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Abstract
This essay offers the first graphic arguments as a prologue to identify a “weak”: a neologism proposed to classify a moment in the Biobío River delta that the authors see as the architectural antithesis to the military fortifications that have historically categorized this body of water as a border, a word that has been rooted in the Chilean colonial national imaginary fundamental to our identity. Methodologically, the authors use graphics to explore the possibilities of a photographic disarticulation of this space, and the creation of alternative imaginaries with the aid of artificial intelligence, giving way to a new “misty” artifact that positions itself against the projective arguments of the established architectural narrative.
Acknowledgements
The research for this essay was derived from a final thesis developed in the Latin American Architecture Masters program at the Faculty of Architecture of the Universidad del Bío-Bío (Chile). Patricio Ortega recognizes with gratitude Claudio Araneda Gutiérrez (UBB) and Fernando Luiz Lara (UT Austin), his tutors, for their support in the search of the misty ideas here outlined.
Notes
1 Fernando Luiz Lara, “Invisible Treasures: How the Occupation of America in the Sixteenth Century Influenced the Emergence of Architecture as a Discipline,” ARQ (Santiago) 110 (2022): 28–35, https://doi.org/10.4067/S0717-69962022000100028.
2 Santiago Castro-Gómez and Ramón Grosfoguel, “Prologue: Decolonial Turn, Critical Theory and Heterarchical Thought,” in The Decolonial Turn: Reflections on Epistemic Diversity Beyond Global Capitalism (Bogotá, D.C.: Siglo del Hombre Editores, 2007).
3 Carole L. Crumley, “Heterarchy and the Analysis of Complex Societies,” Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 6 (1995): 1–5, https://doi.org/10.1525/ap3a.1995.6.1.1.
4 While the concept of “weak” as a direct antonym of “strong” is grammatically and conceptually understandable in Spanish, it may not be so in other languages. For these cases, it is important to emphasize that the etymology of fort comes from the Latin adjective fortis, which can mean “strong,” “brave,” “resistant,” “fixed,” or “well placed.”
5 Walter Mignolo, “Revising the Rules of the Game: A Conversation with Pablo Iglesias Turrion, Jesús Espasadín López and Iñigo Errejón Galván,” Tabula Rasa 8 (2008): 321–34.
6 José Bengoa, History of the Ancient Mapuche of the South: From Before the Arrival of the Spaniards to the Peace of Quilín: 16th and 17th Centuries (Santiago, Chile: Catalonia Ltda. 2003).
7 Claudio Valdovinos and Oscar Parra, “The Biobío River Basin: Natural History of a Multiple-Use Ecosystem” (EULA Center Publications, 2016); Susana Riquelme, Magaly Mella, Osvaldo Pino, Rodrigo Ganter, Andrea Santelices, Ariel Yevenes, Alejandra Brito, Sergio Moffat, Rafael Galdames, Pi. Krag, and Eduardo Bascuñan, “Identity and Identities in the Biobío Region,” Estudios Regionales 34 (2011); Armando Cartes and Boris Márquez, Biobío: Regional Historical Bibliography (Santiago, Chile: Dibam, 2014); Luis Eduardo Toloza, “The Walls of the Fort of Nacimiento: The Construction of an Eighteenth-century Defensive Enclave in the Biobío Frontier,” in Proceedings of the Eleventh National Congress of Construction History, October 9–12, 2019 (Madrid: Instituto Juan de Herrera, Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid), 1081–90; Armando Cartes and Violeta Montero, “El Bio Bio, reconfiguración espacial de una región histórica,” in Tiempo Histórico 21 (2021), https://doi.org/10.25074/th.v0i21.1915.
8 Riquelme et al., “Identity and Identities.”
9 Alejandro Mihovilovich and Marlenne Fuentealba, The Streets of Concepción (S.I.: Ediciones del Archivo Histórico de Concepción), 2022.
