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

constelacion-7

The artist collective CONSTELACIONESMonica 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.

CONSTELACIONES. We are shifting; fluid, overlapping and multiple. We are stardust. We share the same sky. CONSTELACIONES. We speak through borders with gesture and movement, with languages of time, memory and connection. CONSTELACIONES. We practice the art of magic. CONSTELACIONES: born of exile, configurations of light. CONSTELACIONES embodies collective healing through art-making, kinship and vulnerability—rejecting isolation, silence, and disconnection in the face of trauma.

 

 

 

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