BAUHAUS 100, el manifiesto se manifiesta

To commemorate the 100 years since the creation of the Bauhaus, the Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago de Chile (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes) commissioned an installation to celebrate its century for their main hall.

The proposal consisted of a participatory installation in which the ideology of the Bauhaus “took over” the museum. Through a large canvas that took possession of the balconies into the main hall and an infinite number of curated pamphlets, the visitor was invited to revisit the “Bauhaus spirit” one hundred years after its conception.

The installation was activated through the very medium that started it all: the Bauhaus Manifesto, written by Walter Gropius when he founded the school. On a 50 meter long canvas , an extract of one hundred letters (in Spanish) taken from the manifesto, takes over the main hall calling for new possibilities from the past to rethinking our future: “LET US CREATE A NEW STRUCTURE FOR THE FUTURE THAT WILL UNITE EVERY DISCIPLINE: architecture, sculpture and painting”.

The original manifesto was printed in a pamphlet that in 1919 had circulated in the press, by mail and passed from hand to hand. This same format is the one that gives body to the installation, here multiplied a hundred times and repeated indefinitely. One hundred piles of pamphlets organized around concepts / works / protagonists / practices were arranged in a linear sequence to be presented as an open archive to the visitor, inviting him / her to interact, manipulate and take possession of the printed matter that generates his / her interest. The first fifty stacks of pamphlets focus on the fourteen years of the school’s existence in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin (1919- 1933); the next fifty explore how, after its closure, Bauhaus ideas traveled and expanded, transformed, dialogued and adapted to the new realities they encountered.

The self curatorship presented, supported by the research of the historian Sylvia Dümmer, moved away from a closed and encyclopaedic overview of the Bauhaus cliché to propose an open approach, made up of fragments and allusions that coexisted without a fixed order, as in a kaleidoscope. The aim was to generate a critical reflection on the complexity and transmutations of the Bauhaus ideology and to infect visitors with its modernising force, encouraging a new discussion about the present and an effort to rethink the future in which we want to live.