10 Bengoa, History of the Ancient Mapuche.
11 Andrew Herscher and Ana María León, “At the Border of Decolonization,” in ARQ (Santiago) 110 (2022): 114–21, https://doi.org/10.4067/S0717-69962022000100114.
12 (Dussel, 2009): what is the source?
13 Francisco Albizú Labbé, “Chilean Indians: Between the River, Fiction and the Nation,” Babel 19 (2009): 93–120, https://doi.org/10.4000/babel.242.
14 Bengoa, History of the Ancient Mapuche.
15 This idea of center and edge can be associated to that described by Jaime Garretón his A Cybernetic Theory of the City and its System (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Nueva Visión, 1975). Garretón states that “(…) the notion of square indicates a central place of more general activities. The city in its expansion is organized around it and increases in a radial sense. But while this expansion takes place, the impossibility of defining how far it should go appears. Also, its most characteristic uses are ordered around and on the margins of it, to weaken progressively as it distances itself.”
16 Pedro Andrade, Joaquin Dalenz, Alexis López-Concha, Katherine Fonseca-Aravena, Alexandra Pacheco-León, Sebastián Santana, Marlene Martínez, Lía Leyton-Cataldo, and Valentina Hunter, “Of exiles and outcasts: bioarchaeological reconstruction of the population from the colonial mission of San José de la Mocha, Concepción, Chile (17th to 19th century),” Chungará (Arica) 52:1 (2020): 57–75, https://doi.org/10.4067/S0717-73562020005000502.
17 Toloza, “The Walls of the Fort of Nacimiento, 1081–1090.
18 (Falleto 1999) What is the source?
19 For the Mapuche people, and according to their stories from generation to generation, the conquest was and still is perceived as the origin of the calamities that befall the people. Bengoa, History of the Ancient Mapuche.
20 (Falleto 1999) What is the source?
21 Andrade et al., “Of Outcasts and Marginals.”
22 In the face of Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum,” Lacan emphasizes the necessity of identification, of establishing a distinction between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciation.
23 Originally “The world we want is one where many worlds fit,” is a phrase from the fourth declaration of the Lacandon Jungle written by the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Clandestine Committee–General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, Mexico, January 1996.
24 William James, A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green, 1909).
25 Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566) was a Dominican friar, theologian, priest, and Spanish bishop who published texts such as “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies” (1552) in which he denounced the effects that the colonization by the Spaniards in the Americas had on the Latin American Indians, being officially named the first “protector of the Indians.”
26 An anthropological review of our Latin American assumptions and the relationship we have with the first Indigenous inhabitants of these lands, understood as colonized natural peoples, allows us to conceive what Viveiros de Castro indicates in his book Metafísicas Caníbales: “Only we, Europeans, are complete humans, or if you prefer, grandiosely incomplete, the millionaires in worlds, the accumulators of worlds, the “configurators of worlds.”” In the European adjective of the above quote, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Brazilian anthropologist, adds a footnote indicating “I include myself here out of courtesy.” Because yes, we all include ourselves there out of courtesy; we are the product of an encounter between an “old” and a “new” world, children of the invader who appeared first to create us and then to advise us, to teach us how to be-there in the colonial/modern world-system. Silently and unknowingly, we identify ourselves as Europeans born in a distant land who long to return to the roots of their fathers.
27 Celso Moreno Laval, “Latin America and the Pacific Basin: A Chilean View,” Estudios Internacionales 24:95 (1991): 368–83.
28 Osamu Nishitani, “Anthropos and Humanitas: Two Western Concepts of ‘Human Being’,” in Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference, ed. Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon, trans. Trent Maxey (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006), 259–74.
29 Walter Mignolo, Inhabiting the Border: Feeling and Thinking Decoloniality (Anthology, 1999–2014). 2015. Editors could not find this source. Please cite source (book? article? Publisher?)
