"What you risk reveals what you value." Jeanette Winterson

Dr. Roewan Crowe and Dr. Helene Vosters co-edited the open access digital book, Return Atacama: Engaging Histories of Political Violence Through Performance and Durational Witnessing which assembles the many movements, reflections, and practices surrounding hemispheric artist collective CONSTELACIONES’s 2016 performance Return Atacama. This richly visual collection from the award winning HemiPress Gesture Series incorporates photography, video, drone footage, poetry, and prose, to produce a polyphonic experience of this politically urgent performance. Blurring the distinction between artistic and scholarly work, both the performance and this publication, which bears its name, probe the possibilities and limits of transnational creative collaboration, while “challenging the containment of trauma associated with political violence within isolated historical events and disciplinary or geographic locations.”

The artist collective CONSTELACIONES— Monica Martinez with Roewan Crowe, Doris Difarnecio, Christina Hajjar, and Helene Vosters — travelled to Chile’s infamously storied Atacama Desert to return a large set of vibrant sculptural forms. The heavy ceramic forms, created by Monica Martinez, are woven from stratified layers of Chilean history and from diasporic and nomadic trajectories resulting from the 1973 coup. They were laid down in a performance called Return Atacama. The Atacama Desert is central to dictator Augusto Pinochet’s Caravan of Death, the poems of Raúl Zurita, Patricio Guzman’s film Nostalgia for The Light, and, crucially, to the women of nearby Calama, who have spent years battling official secrecy while searching the sands for the remains of loved ones murdered by the Pinochet regime. Following the Return Atacama performance, the artists performed Echoes: North…North in Santiago at the   bi-annual Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.

 

 

 

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