Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Taking as a historical reference the event that in 1976 caused the loss of the former campus of the University of Chile’s Faculty of Architecture in Cerrillos area, which is currently occupied by police institutions, this article will expose some of the curatorial premises of the laboratory "Núcleo Cerrillos Archive”. This laboratory, located territorially as a dispositive in the National Center of Contemporary Art, has consisted of an extensive gathering of legal and patrimonial documents, but also in a series of creative and communitary operations that, by producing new “archival machines”, have activated other sensitive aspects of the problem. Some of these aspects will be analyzed in order to expose the biopolitical impact of the archive for an understanding of the territory, as well the medial aesthetics activated by the laboratory in this outlying area of Santiago.

This research presents a first attempt to define the concept of sound-space from the aesthetic and auditory experience of sound in space, through the observation of the interactions between sound and architecture revealed by sound perception. The importance of sound in the configuration of space regards architecture not as its constructive conditions, but instead, as a sensible environment where sound builds animated environments. The case studies for the experiment are industrial spaces and sublime wartime architectures, abandoned infrastructures at the margins of memory, and the urban, uninhabitable places with unique and exacerbated acoustics. A series of compositions were made from the field recordings within the case studies, to work with the subjective interpretation of a sample of people using reactive listening as the main methodology. This aesthetic experience translates acoustic information through comparisons and associations that use the senses, synesthesia, memory, personal and social constructions of reality, and the affective relationship we have with the environment to give shape and definition to the sound-space.

Since the beginning of 2000, extra-legal leases have notably increased in Poblacion Zona Norte, a working-class neighborhood from the early 1930s, located on the historic periphery of the city, at the northeast of the municipality of Independencia. There, its inhabitants build and subleases and rent precarious homes for theundocumented immigrants, workers without contract, and insolvent, who cannot access legal mercantile production due to bank requirements. To understand this phenomenon, the origins and characteristics of the neighborhood and the practices done by those who live there are analytically described. This review is based on information collected during 2018 and 2019 through qualitative interviews and a contextual interpretation. The analysis of the information collected was carried out from the theory of production of space and the theory of value criticism. The first postulates that space is the product of social practices done by value-creating agents (of use, of change); and the second, allows us to explain that the feasibility of extralegal mercantile production is related to the possibility of the inhabitants of the North Zone Population to build with low costs, be owners (or act as such) and set prices based on the restrictions that imposes the formal mercantile production. The relevance of this study lies in the fact that it allows us to understand why the undocumented, insolvent, and informal are concentrated in neighborhoods on the historic periphery of the city, in homes with serious habitability problems.

The study of place atmospheres is relevant to understand a series of elements in the relationship between subjectivity and place (Gandy, 2017); especially the processes of change in urban space and the possibilities for this change to be purposefully directed (Sumartojo & Pink, 2019). In this article, I analyse how the curation of food markets requires the use of different cultural and aesthetic knowledges that capitalize on the vast gentrification process in London’s (UK) key areas in order to create a place atmosphere, and with it, to generate belonging and exclusion. This work explores specifically how commercial space organizers, as cultural intermediaries or “curators” use their specific taste to create pop-up street food markets. Curation implies a delicate design process and arrangement of different material, affective and sensorial elements. This includes the selection of food vendor with particular cuisines, and the distribution and flows in the market space to attract a certain audience. In this article, I draw findings from an ethnography conducted in 2014 and 2015, using the case of Vibes Feast, a company that organises night markets in London in areas such as Dalston, Lewisham and Battersea. I use the case of the Lewisham market in southeast London to illustrate the curatorial work or market organisers. I analyse their working practices and decision-making process to understand how the curation of this kind of markets is a relevant practice in the generation of place atmospheres for consumption and the integration of a middle class public, excluding the rest.

