VIEXPO 74
Leonardo Portus, Eduardo Cancino, Francisco Lira(propuesta)
Lugar: London Design Biennale, Somerset House, Londres, Inglaterra
2016
The uchronia of a failed chilean utopia.
Every utopia embodies the dream of a better world, a place where everything is possible. However, these dreams often collide with reality in different levels, leaving in the wake of this collision, seeds of a future hope.
In the late 60’s and early 70’s, Chile experienced rapid social changes, represented during Salvador Allende’s government as the “Chilean Way To Socialism”. The initiatives proposed by the government sought to improve the basic conditions of habitability for thousands of families, through the generation of an industry that would allow the economic and technological autonomy of the country.
One of these initiatives was the formation of INTEC, an interdisciplinary group that operated in Chile from 1968 to 1973. INTEC was founded in order to modernize industrial productions processes and design and it was supported by Gui Bonsiepe, the renowned designer and teacher at Ulm. Their work sought solutions to everyday problems, and often where synched to social programs developed by the government, such as the “half-a-liter milk per day” in which INTEC designed a powdered milk dispenser. In this sense, the group worked on a variety of problems, different in scale and reach, from tableware to cars, and from farm equipment to the famous project Cybersin.
Many of these projects and designs remain only as prototypes, because the coupd’etat of 1973 interrupted their development.
In our proposal for the pavilion, we want to recover these experiences and give them a new course, by installing an uchronia –the dramatization of a fictitious reality, as if history would have taken another path. In this case we propose to build, in the 35 sqm. assigned in the interior of de London Design Biennale, a showroom of the interior of a social housing unit from the time, such as the Villa San Luis de Las Condes, equipped with domestic objects designed by the INTEC group.
.
VIEXPO 74 is named after an international exhibition of housing and urbanism held for the first time in Chile, in September 1972 (VIEXPO 72) in order to show projects and advances in this regard. VIEXPO 73 could not been held for aforementioned reasons.
VIEXPO 74 is retrofuturism. A retrofuturism that asks a question: Can a utopia, give us the opportunity to dream of an unfinished past?
Leonardo Portus
