Magnolia

How a tree found its way to the middle of Chile’s National Stadium and transformed its spatiality within a week, culminating in a match around a magnolia.

Imagine a football stadium. Any football stadium you wish. As big as you like, as small as you like, as old or new, as bright or dark. All it needs is a grassy field, and somewhere to watch the pitch. Now imagine the most disruptive element you could possibly add to this stadium—what would it be? Advertising? A large animal? An army tank? Or perhaps consider: a tree. A single tree, in the middle of the field. Specifically, a ten-metre-tall magnolia, full and robust, perfectly placed at the heart of the pitch’s centre circle. The grass around remains untouched, behind the tree are the stands, the seats all turned towards it.

This was artist Sebastian Errazuriz’s disruption of choice, and in 2006, after two years of self-funding and obtaining permits, he successfully transplanted a magnolia tree to the centre of Chile’s National Stadium in Santiago. The piece lasted a week, during which the 48,000 capacity stadium was open to the public, the tree wordlessly and instantly subverting a ticketed playing field into unstinted park space for everyone. The week culminated in 20,000 people coming to watch Chile’s national football team play a game around the tree.[1]

While the tree was only physically in the stadium for a week, the photos, and even the imagined vision of a playing field with a singular tree at its centre has an eerie timelessness. Immediately disruptive in its physical manifestation, the tree at first appears as the obvious intruder on the field. How would players kick off with a tree in the way? But just as immediately, the condition flips—the tree reveals the complete absence of any other plant, bird, or insect. There is only impossibly manicured grass, branded with slicks of white paint, all of it fenced in by high concrete walls and plastic seats. It is the stadium that is the intruder. As with all that is manmade, the tree was here first. At the time of its inauguration in 1938, Chile’s National Stadium was the largest building in the capital. From an aerial view, the stadium, still in use today, looks unremarkable, and much like any other stadium around the world—the verdant green rectangle open to the air, sloping bleachers all around, coming together as an elliptical tin from the sky. But in close-up photos taken in the stadium’s early years, you can see unabashedly modernist details—aspirational circular and square apertures punching through white stucco, and a repeating line of porticoes standing tall at the main entrance, also in white stucco. The stadium was just one of a number of public works commissioned by Arturo Alessandri’s government at the time, all modernist, all monumental, a top-down signalling of national growth and success signifying a modern capital. Architect and historian Valentina Rozas-Krause writes that modernism was the perfect style for this mission, it completely fulfilled the modernist credo that public architecture should ‘consolidate a new national identity through new techniques, spaces, and aesthetics’,[2] while at the same time, Chile’s then-growing middle class was sympathetic to modern architecture for its distance from land-owning aristocracy. And yet, things were not as perfect as they seemed, even from inauguration. The stadium was in fact incomplete at the time of its opening, and even in press photos you can see unpainted raw concrete next to another wall in white stucco paint. But the stadium’s darkest days were still to come.

In 1973, the stadium became a concentration camp. Between 10,000 to 20,000 Chileans and foreigners were detained, tortured, and killed in the stadium over eight weeks by Augusto Pinochet’s military junta.[3] This came immediately following Pinochet’s coup d’état, which overthrew Salvador Allende’s government and imprisoned civilians whom the dictatorship deemed to be in opposition to the regime. The National Stadium in fact made sense as a place for the military junta to detain people en masse. It was still the capital’s largest building, wholly visible to locals who may have attended games there themselves.

To turn a place associated with recreation and collective spectacle into a place of oppression and collective horror was a psychologically strong message. The place where the 1962 FIFA World Cup finals were held was now a dreaded place to be. If a football stadium is now a concentration camp, what does that make the rule of law?

To add to the harrowing and twisted nature of such a location, the technical benefits of reappropriating a stadium into a place of detention were numerous—plentiful changing and service rooms and underground passages, ‘potential dungeons’ abound, as Rozas-Krause writes. Men were held in the locker rooms and gallery, while women were held in separate changing rooms. Other service areas were refashioned into interrogation rooms; the former velodrome became a place of torture. Detainees would be called into the stands and given a coloured disc, and those with a certain colour would be sent for interrogation, where people never fared well.[4] The press gallery and the entire field itself, surrounded by bleachers, offered Panopticon-like environs with World Cup-grade crowd-control measures built into its very design, its eight wide escotillas (large passageways underneath the stands) able to get some 76,000 people in and out during the 1962 FIFA World Cup. No less, Pinochet and other junta members would use the public address system to yell insults and orders at the detainees.

