The Playthings of Plaza Brasil by Federica Matta

Santiago, Chile, 1993

Sebastián de la Fuente Cienfuegos

The playthings of Plaza Brasil by artist Federica Matta were conceived a year after Chile’s return to democracy (1991). The country had undergone 17 years of civil-military dictatorship, a period marked by fear, loss of freedom and democracy, political persecution and death. Reclaiming public space for communities was the response she devised as a poetic-political argument for a country that was beginning to recover democracy. It is no coincidence that Federica considers this work to be the embryo of a model of urban intervention for the setup of 1,000 Plaza Brasil squares in Chile, as a hint to the 1,000 days of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government.

The conception, design, and construction of the project took two years, progressing from drawings to models; from architectural plans to the execution of the work; and it was finally inaugurated on the 4th of November 1993. The initiative was promoted by the Municipality of Santiago and developed by a team of professionals from the Department of Projects’ Constructions Division. In 2018, structural form and paint restoration took place, and in 2023, the playthings’ 30-year history was celebrated with a public exhibition organised by the Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana (UTEM) along with social and cultural organisations from the neighbourhood. 

Plaza Brasil is located in the western neighbourhood of the municipality of Santiago, which is notable for the high heritage value of its parks, squares and buildings, as well as for its historical and cultural significance. It was inaugurated on the 20th of January 1902, on a site near the García Cáceres valley. It was named Plaza Brasil because of its proximity to the Brazilian legation located on the corner of Compañía de Jesús and Maturana streets. Beginning in 1940, there was a slow migration of the Santiago aristocracy to the eastern sector of the capital, spawning a gradual atmosphere of abandonment and deterioration. After the 1985 earthquake, some buildings were repaired and rebuilt, which led to the revitalisation of the neighbourhood. Currently, Plaza Brasil is part of the typical zone and has more than two hundred tree species, including lime trees, elms, peumos, Canary Island palms, quillayes, cedars, horse chestnuts, magnolias and jacarandas, among others. 

Play as a place; imagination as a journey; poetry as the only weapon; attention as collective consciousness; art as education and connection with the invisible; and urban acupuncture as a regenerative design tactic. These are some of the arguments that motivate her strategies, expressed through drawing, painting, sculpture, posters and writing. The artist’s inner world forges links with the worldview of indigenous people, ecology, Eastern spirituality, and the expansive energies of the cosmos and the universe. Thus, for example, in Plaza Brasil, the Andes mountain range, the Antarctic ice, the volcano, the temple, dice, flowers, trees, birds, and moai (Easter Island heads) become slides, ladders, swings, seats, or mythological heads in a set of sculptural-playthings in which the dynamism of the forms and the chromatic and expressive strength of the components are highlighted, radiating an expanded wave. 

Each time I go and look at the places I talk to people and spiritually set down in a city, and I see invisible things, and I examine the important places, and I draw them as an imaginary map of the things that I see. People recognise their things which are also imaginary things […] The action over the city changes the existence conditions of its inhabitants. An acupuncture of fine touches that restore urban rhythms connected to biological rhythms (Federica Matta).

Plaza Brasil’s sculptural-playthings invite visitors to rediscover Chile’s geographical map. As in Thomas Mann’s novel, Santa Lucía Hill becomes a “magic mountain”, in the same way as the rocky terrain of Huelén Hill was transformed into a park for the city at the end of the 19th century. The same is true regarding the ‘iceberg’, whose presence stands as a symbol of the importance of water conservation in the face of a possible geopolitical dispute over the planet’s largest freshwater reserve; or the ‘volcano,’ a telluric force that shapes the Chilean character; or the ‘Andes mountain range’, the presence of “an insistent matter, a familiar creature and an original matriarch” in the words of Gabriela Mistral; or the ’temple,‘ the ancestry of our people; or the ’bird swing‘, a reference to The Conference of the Birds by the Persian poet Fariduddin Attar; or still the ‘dice of the universe’, the creative and original game of the Gods. Unfortunately, some pieces were left unbuilt: trampolines, a wall with reliefs and some moai.

Thus, Plaza Brasil becomes a geographical symbol in which the quaternary water, earth, fire and air stage the fragility of planet Earth, converting the game into a field of resistance where public art has a community reflexive function:

while through it—and by virtue of it—the community periodically starts gathering again, starts converging again on everything that could be important to a shared experience […] and while around it, institutions through which citizens maintain direct or indirect permanent exchange with their fellow citizens arise (Humberto Giannini, 1987).

Metaphorically recovering the meaning of the Athenian agora that gave birth to democracy. But, as the artist points out, these sculptural-playthings were not designed solely for the children of the Brasil neighbourhood, but for all those who, connected with their inner child, continue to keep the square alive as if taking care of a refuge and being sensitive to the presence of homeless people. Perhaps this is why, intuitively or visionarily, once the playgrounds were unveiled, Federica Matta carried out the project ‘La casa de los niños’ (The Children’s House), a place where children and artists could meet to share, eat, rest, do some schoolwork and imagine other possible squares for Chile in a poetics of the politics of play and community coexistence.