Seeing-in-Place: Visual Culture, Urban Design, and Political Conflict in Twentieth-Century Chile

This paper examines the relationship between the urban landscape, material and visual culture, and political change in twentieth-century Chile. It is founded on a historical understanding of seeing as a social and political, rather than natural or common-sense act. Throughout, I argue that sight must be studied in relation to the context and place of its practice – that seeing happens, and must be analyzed in relation to the particularities of place. In broad terms, I look at the process by which Santiago is built as a modern (and then post-modern) city, and contend that this process is intimately tied to a series of overlapping hegemonic and counter-hegemonic 'scopic regimes' and 'ways of seeing.' More specifically, I focus this presentation around the particular intersection between material culture, the urban landscape, and the practice of seeing (and being seen) in Allende's Chile. The case study I have chosen centers, in part, on the Frei-Allende era projects to re-design Santiago's downtown core, and in particular, the modernist building constructed for the Third United Nations Congress on Trade and Development (UNCTAD III) which I examine in terms of politics, gender and class discourse. I study this as a key instance in the transformation of public space into an arena of political debate open to groups that had been historically excluded from national politics and political citizenship. I conclude the presentation by discussing the military dictatorship as an attempt to re-define the relationship between politics and the public sphere, ultimately in relation to neo-liberal models of citizenship and consumption. In short, this is a study of the public sphere as political space that can be fruitfully analyzed as it is created in relation to vision and visuality.