9 - Violeta Parra and the Empty Space of La Carpa de la Reina

Summary

Lo que el alma hace por su cuerpo es lo que el poeta hace por su pueblo.

Gabriela Mistral

(What the soul does for the body is what the poet does for the people.)

La Carpa de la Reina was essentially a large circus marquee (‘carpa’) set up by Violeta Parra in La Reina, a city region in the east of Santiago close to the foothills of the Andes. La Carpa was intended by Violeta to be a venue for the performance of Chilean music and dance and for the exhibition of artwork. Opened on 17 December 1965, it was also to be a cultural centre in which she could bring to fruition her plan for a National University of Folklore. This was the artistic and didactic endeavour to which Violeta devoted her enormous energy and belief in the last years of her life. La Carpa is, however, mostly remembered now as an ambitious yet fatally conceived project, the site of Violeta's decline on a seemingly inexorable path towards her suicide on 5 February 1967. La Carpa de la Reina has become a type of myth, as her son Ángel Parra has said. He is right: La Carpa seems made from citations that turn into air, from stories, anecdotes, memories, testimonies. There is nothing remaining of it: very few images and some recordings, including one with different artists, La Carpa de la Reina. Violeta Parra y otros intérpretes (1966), and her final record, Las últimas composiciones de Violeta Parra (1966), which includes the work she wrote during her last years. In this chapter, I start to reconstruct the space of La Carpa and recuperate it as a place for the realisation of the goals of Violeta's life's work, a space for creativity and apprenticeship, for teaching and learning, and for bringing dignity, recognition and renewal to the folk music, dance and art of Chile. La Carpa de la Reina was the culmination of her development as an artist; that it failed is also the tragedy of her life's final labour.