A School Made of Acts

Abstract:

Re-founded in 1952 by a group of architects, artists and poets; the School of Valparaíso represents one of the most long-lasting and original experimental artistic experiences in the Latin American context.

The article comments on a fundamental aspect of the School approach: the lived structure of Acts that organizes and gives shape to its creative experience and learning ambit—a continuous rhythm of Acts, structuring the spheres of life, work and study.

The authors propose that one of the particular dimensions constructed by this practice is to summon and situate the work at the centre of the School quests. The article develops the idea that it is exactly through the work that the School seems to fulfil its role, transforming ourselves into the crafts.

Notes

1 The group was composed of the architects Alberto Cruz, Jaime Bellalta, Arturo Baeza, José Vial, Fabio Cruz and Miguel Eyquem; the painter Francisco Méndez; the poet Godofredo Iommi and the sculptor Claudio Girola.

2 This position concerning modernity was developed by Godofredo Iommi during a master class held in 1982 titled ‘One must be absolutely modern’. (Iommi 1982a)

3 See the French philosopher François Fédier on the Aristotelian understanding of energeia in which the being can reach its greater plenitude by being-at-work. A notion explained by Godofredo Iommi during his ‘One must be absolutely modern’ masterclass (Iommi 1982a: 15).

4 In a lecture by Godofredo Iommi held in 1981, the poet defined tradition by heredity as ‘an invitation to recreate it, as if its emergence was its very being’ (Iommi 1982b: 2).

5 The poet (Godofredo Iommi) has named this desire to be collective and individual at the same time, as ‘a nation of starlings’ (in English, a ‘murmuration of starlings’), evoking the image of multiplicity in singularity. As the flock of birds moves in a unitary cloud tracing one route, inside which each starling follows its own flight path. The term has deeper meanings related to Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘nation of doves’ from ‘Le Bateau Ivre’ (1960:129):‘L’aube exaltee ainsi qu’un peuple de colombes’ [‘Dawn exalted [rising] as a nation of doves’.

6 The inaugural potential of poetry is taken from the direct interpretation of the poetic voice of Hölderlin, when he writes in his poem Andenken: ‘was bleibet aber stiften die dichter’. These words will illuminate and profoundly mark all the poetic work of Iommi and the poets of La Santa Hermandad de la Orquídea. As stated by the poet Gerardo Mello Mourão, these few words of the German poet will be enough to ‘place us at the mere face of the Muse’. (Mello Mourão 1993)

7 The words of Isidore Ducasse, ‘Poetry must be made by all and not by one’, have been present as a poetical axiom driving the group collective approach to action (Lautréamont 1988: 591).

8 The Open City was founded in 1970 by the School members as a place of creative freedom, opening the possibility that anything that is disposed on the terrains appears under the light of the poetic spoken word that Ha-Lugar. Ha-Lugar is Spanish legal terminology, used by a judge to sustain a motion presented by lawyers. It means to give permission for something to happen. In the Open City the poetic spoken word that Ha-Lugar opens fields of possibilities.

9 Referring to the blackboards of the twentieth-anniversary exhibition in which ‘virtue’ was defined as that human courage that necessarily appears in front of our poetic nature to ‘live freely without ceasing in the vigil, and making a world’ (Escuela de Arquitectura UCV1972).

10 For that occasion fifty-nine blackboards were hand drawn and written by the professors of the School, displaying the artistic position of the School as an act of public declaration and internal meditation.

11 François Fédier during his conference ‘Around the Origin of the Work of Art’ at the Musée des beaux-arts d’Orléans, France, on 23 March 2005.

12 In 1967 the School proposed the complete restructure of the university starting a Reform movement in Valparaíso that then grew and expanded to all of the Chilean universities. Among their fundamental postulates was the proposal of a real community of life, work and study, ‘understood as the non-submission of life to artificially predetermined periods’ (Iommi 1971: 1). This process will later lead to the foundation of the Open City as a place to realise all of these premises.

13 In 1964, a poetic vision of the South American continent was formulated: Amereida – an epic poem that raises the question about the American being and its possible destiny, opening the possibility to think what is properly ours.

14 Godofredo Iommi refers to the South American hinterland as the Inner sea, and develops its fundamental relation with the Pacific Ocean in a conversation held in the Open City just after the Phalène of the Pacific.

15 As proposed by Godofredo Iommi in a lecture held in 1980, morality is not about a normative body, but about the possibility of everything and everyone reaching its own fulfilment.