VIRTUAL Barcelona

Abstract

View film

La Chimba is one of the oldest neighbourhoods in Santiago de Chile, Chimba in quechua language means “across the river”. A place that has been condemned since the Spanish conquest, for from its beginnings it was destined to house everything that was not considered civilized. This is how it was used for the habitation of the native Indians, later as a place of revelry. From then on, this neighbourhood, started to harbor all the architectural places that were consider unfit for a civilized society, for instance: hospitals, cemeteries, asylums, madhouses, informal markets, and some very hermetic places such as female convents. More contemporary has been the preferent location of what we can called a red-light district. Most of them are what Foucault defines as heterotopias, and many of them have remained as such for centuries. It is this condition that has turned this district into a source of a rich imaginary that has fed literature and cinema in recent centuries. And it is precisely from one of its greatest literary products that we want to analyse the whole neighbourhood of La Chimba: José Donoso’s Obscene Bird of Night. Our hypothetical assumption is that the book is a sort of synthesis of La Chimba, since the chronotopic spaces described by Donoso are but a mirror of what exists in the neighbourhood itself. On the other hand, the characters who inhabit these literary spaces are nothing more than a representation of the beings who continue to inhabit the hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, asylums, and brothels of the same district. The architectural and imaginary value of this neighbourhood lies in the fact that it is a space that has resisted modernity, it is a kind of counter-modernity, which is why it corresponds to a pre-capitalist urban order, spaces that are extinct in most of our cities and which needs to be preserved.