Stadium and Museum: A Mapping of Narrative Impulses

Building a Stadium for a Museum was the operation behind "Stadium", Chile Pavilion at the 16th Venice Biennial in 2018. The exhibition recovered a forgotten event of recent local history where, during Pinochet's dictatorship, 37,000 property titles were awarded to Santiago slum dwellers in Chile National Stadium. For the event in 1979, a footprint of the building was redrawn, which instead of grandstands traced polygons with the name of more than 60 towns on the outskirts of Santiago, from where those summoned that day came. The drawing, the starting point of "Stadium", brings together a cartographic and a narrative impulse in the same effort. Stadium debate its premises from a second adaptation of the pavilion, in which the stadium is reconstructed for the Museum of Contemporary Art of Santiago in 2019. The exhibition, like the event of the past, transports the city into a building, and makes visible the periphery in the centre. Thus, the Venetian Arsenal and the Contemporary Art Museum of Santiago echo its content and open new disciplinary reflections from the operations involved: in them a building is compressed inside another, or even a city compressed within another. "Stadium" takes up Rossi's premise on Architecture for the Museum and raises its potential to open critical debates about architecture and its practices.