Yet, amongst the oppressive architecture of the stadium, detainees found ways to help each other survive. Within the different locker rooms and areas, detainees created a series of tight support networks. When a fellow detainee returned from torture, they would be given extra blankets, food, and cigarettes if there were any. Cards and dominoes were made from discarded popsicle sticks under the stands. Women detainees would sing to each other and to the men in separate but adjoining rooms. They also created a system where if someone were to escape, they would return and wave a white flag through a visible gate, the only way to let those inside know that they were okay. Quotes, dates, and calendars were etched into the walls with any remaining tools, a stray key for example.[5] Some of these etchings can still be seen today, in Escotilla 8, which has been preserved as a memorial space.[6]

Even on the outside, solidarity amongst Chilean citizens was forged in opposition to what the stadium walls had become. Mostly women relatives who had family members detained on the inside would gather each day, for weeks on end, barraging the stadium’s guards. They brought food, clothes, and letters for the prisoners that would sometimes make their way into the stadium through the uncommon sympathetic soldier or Red Cross nurse. Amongst these gatherings just outside the stadium walls, influential human aid groups such as The Association of the Detained-Disappeared and the Association of the Politically Executed, were fostered.[7]

In the end, it was none other than a football match that ended the National Stadium’s role as a concentration camp, but not before one final act of dictatorially branded bizarreness. It was the 1974 World Cup qualifiers, and Chile was set to play against the Soviet Union. The Soviets complained about the site, as ‘a place of blood’, and were politically opposed to Pinochet’s anti-socialist regime. FIFA inspectors were sent to investigate. Upon their arrival, most prisoners were sent to hide in the underground changing rooms, but some remained on the stands. Felipe Agüero, one of those prisoners, told David Waldstein in an interview for The New York Times that while the FIFA inspectors wandered about, ‘they seemed only interested in the condition of the grass.’[8] Indeed, the inspectors found the site perfectly fine for the match and insisted it proceed, but the Soviets still announced that they would boycott the game, which would have resulted in Chile’s automatic win.

However, Pinochet wanted a victory on his field nonetheless. Detainees of the stadium were shipped out to other prisons across the city, and on 21 November 1973, the national team returned to the stadium to play football, against absolutely no one. Dressed in their red and blue uniforms, the Chilean players passed the ball to each other in a line, finally landing the ball into an empty goal, ending perhaps the most uncanny nineteen seconds of international football ever played.

Today, the National Stadium, or what since 2008 has been called Estadio Nacional Julio Martínez Prádanos, is a place for football and concerts, but also a polling station and a place for democratic gatherings. It is the home of La Roja, Chile’s national team, and held the international Copa América in 2015. For former detainees alive today, the sight of so many cheering in a place they survived can be jarring. ‘They did unspeakable things to us there. Now it is a place for football. People have fun there’, said René Castro, one of the longest-serving prisoners in the stadium. He did not return to the stadium until 2011, when U2 was performing. On stage, he got a shout out from Bono: ‘René Castro, this is your house, too!’[9]

Errazuriz’s magnolia tree was a direct reference to the stadium’s once-dark role. The piece was titled The Tree Memorial of a Concentration Camp, which without context could strike one as odd for a tree in a football stadium. Knowing the history of the place, the solitary tree is even more potent. While site-specific, it is also universally applicable. No matter where it is, the tree asks: what came before me, how did these shiny seats get here? A tree planted in the middle of a field in Qatar would speak to a tone-deaf disregard for environmental and labour abuses; a tree planted in the abandoned half built Guangzhou FC stadium would speak to the futility of misguided profit-driven shells; a tree planted in a US stadium would nod to on-field activists taking the knee. Now imagine again, a football stadium, this time the one that’s closest to you. If a tree were to suddenly appear at its heart, what would it mean?

This text was originally published in BOM Magazine.

[1] Sebastian Errazuriz, ‘The Tree Memorial of a Concentration Camp’, Sebastian Studio (2006), https://sebastian.studio/public-the-tree-memorial-of-a-concentration-camp.

[2] Valentina Rosa-Krause, ‘Interrupted Stadium: Broken Promises of Modernity in the National Stadium of Chile’ CUNY: Shift Journal 8 (2015), 63.

[3] Zachary D. McKiernan, ‘The Public History of a Concentration Camp: Historical Tales of Tragedy and Hope at the National Stadium of Chile’, PhD thesis, University of California: Santa Barabara, 2014, 56–57.

[4] Eva Vergara, ‘Guard blows lid off Chile deaths’, The Guardian (28 June 2000), www.theguardian.com/world/2000/jun/28/pinochet.chile.

[5] McKiernan, ‘The Public History of a Concentration Camp’, 6.

[6] Fernando Lavoz, ‘La memoria oscura de un estadio’, Fernando Lavoz, image series, www.fernandolavoz.cl/estadio-nacional.

[7] McKiernan, ‘The Public History of a Concentration Camp’ Camp, 71.

[8] David Waldstein, 'In Chile’s National Stadium, Dark Past Shadows Copa América Matches', The New York Times (17 June 2015), www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/sports/soccer/in-chiles-national-stadium-dark-past-shadowscopa-america-matches.html.

[9] David Waldstein, In Chile’s National Stadium.