An Encounter between a Chinese Stadium and a Costa Rican Volcano on a Geophysicist’s Monitor
Valeria Guzmán Verri
What do a stadium and an active volcano in Costa Rica have in common? Turning to geoaesthetics, Valeria Guzmán Verri examines this encounter to reframe discussions about the impact China’s foreign-aid projects are having in the Global South.
Fig. 1. Costa Rican National Stadium as scalar device for showing the geomorphological changes of the Turrialba Volcano, 2017–19. OVSICORI-UNA Archive. Image courtesy of Dr Cyril Müller.
Over the last few years, the Turrialba Volcano in Costa Rica has been active, and especially so in 2015, when a series of ash clouds covered parts of the Greater Metropolitan Area for several weeks, interrupting air traffic while affecting the country’s crops and people’s health (fig. 2).[1] As part of a series of analyses of the phenomenon, Costa Rica’s Vulcanological and Seismological Observatory (OVSICORI) used drone photogrammetry to create a digital model of the volcano’s main craters.[2]
Aimed at a non-specialised audience, this five-minute animation shows general measurements of new geoformations caused by recent explosive volcanic activity. In the final minute of the animation, things take a peculiar turn. A rendering of the recently built National Stadium of Costa Rica (2007–11) is superimposed onto the model of the main crater, showing the coincidence in size between the two objects (fig.1). Though such size comparisons are common practice in geological visualisations, inclusion of this particular building in this context could not help but call our attention.[3]
Fig. 2. Explosive activity of the Turrialba Volcano, 2015. Photo courtesy of Dr Guillermo E. Alvarado.
The stadium was a ‘gift’, requested from the People’s Republic of China by President Oscar Arias as a celebration of the establishment of diplomatic ties between Costa Rica and China in 2007 – the first between China and a Central American nation.[4] Together with conference centres and people’s palaces, stadium gifts of this kind are highly visible artefacts that can be completed swiftly. Inscribed directly into the urban landscape of the recipient country, such projects might be seen to serve as ‘reminders of China’s generosity’ and also of its efficiency (fig. 3).[5]
The Costa Rican National Stadium (which, with its football field, running track, athletes’ hostel, offices for 32 sports federations and seating capacity of 35,062, is the largest in the country) was both presented and embraced as ‘the most modern sport infrastructure in Central America’.[6] Its design was entrusted to the Central South Architectural Design Institute (CSADI) in Wuhan, after a bidding process conducted by the Foreign Affairs Division of China’s Ministry of Commerce.
When the stadium’s chief architect, Li Fang, made his first visit to Costa Rica in 2008, he announced that the design of the stadium would correspond to ‘the local particularities of Costa Rica’.[7] But how were these particularities identified and translated into the architecture of the stadium? According to CSADI, the stadium resembles a volcano from above and a sailing boat when viewed from the side. When I queried this with Li Fang at CSADI’s Wuhan headquarters, he pointed me to the Costa Rican coat-of-arms as the source of this sail–volcano synthesis, claiming that, in a photograph taken from the outskirts of the city, the stadium looks ‘really like the top of a volcano’.[8]
Thus, long before the OVSICORI animation, a geoaesthetics of stadium and volcano had already been pictured for Costa Rica in China. Embodying a sweeping and summary notion of local specificity based on loose visual associations, this geoaesthetics was in line with the official diplomatic script, and also reflected wider geopolitical tactics. Outshining a previous ‘gift’ made by Taiwan (a bridge over the Tempisque River, much praised by Costa Ricans at the time of its construction in 2003), the stadium belonged to a package of ‘cooperation’ agreements negotiated as part of the newly sealed diplomatic bond, which included the opening of lines of credit for Costa Rica with Chinese banks; a free-trade agreement; and the adoption by Costa Rica of the ‘One China’ policy, at a time when Taiwan was still dominating diplomatic alliances in Central America.
Fig. 3. Aerial view of the Costa Rican National Stadium, 2019. Photo courtesy of Diego Chaves.
A further geopolitical question could also be contemplated: whether such architectural gifts ought to be recognised less as independent objects and more as a distinct assemblage of undertakings that operate at transnational levels through the interrelated processes that China has developed over decades – through diplomacy and financing, the construction industry, public administration, architectural know-how and logistics. As analysed in my recent article, Gifting Architecture: China and the National Stadium in Costa Rica, 2007–2011, in the Costa Rican case these undertakings included: the introduction of Chinese construction companies into the country; the mobilisation of workers; changes in migration, in labour law and in construction-drawing protocols; and the importing of construction materials, products and machinery with tax exemption, among others.[9]
The national stadium is now a well-established landmark in the city. The OVSICORI animation draws on this condition: as the stadium is so well-known, it can be effectively repurposed as a scalar device in such visualisations of geomorphical phenomena. Stadium diplomacy has thus impacted on spatial imagination. But let us bring the image back to its geological capacity. As we consider the dispersion of ash in the atmosphere by the volcano eruption, the image remains significant as much for what it omits as for what it exposes. Not only are the damaged crops and the immediate respiratory and eye impairments caused by the ash-cloud absent, but also the microparticles scattered and stored in human, animal, plant, aquatic and subsoil bodies, which prolong exposure to the event (fig. 4 and fig. 5).