30 Walter Mignolo, “Revising the Rules of the Game: A Conversation with Pablo Iglesias Turrion, Jesús Espasadín López and Iñigo Errejón Galván,” Tabula Rasa 8 (2008): 321–34.
31 Mignolo, “Revising the Rules.”
32 Mignolo, “Revising the Rules.”
33 Mignolo, “Revising the Rules.”
34 Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel, “Prologue: Decolonial Turn.”
35 The work of semantic segmentation and identification of archetypal realms is part of a work method previously carried out by Dr. Claudio Araneda, researcher and guide of this thesis, with whom the author of this research collaborates.
36 According to the RAE, “pertaining or relating to man.” In this case, the term humanal is associated with the work of Chilean architect Juan Borchers, as seen in his studies on Juan de Herrera and Raimundo Lulio. Please identify what RAE is.
37 In simple words and according to the RAE (1992), AI is “the scientific discipline that deals with the creation of computer programs that perform operations comparable to those performed by the human mind, such as learning or logical reasoning.”.Please identify what RAE is.
38 The prompts used were “old photo of mapuches living in the biobio river”; “old photo of mapuches living in the biobio river before the colonization”; “old photo of the biobio river before the spanish colonization of the americas”; “drawing of mapuches living in the biobio river”; and “old photo of the mouth of the biobio river concepcion chile.”
39 The denomination from an antonym arises as a strategy to give space to opposite terms that exist in the same grammatical category, in this case associated with the origin of architecture. At the same time, it should be considered that the grammatical exercise in this case seeks to understand these antonyms as reciprocal: the “weak” claims its existence because of the existence of the “strong,” without the intention that the other disappears (which would be the case of complementary antonyms).
40 Today’s conventional construction is understood as heir to a series of construction treatises related to military engineering, such as El Architecto Perfecto en el Arte Militar, divided into five books by Sebastián Fernández de Medrano (1735).
41 Daniel Belmar called Concepción “Ciudad Brumosa” (Misty City) in 1950, a description available to anyone who has been in the penquista territory and more than once has experienced being embraced by a fog that announces the presence of the Biobío without necessarily indicating its direction.
42 Mignolo, “Revising the Rules.”
43 The concept “decolonial turn” was initially developed by Nelson Maldonado-Torres in 2006 in the publication “Césaire’s Gift and the Decolonial Turn,” published in Radical Philosophy Review. Later it would be used in different publications, among them Castro-Gómez and Ramón Grosfoguel, Prologue: Decolonial Turn.”
44 Claudio Araneda, “Concerning the Architect’s Objective and His Object of Study: A Necessary Basal Distinction for the Cultivation of a Properly Architectonic Academy,” AUS [Architecture / Urbanism / Sustainability] 25 (January 2019): 47–52, https://doi.org/10.4206/aus.2019.n25-08.
45 (Sousa Santo, 2003, in Farrés and Matarán, 2014) What is the Sousa Santo source? Need more details.
46 Yasser Farrés Delgado and Alberto Matarán Ruiz, “Towards an Urban Transmodern and Decolonial Theory: An Introduction,” in Polis (Santiago) 13:37 (2014): 339–61, https://doi.org/10.4067/S0718-65682014000100019.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Patricio Ortega
Patricio Ortega has a BA in Architecture (2016) and an MSc in Architecture, (2023) both from Bío-Bío University. Ortega teaches at San Sebastián University (Concepción) and Bío-Bío University in courses related to design and architectural graphics. Independently he is part of Estudio Invasivo, a collective that has given space to theoretical explorations located in the city of Concepción.
Claudio Araneda
Claudio Araneda has a BA in Architecture (1997) from Bío-Bío University and a PhD (2008) from the Architectural Association, School of Architecture. Araneda served as an ANID postdoctoral researcher 2008–2011. He has been a visiting teacher at the Architectural Association, London, England (2000), is a Chevening Scholar (2001) and was director of the Masters Program in Project Didactics 2009–2013 at Bío-Bío University, where he currently teaches and develops research work.