Observing the desert and its surroundings forms part of a study. Other times, in a flash, it becomes a space of learning: the instant in which it is specifically captured in the concurrence of a critical-reflexive binomial. 

In these last turbulent years, desert lands have borne witness to the creation of innumerable poetics and spaces that inform us about their location and eco-geopolitical connections. Indeed, today’s insatiable global economy has jeopardized the salt flats for the creation of lithium batteries. This situation, made worse by transnational corporations, has inspired a series of thinkers, architects, and scientists to write about and try to distill the mood of the desert.

In the case of Chile, the peculiar geography of the Atacama Desert prefigures a different kind of territoriality to that which the state—a state which has forcibly intervened into its most inclement landscapes as a consequence of the War of the Pacific (1879-1883) [1]—would like to advertise. However, despite the constant onslaught from the state, which ignores territorialities and their geographies, the Atacama Desert invites me to interject with didactic critiques raised by axioms of displacement, axioms which have in the past suffered absurd censorship by a ludicrous Chilean milieu, in particular on the part of some “contemporary art consultants” deeply embedded in the academy of “fine arts.”   

The Chilenization of the Atacama Desert, begun at the end of the nineteenth century, condemned and transformed this impetuous colonial process into one of its greatest enemies, one that threatened both social cohesion and the political acculturation of the Andean worldview. This dilemma brought about by a Chilean identity supported by Eurowhiteness, is what motivates my reflections on the things we can use to reconsider the current lay of the land, which has itself become pixelated by the Capitalocene.

Most of these analyses that grew out of land research residencies provide an argumentative base for and, incidentally, act as the prelude to a series of artistic essays whose emphasis includes heterogenous ideas articulating, for example, a resilient anticolonial maxim aiming primarily to preserve Andean territoriality through the following questions: What do we do with epistemic stories of the desert as we try to understand it as a space of learning? How do we currently observe its troubled imaginaries that ignore its racialized aspects? 

As I work to answer these questions, I have discovered that current frameworks of transdisciplinary thought have constructed more than one bridge between the lessons learned from working in the desert  and other notions to respond concretely to the above questions. This is why, since 2009, in every research trip I have organized around specific geographic landmarks in the Atacama Desert, I have proposed an expanded curatorship that brings together a diverse group of  thinkers. Together they affirm an inclusive political thought that both fosters and contains the panorama of contemporary art practices that respond to place and apply it to territorial research in the Atacama Desert. These considerations make clear that systematic work in this desert and others confronts those hallmarks of a market of artistic creation only interested in creative processes that glorify disjointed confections and a kind of intellectual drift full of artificial plumage. 

The hallmarks of these markets, the same ones that are always disseminating contemporary art that has to do with working in the desert, are like postcards that undoubtedly decorate not just the (hind)quarters of collectors and fashionable gallery owners, but also those who appear to promote an alternative reading of the desert that isn’t determined by its historical or more recent problems.

As we have observed in the work of one group of artists and writers, there is a certain kind of negligence in validating precarious work that others have built on the desert. In light of this apathy, I dare to point out the fact that the areas where we have noted that many others work in the desert are part of a graph that appears on a banner, only delivering a vision of this instant and not allowing for the exoticizations that we have read and seen on those simple postcards of dryness that radiate dolled-up lights financed by the art market.   

Through these adventures, I hope to inscribe a juxtaposition of ideas that rescue what I have cultivated in the Atacama Desert, as a way to unlearn and translate it to other deserts in order to postulate a memory of displacement and invent an active theory stemming from a consideration of the contemporary body. In this sense, when I began to promote the work that I presented in Gestionar desde la Geografía Nuevos Desplazamientos [Reflection on the Geography of New Displacements] [2], an infinite number of questions came up about curatorial practice and the narratives that new grammars present to produce thought from the contemporary body. To be contemporary can mean to be immediately present, a being in the here and now. In this sense, art appears to be truly contemporary if it is perceived as authentic, as capable of capturing and expressing the present in a way that is radically unpolluted by past traditions or strategies destined for future success [3]. In this case, art only exists in conflict with its time. . . art implies the courage to respond to questions that don’t yet exist. [4]

Representing desert locations that function as archetypes validating images and amplifying the oral histories of the Atacama is a mode of transdisciplinary investigation. It is an opportunity that explores the grammars of displacement for the creation of collective thought, and in this way guides debates about the consequences of doing land research residencies in the desert. With that said, no one can deny that a residency in a desert, whether it be the Atacama or the Gobi, generates anxiety that can only be caused by the idea of a visual artist who analyzes residencies as spaces of scientific research, and this is a big mistake. Artists should place themselves at the heart of the practice, a methodological format that is not synonymous with anxiety, and which clearly validates visual practice in this age. 

On another note, learning from the desert has defined a pathway that leads primarily to the production of texts, images, sounds, and interventions in the particular case of these geographies that are heavily impacted by nature. Reviewing these antecedents encourages a consideration of the represented subjects and objects that are connected to the poetics of the contemporary, and that take on the representation that the desert now possesses, for example, in the face of a boiling climate. 

Meditating on the desert can be implemented as a political response to displacement and thus support the current circulation of contemporary art that continues to suffer  excessive precarity under the state. Tying together different kinds of territorial research conducted across the desert helps to define the expanded conceptual framework that surrounds not only learning within this context, but also its dynamization as a creative space.  

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[1] The War of the Pacific was an armed conflict between Chile and the allied Bolivia and Peru. The battles occurred primarily in the Pacific Ocean, but also in the Atacama Desert and some areas of Peru. In some historical accounts, this event has come to be known as the Guano War or Saltpeter War.

[2] Projects developed by the author beginning in 2012. They involved the displacement of a group of architects, scientists, and writers through several different ecological zones in the Chilean regions of Valparaíso, Antofagasta, and Tarapacá.

[3] Boris Groys, Volverse Público: Las transformaciones del arte en el ágora contemporánea (Buenos Aires: Caja Negra, 2014), 83.

[4] Marcus Steinweg, Kunst und Philosophie. / Art and Philosophy. (Berlin: Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, 2012), 92.