Will and Tombstone
Leonardo Portus
This work rescues the collective testimony from the plaque made by the Chilean sculptor Samuél Román in 1972 and disappeared that said:
“This building reflects the spirit of work, the creative capacity and the effort of the people of Chile, represented by: its workers, its technicians, its artists and its professionals. It was built in 275 days and completed on April 3, 1972 during the popular government of the fellow President of the Republic Salvador Allende G.”
— Collective testimony.
In this curatorial project, Portus creates a work composed of two parts called “Will and tombstone”, which rescues the collective testimony from a replica of the plaque and through a translation of the text in Braille code as a reading exercise for blind people, making evident and tangible in a tactile experience, a hidden, lost and therefore intangible fragment of our history.
The first work called “Lápida” consists of a replica worked on a peephole device in which the public is reunited with the image of the lost tombstone through a historical photo, practically the only existing record, and whose low angle view highlights the image of the tower as scenery, freezing the utopia of modernity in a Latin American version, as a latent possibility.
As a counterpart to the previous work, housed inside the building, the second work “Voluntad” is located outside in the sunken plaza sector of the building (where the original tombstone was located). This extended format work consists of two parts: the first installed on the handrails that lead to the sunken plaza with Samuel Román's phrase written in Braille code running through the spaces and places. The second phase is the silkscreen inscription on the glass with the same phrase in a 3 cm high format (for each letter), extending 9 meters long.
On "Voluntad y Lápida", the skin and the architecture are physically installed as an exercise in reading memory, without nostalgic memories but rather murmurs and silences that were always exposed and shared.
Interview
Interview with Paulina Varas and José Llano, who carried out the project "275 days; Site, Time, Context and Specific Affections" in 2010. The video explains the development of the project, the works of art incorporated into the GAM building, and a general synthesis.