León Duval — Spatial Possibilities

The research Bicianimitas. Disposiciones para un nuevo monumento urbano is a project developed as my master ́s thesis in American Aesthetics that I pursued at the Philosophy Faculty of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile between 2018 and 2020, and directed by the professor Dr. Claudia Lira Latuz. This final thesis was approved with maximum distinction by the department and the review committee integrated by Dr. Ángel Álvarez and Dr. Ronald Harris, and chaired by Dr. Patricia Espinoza. 

This piece of work is focused on the possibility of public space devices developed by the community and popular culture to interpret the urban pulse and the complex cultural relationships in the built environment. In this particular case, in the city of Santiago de Chile. 

My purpose was to investigate how different types of cultural and political devices can interpret and translate the dialectics coexisting in the contemporary city. Dialectic cases of hegemony and subalternity, official and subterranean culture expressions, western and oriental approaches, and global and local influences. With a special interest in the subaltern production along with its images and worldviews. 

With this thesis I concluded that the Bicianimitas are a new type of counter-monument originated in the city from different hybrid cases of Latin American popular religion practices and Anglo-Saxon civic, artistic and political practices. That sustains and represents citizen discourses. 

This investigation has driven me to write two follow up articles, one for the Critic-All 2021, realized in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and another for the Chilean website Lofscapes, about the role that landscape as well as artistic references has played in the production of the Bicianimita.