The player as ball, the ball as field /

Manuel Casanueva and The Tournaments

An exhibition organized by Felipe Mujica

 

February - April 2015

 

NuMu is proud to present for the first time in Guatemala photographic and video documentation of Los Torneos (the tournaments): Extremely playful corporal and spatial exercises developed by Manuel Casanueva, with colleagues and students between 1972 and 1992 at the Catholic University of Valparaíso, in Chile. Founded in 1952 and still active, it is also known as the Escuela de Valparíso or simply the La Escuela. Since it's founding it proposed a unique philosophy in which the teaching and learning as well as the praxis and living of architecture where approached through its integration with the arts and poetry, where more than building the focus was on how spaces could be “inhabited.”

The tournaments were celebratory events that emerged from the course “Cultura del cuerpo” (Culture of the body), a mandatory physical education workshop. The tournaments consisted on creating and realizing different exercises, where the concept and structure of each “game”—field, teams, rules, props—were utilized to produce different kinds of corporal and spatial interactions that emphasized collectivity, chance, and improvisation. Contextually it is important to emphasize that the tournaments were enacted under the guaranties of academic research. However, it happened during a period in Chile in which public space, as well as the private and academic ones, where rigidly controlled by Pinochet’s authoritarian dictatorship.

Images of young men and women joyfully playing and exploring the relationship between their bodies and space were captured in photographs and videos. Thanks to this documentation we can, to some extent, relive the colorful and poetic formal experimentation of the tournaments.

This exhibition will be accompanied by the presentation of the book Jugador como pelota, pelota como cancha (The Player as Ball, The Ball as Field), which was originally conceived during conversations with María Berríos and Paola Santoscoy, and was published in late 2014 as a closing project for my solo exhibition Arriba como ramas que un mismo viento mueve (Up Above Like Branches Moved by a Common Wind) at the Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City. The book both pays homage to Manuel Casanueva and all the people who contributed to the creation and development of the tournaments, and introduces his work to an international public by providing an English translation of Casanueva’s descriptions of the tournaments. It is difficult to fully grasp a history that is so local and so specific, narrated and remembered from such a personal perspective. This book wishes to finally diffuse knowledge of the tournaments outside of Chile—to send them leaping over the cordillera and the ocean, so high and vast.

We would like to thank the continuous support of Paola Santoscoy and the Museo Experimental El Eco, México City, as well as the generosity and openness of the Archivo Histórico José Vial Armstrong, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. Also, would like to thank Hugo Quinto, Juan Pablo Lojo, TEOR/éTica and Los Amigos del NuMu for their generous support in making this exhibition, and its accompanying publication, possible. Last but not least, profound thanks to Olivia Casanueva and family, for their trust and great enthusiasm.

Felipe Mujica