Son[i]a #302 Manuel Sanfuentes on Amereida and Ciudad Abierta

Amereida emerged from a journey undertaken by a group of poets, architects, and philosophers from Tierra del Fuego to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, in the course of 1965. Years later, the experience resulted in Ciudad Abierta, a series of experimental, imagined, collaboratively-built constructions jutting out of vast expanse of dunes, estuaries, and gorges bordering on the Pacific Ocean.

For decades, in partnership with the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaiso, Ciudad Abierta has woven together philosophy, poetry, and architecture, giving rise to a profound understanding of culture, and creating a landscape in which poetic activity is in a permanent state of latency and can happen.

The journeys, the rounds, the phalènes,the ha lugar ("there is room") and "returning-to-not-knowing" are just some of the elements that shape an educational edifice whose characteristics are difficult to pin down, because they reveal themselves through activity, as it is taking place. Life, work, and study are vital spheres that are called upon to merge so as to dissolve their internal boundaries.

In this podcast, Manuel Sanfuentes talks about the tradition of the troubadours and the journey to the inland sea, about interruptions, gerunds, and roaming, about impropriety, hospitality, and cemeteries; about learning by doing, the world's trades, and the poetic echoes that prevent doing from becoming mere doing. We also talk about how to organise an agora based on consent rather than democracy, of which the only record that remains is orality.