![]() I argue that the school’s detachment implied a removal, a voluntary imprisonment, which should be understood in the context of the political turmoil of 1970s Chile, which saw the short-lived presidency of socialist Salvador Allende (1970-1973) and the subsequent military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). ![]() In the camp, these influences were mobilized with specific political intent, but in the school, which expressly detached itself from politics, similar activities had much different motivations. I compare the school’s pedagogical methods and the prisoners’ performances, describing their origins in French Surrealist theater and Brazilian Marxist pedagogy. In this article, I place the founding and development of the school in the context of the pedagogical and political environment of late 1960s and early 1970s Chile. The confrontational nature of their performances which included defiant interactions with their audience the guards stands as a foil to the Open City’s architectural performances. (2) The camp prisoners, who included professional actors and playwrights imprisoned for the political content of their theater plays, initiated a series of games and theatrical performances at the camp. Three years after the Open City was founded, the dictatorial regime of Augusto Pinochet set up a concentration camp for political prisoners three miles north of the school (Lawner, 2003). This process reflects the school’s philosophy: that architecture should be a collaborative, ephemeral, and utopian event that exists outside the boundaries of conventional professional practice (Pérez de Arce et al., 2003). These exercises are starting points for the design and construction of buildings, sculptures, and installations on the Open City campus. As part of their studio exercises, students participate in collective events that recall surrealist practices, such as the exquisite corpse and automatic writing. Región de Valparaíso, Chile.įounded in 1971 on the south edge of the beach, the Open City is an architecture school that has defined its pedagogy as a combination of poetry and architecture. Location of the Ritoque concentration camp (provided by Miguel Lawner, former prisoner) and the Open City school. (1) My argument follows these tracks, connecting two sites that settled in Ritoque in the early 1970s: the Open City, an architecture school, and the Ritoque concentration camp, established by the Pinochet regime to house political prisoners (FIG. Keywords: architecture, pedagogy, performance, theater, dictatorshipĪ set of train tracks runs along the Ritoque beach. Camp prisoners instead turned their forced isolation into active political resistance. School professors formed a utopian enclave that freed them from regulatory structures but limited its political action. While there was no contact between them, their occupants formed communities and used similar repertoires (games, events and performances) to create real and imaginary spaces. *Assistant professor, History of Art and Romance Languajes and Literatures, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA the early 1970s there were two spaces of exception in Ritoque: a school of architecture and a concentration camp.
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