GeoSemantics II / Mineral Writing: From the long sixties to Umbrales Atacama
By María Teresa Johansson M.
The Atacama Desert is a territory with an enormous capacity to salvage traces and images that superimpose broad temporalities and unusual interactions between humans, the animate, and inanimate worlds. The most important of its layers in recent times is the confluence between the minerals of the desert soil and the history of mining. This confluence has originated in the economic cycles of capital in Chile: Based on the industrial extraction of nitrate at first, continued with saltpeter, and later consolidated with copper. Meanwhile the future has already arrived in hands with the extractive economy oriented towards the extraction of lithium. The desert and the metallurgical industry have generated representations and inquiries that make up a field of writings, explosions, and images. These are created by traveling bodies that, in order to write, visualize, mark, or break into this geo-mineral entity, have moved towards Atacama. Victoria Jolly’s Umbrales Atacama is part of this field of exploration where it is possible to pick up traces of previous writings involving the mineral.1Umbrales is about representations and incursions that attend to the vitality of metals in relation to the productive forces of mineral extraction.
In the early writings of the 1950s and 1960s, young backpackers, chroniclers, guerrillas, visual artists, and members of Latin American avant-garde movements traveled through the continent guided by different needs: among them, the search for an indigenous identity, the denunciation of injustices and poverty that led to revolutionary action, and the realization of aesthetic interventions and poetic acts, stood out. These imperatives shared the political, symbolic, material and territorial appropriation of the continent encoded in the experience of travel. In the travel writings that had the Atacama Desert as their destination, one can trace a way of conceiving space precisely through the connections between soil, minerals, and the metallurgical industry. The interest in unveiling the exploitation of mineral resources in Latin America was evident to travelers whose gaze was influenced by Marxist ideology, attentive to the conditions of production of global capitalism. While historical materialism considered nature as the basis and source of technological progress, the Third World orientation wanted to denounce the complicity between the extraction of mineral resources and imperialist capitalism. The gaze of these travelers was focused on interpreting the desert in productive terms; this meant following the route of the mineral to describe its power and dynamism in the flow of capital and denounce the necrotic force of extraction.
The accounts of Ernesto Guevara’s travels through the Atacama Desert is eloquent in this respect: when he visits the Chuquicamata mine, after obtaining the permits to enter, Guevara reveals his fascination with the magnitude of the engineering work of the copper metallurgical industry, but he also pays attention to the extreme conditions of mining workers and their exposure to death. Furthermore, he adds a description of the territories where images of the Capitalocene2, in this case the Mineralocene, emerge since the environment is modified and affected by industrial production. The story constructs the image in the following terms: “As you come close to any part of the mine, the whole landscape seems to concentrate, giving a feeling of suffocation across the plain” (80). The immersion of Guevara’s traveling body in this new space of the mine produces an affective character. The gaze creates a panorama that is condensed before the emergence of this industrial and technological mega object, which suffocates the space affecting both the inanimate and the animate. The image is powerful because it integrates the perception of the traveler and the environment in a mutual implication. Guevara, with a descriptive rhetoric, details the voracious technological process on the soil: “Every morning the mountain is dynamited and huge mechanical shovels load the material onto rail wagons that take it to the grinder to be crushed” (80). In his report, the reference to the extraction of copper in the form of sulfate is detailed, giving an account of the stages of the process and its flip side: the cemetery where the victims of “cave-ins, silica and the hellish climate of the mountain” lie buried. The human body of the Latin American miner is involved up to his death in the life of the mineral that energizes the flow of capital.
The technological, geological, economic and human issues were directly linked to the economic cycles of metal sales, the technification of metallurgical progress, the splendor and ruins of mining towns transmuted into ghost towns, and especially, the impact of biopower on the illness and death of miners. Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America (1997 [1971]) constitutes an early cartography of denunciation of planetary extractivism witnessed by the author in his travels. In it, the natural forces of the earth and the mining cycle become intermingled: “In the thirsty desert of Tamarugal, where the land dazzles one’s eyes with its brilliance, I have stood beside the ruins of Tarapacá” (143). In the parched desert of Tamarugal, where the glow of the earth burns one’s eyes, I have witnessed the razing of Tarapacá.” The author reflects on the extraction of copper during Salvador Allende’s plans for nationalization.
Along the Andean slopes Chile has the world’s greatest reserves of copper, a third of all those now known. Chilean copper generally appears with other metals, such as gold, silver, and molybdenum-an additional factor which stimulates its exploitation. And Chilean workers are cheap: their low costs in Chile more than compensated Anaconda and Kennecott for their high costs in the United States. (145)
In those same years, the avant-garde trip of the AmereidaCrossing sought a new poetic foundation of the territory. The journey began in Patagonia and took the route towards northern Argentina, so it by-passed the Atacama Desert. In their journey, the group of travelers convened poetic acts to infuse the territory with new senses , guided by the aesthetic impulse of refounding the continent. In 2017, filmmaker Javier Correa and architect and visual artist Victoria Jolly displayed the exhibition dedicated to Amereida’s journey at the National Museum of Fine Arts / Museo de Bellas Artes. During the show, they performed an intervention on the walls where water stains erased the map of Amereida. In this act of dismantling and erasure, Victoria Jolly felt the call to embark on a journey to discover new routes and trajectories that would have an impact on the erasure of the old maps and allow the emergence of new ones. This impulse took shape in a journey to the Atacama Desert in 2018 with the participation of German artist Ursula Biemann.
