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GALERIA
METROPOLITANA (METROPOLITAN GALLERY)
Felix Mendelssohn 2941
Santiago de Chile
Phone-fax: (56-2) 563 0506
metropolitana@mail.com
Ana Maria Saavedra and Luis Alarcon
DEFINITION:
It is a private contemporary art exhibition space, which is also meant
to disseminate it. It is located in the periphery of Santiago de Chile.
It is responsive to the purpose of making a certain social sector
participate in the new art manifestations which have usually been
kept aside from them.
PLACE: the gallery is set up in a metal hangar. Its dimensions are:
12.5 m length by 6.5 m width and 4 m height.
The building is like an extension of the house, reproducing the typical
doing of the popular sector: to add new rooms to the house and rearrange
them so as to have enough space to open up a shop or a parlor (e.g.:
hairdresser’s, china shops, workshops, etc) but in this case
it is an art gallery.
The place where the art gallery is located belongs to the popular
community- Pedro Aguirre Cerda- industrial neighborhood and it is
the area where workers, technicians, employees, and small merchants
live.
PROGRAM: the Metropolitan Gallery functions under a working program
that could be described, hypothetically speaking, like constantly
experimental, this is totally conditioned due to the blurred boundaries
between the house-bedroom and the art gallery.
Both spaces are placed within the same premises and they share a window-door-wall
that, at the same time, it is a boundary as well as common ground.
The gallery does not have any external support and its working depends
almost exclusively upon the shared self-management capacities between
its directors and the convened artists.
A topic is introduced by the neighborhood and its diversions necessarily
force the work and the artist to think about the relations between
private and public space (everyday life and art).
CENTER-PERIPHERY RELATION: the critical operation that the Gallery
undergoes by being named as it is, consists of an attempt of building
itself as a center and in this way, it would displace the spatial
orders that force the periphery to keep its confinement. Its critical-parodical
activity tightens the idea between local and global from a misplaced
center.
RECONSTRUCTION OF THE ART GALLERY CONCEPT: the gallery carries out
a revision task as well as a critical dismantling and a enlargement
of the cultural hierarchal systems (social class/social art, higher
culture/popular culture)
and questioning both the art institutions and their strategies (universities,
museums, cultural institutionalism, the gallery circuit, market, etc)
as well as the popular-people’s culture.
METROPOLITAN GALLERY
-A research and experimentation space
-An intermediary between art and community
-It is an autonomous and self-reflection space that works with Art
History and the history of the neighborhood.
-METROPOLITAN GALLERY is a seized ground.
The directors of the Metropolitan Gallery are:
-Luis Enrique Alarcun, he holds a PhD in Art History Theory (University
of Chile). Post-graduate studies in Social Sciences Mastery and a
degree in Cultural Criticism (both from ARCIS University). Today,
he works as a cultural producer for the magazine Cultural Criticism
and in the area of Visual Arts- Cultural Division- Mineduc.
-Ana Maria Saavedra, Spanish Professor (University of Concepcion).Post-graduate
studies in Literature Mastery (University of Chile). Today, she works
as a Cultural producer for the magazine Cultural Criticism. |