The pampa is seen from within
Text by Leandro Martínez Depietri

While the decorative arts have been dominated by nature motifs, allegories in bodies of stylized female figures, mythological tales and gallant scenes, Baggio’s work takes a set of tools as an ornamental element. They are a replica, on a real scale, of those he used for the construction of a mud house in the Pampas plains, a performance in which he learned this arduous task. It thus reverses the values of traditional ornamentation by focusing the attention on manual work over iconography associated with leisure and scholarly culture of the wealthy classes. Its location in the antechamber of the palace bursts into the story of the objects bequeathed by the Errázuriz Alvear family, its former owners, and whose portraits it opposes. If the title affirms a change of perspective on the field, its placement in the exhibition operates as a memory of the inequality that made the exuberance of this architecture possible. It interrogates, in a critical way, the public patrimony from the plebeian seduction of its forms.