Initially, the exploration trip was designed to follow a route of defined stations with the contribution of art curator Rodolfo Andaur, among others. The itinerary had an ethnographic and scientific edge in a territory where archaeological and futuristic projects coexist in a sui generis way. These stations included an encounter with a team of anthropologists who had just discovered new geoglyphs, a visit to a camp of NASA scientists working on robotic designs to send to Mars, and a conversation with an indigenous woman activist who was part of an organization defending the ancient irrigation systems and canals of the Ayllu of Atacama. With words that replicate the verses of the poem Amereida, whose second section lists the materials carried by the travelers, Victoria Jolly begins the oral account while driving along the route that links the central valley of Chile with the Pacific Ocean: “The journey began with the backpack full of materials, colored earth, some sticks, canvas, masking tape, all quite precarious”. The trip started with a plane ride to Calama. From there, the group left in a white car for San Pedro de Atacama. In an exercise of memory, Victoria recalls the impressions of the encounter with a multicolor territory, with a petra, mineral, even lunar appearance, constantly crossed by industrial tailings and by a system of hydraulic works made up of gigantic pipes that carry water for the mining operations.
From the road, the tailing rivers of the mining city of Chuquicamata can be seen, giving shape to a new material that exceeds even the possibility of imagining a mirage as it shatters all sense of unreality. Rather, the tailings rivers form a hyperreal entity that makes an “other object” appear: a “hyperobject”3 that exposes its presence and provokes indistinction about its quality and definition. It is impossible to name or give a meaning to this new material: “The river looked like a river. If you didn’t know it wasn’t a river, I could have taken off my shoes and bathed in it,” says Victoria. The indistinction between the environment that is perceived and what is understood by the gaze will be the keynote of the environmental perception during the journey. In the desert, images do not make up a post-industrial landscape, but rather elements of a cyborg environment located in a territory that is clearly post-natural. In this territory, there is a material agent at the origin of the mutation of the landscape; the mining industry.
Although the mining territory was not the focus of Jolly, Correa, and Biemann’s journey of exploration, nor was it contemplated in the design of their stations, it ended up imposing itself in an artistic performativity that emerged along the way and led to the appearance of new maps. For this work to emerge and for these unusual acts of intervention to take place, it was necessary, according to Jolly, to situate oneself in between the itineraries, to attend to the interstice and to concentrate on the paths, for it is there that the question of how to look at and perceive the territory will unfold; a form that would progressively move away from the archaeological and ethnographic dimension, to situate itself in a present in mutation. Initially, the project contemplated an intervention at the Atacama salt flat, conceived fundamentally as a pre-Columbian natural place that preserves its ancestral purity. Jolly says: “In between, we had gone to the geoglyphs of Chuc Chuc, which were admirable. On the way back, we contemplated the volcanoes in ecstasy, because deep down, we were always looking at these natural places as pristine, in their pre-Hispanic condition. After visiting those ruins, we saw next to the volcano other craters, there was a beautiful one, of a single color, whose scale was smaller. I went down and up to measure it with my body.”4
The route to the Salar was more winding and the route crossed the interior of the Escondida Mine. In her story, Victoria recalls the question that emerges, as unanswerable as it is urgent: “And what do we do with these places that are fenced, with their access forbidden? Can we activate them poetically? I actually started to repeat the question whether we were going into those places that nobody wants to enter: the places of slag and tailings.” It was then that the certainty of daring to project a new action became imminent “Just as we were going to do an action in the Salar de Atacama, why wouldn’t we do an action in a place of that same whitish color but which was the slag heap of lithium production?” The locations were then both the Salar and the new tailings territories, the lithium plateaus. In the basin, these whitish reliefs were paired, one was there from pre-Hispanic times, the other had a contemporary, post-natural emergence. One was made of salt, the other of slag. The story of the action is accelerated and concise in its materialization:
On the road from Antofagasta we came across a landscape of white plateaus. We were in the game of stopping on the road when someone wanted to do something. Suddenly I see that this is the terrain I want to intervene in and I ask Javier to film the action. I will climb as high as I can with a wooden stick, without knowing if the terrain is soft, hard or even toxic. My idea was an in situ action but I knew as soon as I went up that we would be reprimanded and forced to come down. This is going to last until they pull us down, I said to myself. I started to climb with only one sensation: the geography wins in scale, the body is a grain in these dimensions. I try to dig with a stick but the terrain is extremely hard as if it were a crust. From the height, it looks like a snowy territory, huge, without even a black spot. That’s what it was like to be in a uniform material deposit. Then, I started hearing sirens, loudspeaker calls and within a minute, I knew the action was over. I waited a moment before running down. Our car was surrounded by four security vans. Despite the restrictions, we had managed to enter and inhabit that place, and accomplished an intervention to mark those territories.
