FRANCE • PORTUGAL • SYRIA • BRAZIL • EGYPT • ITALY • ENGLAND • CHINA
SANTIAGO CHILE
2017
EL LUGAR DE LA VISIBILIDAD
Estación Central, Santiago, Chile.
Maritime container on abandoned square
2017
“El lugar de la visibilidad” is an eight-month residency project commissioned by the Chilean Ministry of Culture and Arts in the borough of Estación Central in Santiago, Chile. The project was constituted by three different stages and its aim was, through art, to try to convert two geographical spaces into a neighborhood, territories into communities.
In the process of the residency, I did different activities with the community of “Gabriela Mistral” and “La Palma”. These two contiguous neighborhoods are in a borough that has a population of 3000 inhabitants, 38% of which are migrants from Haiti, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. The abandoned square called “with no name” emerged as the most important public space for the community.
In the third month of the residency, it was inaugurated the “Cultural Container”, a maritime container in which was installed an open and communal art space, at “with no name” square, former informal rubbish space. The “Cultural Container” generated a physical and temporal space and hosts different manifestations of the neighbors, artistic and non-artistic, that as a whole help to build the cultural identity of the community. This space is still running and now it is managed by the neighbors. They have a legal identity: “Container Cultural” that owns it.
The following list is a symbolic summary of the project:
345 knocked doors in order to disseminate activities.
18 communal “onces” (shared meals)
23537 digital photographs taken
57 hours of video recording
170 hours of workshops
103 times the container’s door was opened (during the residency)
4 public spaces intervened
2 squares were recovered
6 links with other neighborhood associations
45 ideas of how to intervene public spaces
15 trees planted and growing
40 flowers planted and growing 1 “new artists club” created
1 legal identity “Cultural Container”
125 meters of garlands created by the community
1248 square meters recovered 1260 new swing movements
ARTIST:
CAMILA LOBOS
Camila Lobos Díaz lives and works between London (UK) and Santiago (CL). She obtained her BFA degree from the Catholic University of Chile (2013) and an MFA Sculpture in Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (2019). Her work, mainly three-dimensional, is about making the socio-political-cultural context visible. It explores the relationship between power and visibility. Her current research is developed in the intersection between art and human geography extrapolating her research around periphery, marginality, and invisibility to global processes linked to migration, power centers and costs of progress in less developed countries. Camila is a winner of the Chilean National Cultural Council Grant: FONDART (2020) and (2018); Santiago Municipality Visual Art Awards 2017 (Chile); Slade Bursary 2017 (UK); “Art and technology” Award, Telefónica Foundation 2013 (Chile); LENOVO Art Prize, 2012 (Chile). In 2017 she received the Yitzhak Danziger Scholarship to undertake the MFA degree at Slade School of Art in London. She has been nominated for different awards such as Red Mansion Art Prize 2018 (UK - China), UCL Museum/ Slade Collaboration 2018 (UK).
Camila has been recently appointed as the new Artist in Residency at Carpintarias Sao Lazaro Lisbon (2020, Portugal) and awarded the Gulbenkian Grant by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. In 2020 she was granted a Residency program at Berlin Sessions, (2020, Germany). She has been commissioned by Tate Modern Museum to develop a special edition of Christmas cards (2019, UK). In 2017 she was commissioned by the Chilean Ministry of Culture and Arts to create the Public Art Project “El Lugar de la visibilidad” (Chile), and in 2016 was awarded a grant to develop an Artist in Residence program by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Austria). Her work has been widely shown individually and collectively in Latin America and Europe. An example of this is her participation in spaces such as Museum of Contemporary Art (Chile), Telefónica Foundation (Chile), Galería Bech (Chile), Facultad de Artes ASAB Universidad Distrital de Bogotá (Colombia), Kunstraum Niederösterreich Museum (Austria), Gallery Schleifmühlgasse 12-14 (Austria), 12th Havana Biennial (Cuba), L.A. Art Show (USA), Woburn Research Centre, Creekside Gallery (UK) and Hinterland Galerie (AT).