Navarrete Sitja’s starting point is the current architectural construction of an inner chapel named “Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles”  (Our Lady of the Angels) in the Catalunya Park (previous named Comunal Park), at Rancagua City in Chile. The building of the chapel in this park will be the first religious monument by the Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí build outside Spain and will be a replica of a inner chapel of the famous “Sagrada Familia”church in Barcelona. 

The artist is particularly interested in this discourse surrounding its construction. Which claims to be a “symbolic recovery of forgiveness”; and a presumed “symbol of poverty” and “austerity” that expects to “complete a global trajectory of brotherhood between Chile/America and Spain”. A gesture of “recognition of the American culture”. These are “symbolic, material and ideological” understandings of an architectural landmark spread through colonial logics that are inherent of Financial capital and its ways of organizing life and territories.

By working with graphics, sound archives as visual narrative from both grounded as poetical analysis the ideological meanings assigned to the matter. It will show the symbolic connections that are going to be “normalized” and “fixed” in the surface of the chapel, but also the context that it will be placed in. Transforming  materials as press images, videos, 3d models, sound landscapes and fragments of interviews with historians, geographers, philosophers, anthropologists, architects and other citizens from Chile into a video essay that clarifies that context that the chapel will be placed.

This project was developed during a residency as part of a Summer Sessions residency at V2_.