Crossways. The Bridge as a Readymade.

“The bridge is a work of art and symbol; it is a pragmatic and concrete illustration of nature transitioning into culture”. Marc Augé, The Symbolism of the Border, 2004. “Here is a thing that I call art, but I didn’t even make it myself.” As we know, "art," etymologically speaking, means “to hand make.” Interview with Marcel Duchamp by George Heard Hamilton about the Readymade. 1959 “Appropriation itself implies time (or times), rhythm (or rhythms), symbols and a practice ” . Henri Lefebvre, the Production of Space. 1991 Benjamin Vicuña Mackenna, the writer, historian, presidential candidate, Francophile Mayor and Father of Santiago’s late 19 th  Century modernisation, proposed the canal as a key in making this capital city the “Paris of South America”. This imagined project of nature as culture was realised a decade after his death .  “The idea of the border is fundamentally ambiguous. It refers to both obstacle (we speak of natural borders, su...

Historical/cultural context (01/03/20) Puente Vicente Huidobro was one of 6 metal bridges made for the canalized Mapocho by the French engineering company Schneider-Creusot (a steel mill and arms manufacturer).   Vicente Huidobro Garcia was a Chilean avant guard poet and writer who collaborated with Apollinaire in France in the founding of a literary movement called Creationsim. The bridge was better known, from at least the early 20 th C, as Puente Pio Nono, named after Pope Pius IX, but it is not where it used to be. It was built, along with 5 others, in France and shipped to Santiago and assemble on site. Its double curved arches, that mirror the canal’s causeway, are known in its original position and the public imaginary through a post-impressionist painting from the 1920s and photographs (Image 9) including those of the 1980s flooding canal that reached and breached its banks and the base of this bridge with waves crashing over both.   Until 1986 this poetic crossi...

Historical/cultural context (01/03/20) Puente Loreto originally bridged la Chimba (to the true north) with Las Cañadas (to the true south) of the Mapocho River at the Museo Bellas Artes that was built in 1905 as part of the plan for South America’s Paris around the centenary of   Chilean Independence. It was from this metal bridge, on September 11, 1973, that tanks fired on the museum believing it was held up with resistance fighters supporting the Allende government deposed earlier that day. The only injury from the attack on the museum was a bullet wound to the shoulder of a portrait,   “Retrato de mi hermana” (Portrait of my Sister) painted by Francisco Javier Mandiola (1820-1900) that was hanging on a wall in the line of fire. The bridge was moved during the Dictatorship, next to its twin, Puente de la Purisima. 300 meters east up the river. Loreto was replaced with a wider retro-classical bridge built at the height of the Cold War for the growing   automobile ...

Historical/cultural context (01/03/20) Puente (Bridge) Los Carros was named after the wooden carts and the replacing electric trams that crossed a wooden bridge built in 1870 that was similar in form to the current metal one. Located as a continuation of calle 21 de Mayo, whose date is from the year 1879 that marks the Battle of Iquique in the asymmetrical Pacific War that Chile won as the underdog, taking sea access from Bolivia, and territory from Peru up to Lima that was partially returned. Los Carros is imagined the only bridge of the canalised Mapocho that spans the pre and post modernisation of Santiago – a transitional bridge of the historical to the modern capital city and its national territory before and after the Pacific War. Like Grandpa’s axe, or Theseus’s ship, the bridge’s material form has been completely replaced over time, yet it has an identity in the public imaginary as being the same bridge.   It is in the same location but of a shorter span – axe beco...