Fig. 4 (left) and Fig. 5 (right) Two scales of the event. Left: Dune field caused by dry and humid pyroclastic surges at Turrialba Volcano, as well as recent blocks and ballistic bombs (10 April 2015). Right: Photograph through polarising microscope of different types of volcanic clasts: ash (05A-2) rich in lithic tachylite and pyroclastic fragments.
Source: Gullermo E. Alvarado et al., ‘La actividad explosiva del Volcán Turrialba (Costa Rica) en el período 2010–2016’, Revista Geológica de América Central 55, pp. 7–60, 2016. Photos courtesy of Dr Guillermo E. Alvarado.
Could opening this geomorphical dimension to gifts such as the National Stadium introduce geoaesthetic and geopolitical perspectives that offer a more incisive approach to China’s current international drive? The Central American region is facing extreme challenges related to the mounting planetary crisis.[10] In this context, these buildings and the spatial practices they comprise could be understood not only as generating discursive and logistical power dynamics, but also as spatio-temporal processes inserted into ecologies that redefine, redesign and organise matter and life forms at multiple scales. If we entertain Kathryn Yusoff’s observation that ‘architecture is geology’,[11] questions such as how ‘the forces of the earth’ have both restrained and unleashed political agency are necessary. Indeed, a shift from a geopolitics centred on diplomatic targets to one in which the organisation of life and matter are brought centre stage might allow us to reassess the wide-reaching impact of such projects.
1. Costa Rica’s Greater Metropolitan Area comprises the urban conglomeration where most of the population resides.
2. Cyril Müeller OVSICORI-UNA, Volcán Turrialba 2017–2019 Cambios Geomorfológicos, YouTube, 5 September 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4riwBz1QhTI (accessed on 13 October 2020).
3. Adam Bobbette, ‘Episodes from a History of Scalessness: William Jerome Harrison and Geological Photography’, in Etienne Turpin ed., Architecture in the Anthropocene (Michigan: Open Humanities Press, 2013), pp. 47–58.
4. Information on official petitions for construction projects is scant, as these negotiations are confidential in nature. It has been asserted that, in Africa, solicitations are a usual practice. However, not every proposal is necessarily honoured. For example, China rejected Costa Rica’s 2015 request for a new public debt bond sale equivalent to five times the cost of the stadium. Diego Arguedas Ortiz, ‘Gobierno busca que China compre deuda pública’, Semanario Universidad, 16 September 2015, historico.semanariouniversidad.com/pais/gobierno-busca-que-china-compre-deuda-publica-para-2016 (accessed on 15 April 2018); Deborah Brautigam, The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa (New York, 2009), p. 349. Bruno Stagno Ugarte, Los caminos menos transitados: La administración Arias Sánchez y la redefinición de la política exterior de Costa Rica, 2006–2010 (San José, 2013), pp. 79–140.
5. Samantha Custer et al., Ties That Bind: Quantifying China’s Public Diplomacy and Its ‘Good Neighbour’ Effect (Williamsburg, VA, 2018), p. 13.
6. Harold Leandro, ‘Haremos un estadio moderno’, La Nación, 4 April 2008, wvw.nacion.com/ln_ee/2008/abril/04/deportes1484999.html (accessed on 19 June 2015).
7. Leandro, ‘Haremos un estadio moderno’.
8. Li Fang, interview with the author, 17 April 2018.
9. Valeria Guzmán Verri, ‘Gifting Architecture: China and the National Stadium in Costa Rica, 2007–2011’, Architectural History 63, 2020, pp. 283–311.
10. Jordi Vaqué, ‘Chronology of the Dry Corridor: The Impetus for Resilience in Central America’, FAO Agronoticias: Agriculture News from Latin America and the Caribbean, 1 June 2017, http://www.fao.org/in-action/agronoticias/detail/en/c/1024539/ (accessed on 20 November 2020); Saskia Sassen, ‘Land Grabs are Partly to Blame for Skyrocketing Violence in Central America’, Huffpost, 16 January 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/landgrabs-central-america_b_586bf1a6e4b0eb58648abe1f (accessed on 22 November 2020).
11. Kathryn Yusoff, Geo-logics: Natural Resources as Necropolitics, YouTube, 16 November 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM8B-XZG8OQ&t=3832s (accessed on 26 January 2021); Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2018),
Valeria Guzmán Verri (Ph.D Architectural Association) is a researcher and senior lecturer in the School of Architecture and the Society and Culture PhD programme at the University of Costa Rica. Her research examines relations between visual culture, architecture, knowledge and power.
She is a member of the TransCaribbean Network of Transcultural and Transareal Studies in Central America and The Caribbean.
Email: valeria.guzmanverri@ucr.ac.cr
