Centro Cultural Palacio La Moneda

Inaugurated in 2006 by ex-president Ricardo Lagos, the Centro Cultural Palacio La Moneda is a contemporary art museum located partly underneath the national governmental palace and the Plaza de la Ciudadanía; that offers the Chilean public access to the often exclusive palace as well as the promotion of the understanding and appreciation of national and international heritage though visual/audiovisual means.

After a day and night of exhausting rain, we awoke to a fresh fall of snow atop the nearby Andes Mountains. As the sun finally made an appearance, we headed into centro to visit the “Arte en América” exhibition at this mysterious museum I had been intending to check out.

For $1000 pesos ($2.50) we were able to see an array of modern and contemporary pieces dating from the 20^th century, some of which seemed extremely avant-garde for their time. An American artist created each of the 200 pieces, ie. an individual from the Americas (North America, South American and the Caribbean), from the collection belonging to the ‘Banco Interaméricano de Desarrollo’ and ‘La Organización de los Estados Americanos’.

Each artist instilled in his artwork a sense of his country’s identity, whether they faced dictatorships (Venezuela), communism (Cuba), slavery (El Salvador), poverty (Brazil) or even the fight for women’s rights (Chile). Each country seemed to be represented, from Mexico to the Honduras to Argentina and the USA.

The purpose of the exhibition was to reinforce the ‘American identity’ so that a common thread could string people together to achieve a better coexistence between neighbours within a neighbourhood and within each continent. Chile alone has 285 thousand immigrants; one quarter of them originating from Peru.

I picked up a few interesting facts from the exhibition’s brochure like that women are the household bosses in 31.5% of Chilean family homes, meaning that these women are the principal support for their family. Studies have shown that in the rest of Latin America, these kinds of households have better chances of surviving poverty.

Also, did you know that in Latin America and the Caribbean 47 million hectors of forest are destroyed each year? That’s more than half the entire territory of Chile!

The exhibition was an interesting insight into the Latino art heritage, especially as I had previously only been exposed to US art history at school. Afterwards, we ventured through centro and settled for lunch as a very cute café, canopied by trees in a very quiet city-centre street. We had a delicious organic menú del día followed by a tasty coffee. As we sat out the front in the Parisian-like patio, I couldn’t help but feel that the café was the perfect follow-up to a very cultural morning.

Now it is time for you to reflect on the question: what are you doing to promote equality in your community?