 1973 and reconfigured in the form of the Open-Air Museum in 1991, was an innovative proposal that did not compare with other mural projects with a political orientation that developed in Chile during the same period. The focus of the Mural Workshop was pictorial and artistic, defined by strategies of collective and pedagogical participation in the public space that Mendez linked to his theoretical thinking and to the influence of the School of Architecture at the Catholic University of Valparaiso.