In the early 1970s, Chile’s Unidad Popular government began to build the Ochagavía hospital in a working class neighborhood of Santiago. It was to be a showcase of the Chilean road to Socialism, the largest and best-equipped hospital in South America, but it was still unfinished when Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup d’état stopped the project in its tracks. Thereafter, the structure decayed, but was never put to any other use. This ruin, then, is less a fragment of a past totality than the reminder of a promise of democratic “popular unity” foreclosed with brutal suddenness.
Questions: The main questions of this research are then: What is the political history of the ruination of the Hospital Ochagavia and how did the building became a ruin? If Santiago de Chile can be recognized as an example of a city and a social milieu aligning with neoliberal policies, how do the tensions around this process become apparent in the contemporary relation of the people of the city with the hospital? Does this decaying building have any specific role in the shaping of that part of Santiago’s suburbs?
Stages of Research and Methodology:
Stage I: Archival and bibliographic research on the history of the making and abandonment of thebuilding. If possible we will search for people involved in the construction to get an insight of the resonances of the interruption of the building. We will investigate the various plans to develop and re-use the building, as well as talking to the various artists (Pedro Lemebel, Lotty Rosenfeld, and others) who have used the building as a site of performance art.
Stage II: Participant observation of the interaction of neighbors with the building and different uses the building may have. We will interview people who either have a daily relation with the building because they live or work nearby. We will propose “tours,” asking people to take us round the ruins and we will record the narratives that the building triggers in them. We will film and make photographs during these interventions, as we ask our “guides” to share their observation over the building.
Stage III: Collectively, we will organize and analyze of the three main forms of information produced: archival documents, interviews, and visual depiction. We will seek to answer our research questions and also to engage in a debate over the methodological possibilities of ethnography and cultural studies.
Lines of analysis:
Ruins and modernity.
(Post) Dictatorship, memory and performance.
Space and the city.
Result: Our research output will be a co-authored paper to be presented first at the Latin American Studies Association Congress, and then sent for publication to peer-reviewed journal in the field.