This socio-spatial study, applied to the El Prohibido (The Forbidden, in Spanish) Cultural Center, located in Cuenca-Ecuador, aims to broaden the view of cultural heritage built on the basis of architectural-cultural intervention. A descriptive, cross-sectional and prospective methodology is used, based on bibliographic and critical theoretical analyses on the following topics: 1) local regulations; 2) queer theory; 3) cultural rights, and 4) participatory governance, which converge in this case study. The heritage potential of architectural sites is exposed through a subject-object interaction; thus, contextualizing the construction of cultural identities and the full exercise of individual and collective law, which surpass the current conventional line on built cultural heritage.

This paper deals with the study of Red Desert (Il deserto rosso, 1964) by Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the most recognised filmmakers of European modern cinema of the 1960s. The essay addresses a hermeneutic approach to the film from the principles of Feminist Film Theory focusing on the modern reformulation of the conventions of Melodrama with a special attention to the study of the mise-en-scène of the urban landscape as a privileged site for the representation and tension of gender categories. As an existential Melodrama about the feminine condition and its neurosis within the context of the patriarchal bourgeois family during the Italian economic boom of the 1960s, the film authorises a feminist approach centered on the conventions of a cinematic genre linked to the tensions and contradictions of modern ideals of masculinity and femininity.

This paper addresses a visual study of the media phenomenon that occurred after the fire at Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral and the impromptu announcement of an international architecture competition for its reconstruction by the French government. It provides an inventory of posts found worldwide on social networks with figurations of the monument that began to circulate virally through digital media. From this inventory, a mosaic approach based on McLuhan's approach is proposed, which reveals the main lines of interest that all these images began to draw heuristically. This analytical document, both qualitative and quantitative, allows us to study the operations behind the complex assembly of virtual, material and symbolic elements in which the proposals appeared. Together with the discussion of its results, the role that this viral anomaly could have played in the outcome that transformed the procedure of the architecture competition into a mere simulacrum is assessed. Finally, the article evidences the consequent paradigm shift that the media introduces in the traditional consultation method, and how this has become a diverse space of cultural production for the global village.

The study that we undertake from the work "Blue Terrace Los Angeles 8th 1982" by David Hockney, is motivated by the fascination caused by the combination of Polaroid snapshots or reflex photographs that the artist developed in this type of works, called Joiners, consisting of multiple photographic images composed around a motif, an operation through which it is attempted to create and communicate about the perception for space and time (De ARCH, 2016). The introduction of mismatches in distances, differences in points of view, and frames between takes for a given subject, presents the temporal display in the recomposed image, questioning the instantaneous nature of the photograph. This specific work presents an opportunity to study the perspective restitution of the photographic images that compose it, since the analysis is approached as projections in the frame plane to reveal Hockney's performance in the face of this motif.

Colombia has urban peculiarities associated with various conflicts. These conflicts are evident in the urban space. From an interdisciplinary reading, the role of art combined with design can serve to understand and intervene in conflicts or social problems that appear in the city as urban tensions; however, this dialogic exercise requires making visible specific tools to materialize it. This article presents research results that proposes a methodological approach for the intervention of an urban context in tension at a time of pandemic. It seeks to broaden views of the pedagogical processes of inhabiting, from the review of strategies of political art combined with intervention tools proposed by the design of spaces/scenario (DS/S), an academic program offered by the Colegiatura Colombiana in the city of Medellin, Colombia. It describes a quasi-experiment, which used a mix of observational and experimental research. It is applied in urban space through an intervention based on political art. It mixes techniques such as installation, performance, happening, readymade with design tools, specifically of the DS/S such as social cartography and the design of spatial experiences in a neighborhood with spatial tensions and focused on the elderly population. It concludes that spatial intervention can be a useful tool to create and activate place amid urban contexts in Medellin's political, social, or aesthetic tension. In turn, from the analysis of the case study proposed in Barrio Antioquia, the research finds elements that highlight the power of political art in conversation with the design of spaces to build a collective sense of the public in space.