The Doors of Remembrance: Concepción (Chile)

Abstract

Concepción appears as a new city with few traces of its past, written by episodes of earthquake aftershocks. The Chilean city always appears as a new setting, with few allusions to a tormented past that rhymes with collective overcoming. Nevertheless, the doors and hallways of the houses represent a declared exception, anonymous to the distracted passer-by. This article is one of the results of a scientific investigation, from the perspective of cultural geography and vernacular architecture, carried out, on the basis, of an urban ethnographic work. The interest is theoretical on a local scale, in the recovery of the Mapuche’s urban tradition, as well as on a more general scale, on the revaluation of the transmission of a vernacular heritage, as a form of collective resilience in the face of natural disasters. The custom of maintaining or recovering the doors of the houses over time is not only a fact that obeys a functionality, but it also contains an intentional testimony, with a meaning. Behind the conservation of the original door, there is the search for continuity, the feat of making visible a presence and an identity of one's own, worked out by overcoming. The door is the symbol, as we will see, of the permanence and collective transmission of an identity and at the same time a testimony of the reunion with the rich cultural past of rural, European and Mapuche’s roots.