Steps to an Ecological Aesthetic in the Atacama (original) (raw)
Related papers
2004
In this paper I analyze the main styles of engravings and paintings of the Antofagasta Region (Northern Chile), vis a vis with environmental, cultural, and historic changes experimented by the Atacama Andes for the last five-thousands years. I discuss the relative importance of external stress and the Andean culture tradition over this rock art as a symbolic device. I suggest that engravings and paintings were both, (1) part of ritual transactions with deities to guarantee the subsistence, and (2) discourses related to power and identity of Atacama cultures.
Taira, the dawn of art in Atacama / Taira, el amanecer del arte en Atacama
2017
This book is a publication associated with the exhibition of the same name (November 30, 2017 - May 30, 2018), one of the first temporary rock art exhibitions in the world designed as an immersive experience. The text is aimed at the general public, but, following the style of the publications of the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art, includes notes and references for those who wish to deepen in some topics or examine its archaeological and anthropological foundations. In fact, its seven chapters update the conclusions that the author has reached after more than 30 years of research in the Alera Taira, a rock-shelter located in the interior of the Loa river canyon. His paintings, engravings and picto-engravings of camelids are naturalistic and date mainly from the first millennium before our era. Variants of the Taira style have been recorded in much of the highlands of the ancient Atacama, now known as the Antofagasta Region, Chile. It is argued that this art was a form of rituality of the herders of the region to get the increase of the flocks in respectful dialogue with the deities that govern the earth and the sky. Este libro es una publicación asociada a la exposición del mismo nombre (30 de noviembre de 2017 – 30 de mayo de 2018), una de las primeras exposiciones temporales sobre arte rupestre en el mundo diseñada como una experiencia inmersiva. El texto está dirigido al público en general, pero, siguiendo el estilo de las publicaciones del Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, incluye notas y referencias para quienes deseen profundizar en algunos temas o examinar sus fundamentos arqueológicos y antropológicos. De hecho, sus siete capítulos actualizan las conclusiones que el autor ha alcanzado después de más de 30 años de investigación en el Alero Taira, un abrigo rocoso ubicado en el interior del cañón del río Loa. Sus pinturas, grabados y pictograbados de camélidos son de factura naturalista y datan principalmente del primer milenio antes de nuestra era. Variantes del estilo Taira han sido registradas en gran parte de las tierras altas de la antigua Atacama, hoy conocida como Región de Antofagasta. Se argumenta que este arte era una forma de ritualidad de los pastores de la región para conseguir el aumento de los rebaños en diálogo respetuoso con las deidades que gobiernan la tierra y el cielo.
Natura: Environmental Aesthetics After Landscape (introduction)
New book with contributions from Maria Thereza Alves, Ursula Biemann, Lisa Blackmore, Jill H. Casid, Emanuele Coccia, Oliver Lubrich, Nuno Ramos and others. Out now from Diaphanes: http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/N/bo28415660.html For poets, artists, philosophers, and even environmental activists and historians, the landscape has long constituted a surface onto which to project visions of utopia beyond modernity and capitalism. Yet amid fracking, deep sea drilling, biopiracy, and all the other environmental ravages of late capitalism, we are brought to re-examine the terms of landscape formations. In what ways might artistic, scholarly, and scientific work on nature push our thinking past seeing the world as something we act on, and instead give agency to the landscape itself? Natura takes up this challenge, exploring how recent activist practices and eco-artistic turns in Latin America can help us to reconfigure the categories of nature and the human. Moving from botanical explorations of early modernity, through the legacies of mid-twentieth-century landscape design, up to present struggles for the rights of nature and speculative post-human creations, the critical essays and visual contributions in this anthology use interdisciplinary encounters to reimagine the landscape and how we inhabit it.
Journal of Political Ecology Vol. 26, 2019 760, 2019
Multiple dynamics produce the ecological present. For the past 30 years or more, in the southern Atacama salt pan (Salar) in northern Chile, extractive industries have been accumulating minerals and water in exhaustive quantities, taking ever more than may be regenerated. However, the exhaustion of the Salar de Atacama involves a more complex set of symptoms than demonstrable environmental depletion. Fragmented scientific knowledge of the salt pan due to the privatization of water and under-regulation of mining provides a partial explanation for this complexity. In this article, we discuss these political conditions of environmental knowledge and, using a range of methodologies, we show that the scale of resource extraction threatens social and environmental harm and exhaustion may manifest in unexpected ways. We used remote sensing data to elaborate maps that reflect environmental change (1985-2017), relative to the intensification of extractive activity for copper and lithium salts in the area. Using these data, we undertook ethnographic and participatory mapping work to discuss with people from the Peine Indigenous community how they have experienced ecological change related to mineral and water extraction in the southern Salar. A review of the historical and archaeological material helps us to show the depth of Indigenous people's relationships to and knowledge of the salt pan and surrounds, and how social memory may be ecological. Combining the different results of our research, we argue that ecological exhaustion emerges from social, environmental and political conditions driven by both tangible and uncertain impacts of industrial extraction. Revealing these conditions of exhaustion raises key questions about the complexity of the effects of extraction.
Riders on the storm: Rock art in the Atacama Desert (Northern Chile)
World Archaeology, 1999
Rider and mount iconography is common in the rock art of northern Chile but it is little investigated and poorly understood. This paper takes a new approach which focuses on the meaning and context of these equestrian images. It surveys the contexts in which equestrian imagery, particularly that associated with Apostle Santiago, is used and the meanings it invokes in colonial period illustrations and contemporary indigenous Andean cultures. These insights form the basis of a new interpretation of the equestrian rock art imagery of the Aiquina area of northern Chile. It is argued that the incorporation of equestrian iconography into rock art was not a simple process of importing exotic items and ideas but a complex process involving the appropriation of imagery and ideas and the renegotiation of their meanings in new cultural contexts.