“As the President said when we visited the GAM in March: We are going to finish what we started,” said the Minister of Culture, Claudia Barattini, this morning when presenting the final project that will allow the start of the construction of the second phase of the Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center.
Together with the Minister of Public Works, Alberto Undurraga, and the director of the GAM, Alejandra Wood, the Minister this morning formally gave the go ahead to the second stage of the Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center, which contemplates the implementation of a large performance hall with capacity for 2,000 people.
For Minister Barattini, “the GAM is a good example that culture and the arts are citizens' rights and that the role of public policies in this area is to guarantee the community's access to expressions with high technical standards and high quality shows.”
The Minister emphasized that, in its four years of operation, “the GAM Center has become a meeting place between the public and creators, becoming considered a space that encourages exchange between citizens.”
Barattini added that "the challenge will be to position the great hall as a key space for the performing and musical arts for the coming decades, making the most of the flexibility of its infrastructure and technology. This hall will be the long-awaited space that we had dreamed of for Chile."
The Minister of Public Works, Alberto Undurraga, said that "the State, our country, society requires emblems and it is part of the role of the Ministry of Public Works to build and restore emblems, such as the Humberstone Pulpería in the Tarapacá region, such as the Biobío Regional Theater, such as the Regional Museum in Aysén, such as the Regional Library in Magallanes, such as the second stage of the Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center in Santiago," explained Undurraga.
The head of the MOP clarified that these "are some of the works that reflect a program that is much more ambitious than just the construction of the GAM. But the GAM is called to be a cultural reference and mirror of other works carried out in the rest of the country, all of which we are working on."
"The first positive indication was given by President Bachelet when she visited us on March 17, confirming the construction of the hall," said Alejandra Wood, director of the Gabriela Mistral Center, adding that an update of the design of phase II was necessary, taking into account the current public income that the building receives and recent studies of cultural consumption - such as that of the INE - that reveal an increase in demand in Santiago for theater, music, contemporary dance and the lyrical genre.
This announcement was made during an activity that included the presentation of an excerpt from the dance piece “Against Time”, by choreographer Enrique Faúndez and which is part of the GAM Cultural Center's billboard.
Currently, the GAM has more than 22 thousand square meters of surface area that houses two buildings connected to each other, with 2 performance halls, 4 rehearsal and presentation rooms, 2 exhibition halls, 2 seminar rooms, 1 library, 1 recording studio, 3 shops, 1 restaurant, 1 cafe, 3 open spaces and parking lots.
Since the inauguration of its first phase, in September 2010, an average of 85,000 people visit or use the building as a meeting place. Of this audience, 40% access artistic programming and multiple activities such as workshops, forums, exhibitions, and a library. Of them, 16% access paid activities and 84% do so for free.
The GAM arose from a presidential mandate in the government of Michelle Bachelet, which gave it priority as a Bicentennial project after a fire destroyed part of the Diego Portales building at the beginning of 2006, and it was decided to recover the space as a cultural center.
November 13, 2014