Residencia en Quillagua

Teresa Solar / Bogdan Achimescu



  • ARTIST Teresa Solar / Bogdan Achimescu
  • FORMAT Residencia
  • DATE August 2016


DESCRIPTION


The residence of Teresa Solar and Bogdan Achimescu was held at the World's Most Dry Place within the framework of SACO5. The project was possible thanks to the award of the PICE international fund by the Hablarenarte & Collective SE VENDE alliance, together with the support of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Chile, respectively. The stay included guided visits to the main places of anthropological and geological interest in the sector, technical assistance and logistics, as well as the registration of the artists' research process.



THE LINE, THE ROCK AND THE BONE:
We travel, as every year, to Quillagua, to no place in the Nothing. They were, in 2012, many more than climate, anthropological, political or geological factors, which determined the decision of the Collective SE SOLD to choose the oasis as the center of operation and residences The Dryest Place in the World. Since then more than fifty visits and residences from different areas of creation and research have materialized.

"Quillagua is a laboratory, it concentrates, it does not distract. This is where many of the relevant contemporary tensions are present: the loss of water, identity, abandonment, internal divisions and the destruction of heritage, in a shocking and extreme context. It seems impossible to combine so many global problems in a small oasis in the desert. At the same time, Quillagua is far enough from our urban and semi-modern reality. To be able to investigate it, you have to look from the outside, because in some way it belongs to the other world. And at the same time it tells us about ourselves. A residence in the oasis necessarily becomes an introspection, where one stands face to face with himself and with his questions, regardless of where they come from. "

In 2016, we accompanied at the residence in the Atacama Desert two artists invited to SACO5: Teresa Solar, from Madrid, and Bogdan Achimescu, from Krakow. They departed from ISLA willing, with expectations, energy and memory cards of high storage capacity. The infinite opening of the pampa to the other side of the Cordillera de la Costa, activated the need to travel the desert, understanding the re-running as an attitude of the mind facing the void. Hours in vehicle, between Antofagasta, Tranque Sloman, Chacabuco, Maria Elena, Chuquicamata and Taltal, restricted the experience to the view through the window. Once in the Driest Place in the World, walking was the strategy of understanding through the exercise of the body in movement, for hours and under the omnipresent sun, resulting in the introduction of the physical self into an extremely inhospitable and attractive space at the same time , a personal challenge both physical and mental.

Teresa, in her travel journal of the residence in Quillagua entitled Atacama as the Forbidden City of Beijing, talks about repetitive patterns and discontinuous lines of thought. They appear, in compositions of image and word, mining cars, looking at the desert from a line, Chuquicamata that falls on the town of Chuquicamata, stones that look like bones and stones that look like stones. Cemeteries abandoned in the Pampas. Tombs looks from the window. From the line of the road, line of the footprints of the wheels, line of the path, line of the water pipe ... Desert traced by demarcations, through which the body circulates. The body of Teresa.

Bogdan let himself be carried between the hills by paths whose origins have long been erased by the wind and with the successive layers of industrial history in the desert. Routes of donkey tracks suddenly appeared or became invisible among the rocks. To leave the path or lose it on purpose, to look for it again, to doubt if this or the other, was literal and symbolic part of this exercise carried out in absolute solitude. Achimescu returned to the oasis with a stone of a very particular shape, semi-square, it looked like a tool of archaic times used for unknown purposes today. With a round hole in the middle, he winked at a fountain that can not keep anything, or the craters of the Meteorites Valley, useless even to hold a legend, formed by the water that was ripped away millions of years ago. >
Geoglyph, line, path, rock, bone, grave, blur and new account. Auto, road, industry, Chuquicamata, clean and new account. Layers of cycles, like guano on the rocks of the coast, build formations that fit together as if nothing, as if destruction were the only inevitable. At least in the desert.

Dagmara Wyskiel