Some observations and images in this narrative are worth highlighting as maxims of the present: the post-natural environment makes the human body a tiny and inert entity; the image of the earth crust has the power to show that we only perceive the outside of a wound that is the damaged earth; the hardness of the tailings expresses its compact, solid, immovable, definitive state. And finally, both production and industrial waste is under protection of the transnacional capitalism. According to the operators, the lithium will be used for the electric batteries of the new generation of German cars. Eduardo Galeano’s early denunciation takes on a new image in the words of Victoria Jolly : “The Northern hemisphere complies with the implementation of green energy, while in the middle of Salar, in Chile the slag heap is stockpiled”.
Inserted in this new territory, the human body in the minimum scale of its forces, contaminating itself, barely manages to stand up for a brief moment. In this performance, despite its fleetingness, something is subverted and activates the environment with the energy of intention, an affective and driving energy. This act marks a place in a new map of the spaces of waste. In this way, that place is marked in a new map that emerges and resizes the previous maps of America traced in Amereida’s foundational journey and in the images of Amereida’s poem. This place concentrates different temporalities: a space for the movement of pre-Hispanic passers-by crossed by the mining industry. At present, the same place holds different concessions to the companies whose property not only includes the plant but is measured in depth. Where a mining company owns certain meters vertically, it changes property for another company further down. The territory tends to expand in dimensions beyond the vertical planes, into spaces that begin to be fictionalized and intervened by contemporary art. Umbrales de Atacama by Victoria Jolly is one of these artistic actions related to land art, which today, under the current conditions of climate change, we could call performance “a la intemperie” (outdoor).
The notion intemperie -outdoors- gathers the etymological sense of exposure to the weather, to the atmospheric variations, characterized by distemper and also refers to the sense of being in a world without shelter: in the open, ‘in the open sky, without a roof or any other shelter’. These outdoor performances have no intention of marking or leaving a sign, they are only an act of presence in a threatening and intemperate exterior, which emerges and fades away with no intention of leaving a material trace in space and whose durability remains in the photographic or filmic record. In the cyborg and postnatural environment of the Atacama Desert, Jolly’s performance bursts forth as a momentary gestalt to reveal the condition of the bodies in a state of climatic change, exposed to the toxic residue of the industrial treatment of the mineral soil that shapes new plots between the vital and the necrotic.
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This essay was made possible thanks to a grant from Chile’s National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development, abbreviated FONDECYT. The grant is no. 120 adjudicated to a project titled “Regular 1201731 “Escrituras de viaje en el Cono Sur en la década de los sesenta: imaginación territorial, géneros literarios y formas de viaje”.
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Copyright for all images: Javier Correa y Victoria Jolly, Umbrales Atacama , 2018, Chile.
Victoria Jolly (1982) – inhabitant of the Open City since 2007, where he has developed his work of art and experimental architecture. Member of the Punto Espora collective (2022). He has participated in transdisciplinary projects such as Evoque América, Poetic acts MOMA PS1-New York, USA (2012); art residence Ephemeral Art + Architecture, I-Park Foundation USA (2012); Utopia in Progress, CIVA Brussels, Belgium (2015). Curator and architect, of the exhibition Amereida, The Invention of a Sea 1965/2017 at the MNBA and PcDV, Chile (2017). Editor of the book Amereida, The Invention of a Sea, Polígrafa, Barcelona (2019).
She currently works as a teacher teaching experimental courses on installations and materials technology. He has developed national and international workshops such as:
Experimental Workshop on Textile Moldings, Federico Santa María University (2021-2022); Open City Research Platform EPFL, Switzerland (2019); Fabric Formwork, Magister Torcuato di Tella University, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2018). She is invited to the BoCA 2019 Contemporary Art Biennial, with the site-specific Punto de Fuga at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon, Portugal. Invited to the FotoNoviembre 2019-2020 Biennial with the piece site-specific Wanderings, TEA Museum Tenerife, Spain.
He recently inaugurated the site specific MARGA, cavar adentro (2022) in the Cultural Park of Valparaíso. Awarded in the Emerging category by the MA 2022 awards, from the organization Mujeres Arquitectas. Nominated in the Activists and Academics category for the Womans Day Archdaily 2022 International Award.
His work revolves around the experimentation of materials, installations and specific sites, participating in transdisciplinary projects.
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Endnotes
Bennett. Jane. 2010. “A life of metal”. Vibrant matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Personal interview with the artist on the 16th of March 2023.
María Teresa Johansson M.
María Teresa Johansson is associate professor at the Universidad Alberto Hurtado. She has specialized in Southern Cone literature and memory studies, her research focuses in narrative and testimony. She has written several articles and book chapters on these subjects, co-edited with Lucero de Vivanco Pasados contemporáneos. Acercamientos interdisciplinarios a los derechos humanos y las memorias en Perú y América Latina (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2019) and Instantáneas en la marcha: repertorio cultural de las movilizaciones en Chile (Ediciones UAH, 2021). She is currently researching on travel literature and territorial imagination in Latin America (Fondecyt). She teaches courses on literature, human rights and ecocriticism.
