Border Agency art collective

Hawapi 2023, New York — «Out of Context» Arriving in New York with Hawapi meant returning to a question we had already grown in an earlier encuentro: what happens when you can’t trust the ground beneath your feet. That question, which we had previously worked through from the desert and its minefields, opened up again on entirely different terrain — a city foreign to our usual territories, where the ground was no longer sand or salt flat but asphalt, bureaucracy, invisible borders. And the question took on a form we hadn’t expected: one member of the group couldn’t travel because his visa was denied. His absence wasn’t an administrative detail but a shared experience for all of us: the ground that was supposed to be solid — the very possibility of crossing a border to think together — turned out to be exactly what we couldn’t rely on. Over eleven days we worked with that fracture as part of the encuentro itself, holding the collective conversation from within that absence too, understanding that being «out of context» wasn’t only a geographic or artistic condition, but something that could also be imposed from outside, without warning, on the bodies and trajectories of those trying to find one another.

We carried out fieldwork in Bosque Pehuén, a conservation reserve belonging to the Mar Adentro Foundation. In January 2022, we spent two weeks with our families and the artist Sebastián Calfuqueo working in the recovered forests of the Mar Adentro Foundation. During the residency, we carried out different actions that aimed to make visible the relationships between the species and the temporalities that co-exist there. We arrived at the Pehuén Forest longing to be affected by the infinite relationships that underpin notions of landscape. We wanted to inhabit and understand the forest beyond the camera’s mediated gaze. We wanted to smell, touch, get dirty… turn into a forest. Feel and think through the experience of being IN that territory. We devised different strategies to be in the forest and think of it not as taxonomies of species and experiences, but as connecting relationships. In this process, and following some ideas put forward by Tomás Ibarra (2020), we set out to go, touch and link the elements that contained the memory, encountering the stumps along the way. These are tree trunks that were cut down, burned, or simply fell, speaking to a time when this place was a productive site of native timber extraction. They also remind us of and make visible a much longer and imperceptible history. Understanding these remnants of trees as reservoirs of memory and new life, places where ecosystems reproduce again and where new trees are born and take up residence, means that the boundaries between the living and the inert are blurred. The interdependence of organisms and the becoming of a deep time are expressed very clearly. We created a series of stoneware ceramic pieces in which the textures of the stumps are imprinted by contact between the trunk and the paste. The shapes engraved in the ceramics emerged as rapidly as the rest of the forest. At the same time, we plotted a grid of points along our routes through the forest by recording our geolocation as we marked the stumps. Thus, we recorded the dead/living trees in photography, video, geolocation and stoneware. The experience in Bosque Pehuén opened a new dimension of what we had been investigating in Bosque de Fuego, as we found another forest within the forest, formed by the remains of trees that, in turn, build an internal network in the ecosystem. We discovered a forest within the forest, and that was a find we were not looking for.

The team travelled for a week to the Hawapi residence camp on the border between Chile and Peru. The work took place in the Terrestrial Triangle, a territory that is disputed between the two countries. They performed demarcation actions aimed at reclaiming the territory. This had unexpected consequences with the inhabitants of the neighbouring town (Santa Rosa). The second territory explored was the Terrestrial Triangle, disputed by Chile and Peru and claimed as their own by both countries. We settled there with a group of 15 artists from various countries in April 2017. We arrived cautious, suspicious and fearful of the potential danger of the place, so we were first concerned about sorting out logistics and personal protection, having enough drinking water, protection from the sun, getting used to the meal schedule and getting to sleep. We quickly realised that there were not many comfortable places to be alone and proposed a collective action that consisted of marking places around the camp that were cleared of landmines. By means of sticks, poles and branches intervened with reflective tape, we demarcated a boundary that would make it possible at all times – especially at night – to identify the areas where people could walk without fear. The set of improvised stakes were thus building a diagram in the territory, a record of our most common routes that made visible the way in which we were occupying this space. Once installed, the days passed placidly: the beach, the paradisiacal climate, the calm and the silence. We had formed a group concerned with their work and with collaborating on each other’s activity, organised on domestic levels and only concerned with participating in the “utopian citadel” (Alarcón and Saavedra, Triángulo Terrestre, HAWAPI Catalogue 2017) that we had managed to create. But it was just then that a white municipal van appeared at the edge of the beach, with officials accusing us of trespassing and taking over the territory. Our encampment on the border also provoked complaints from the inhabitants of the neighbouring Peruvian town of Santa Rosa, which resulted in further pressure for our expulsion from the area. What was published in the local press was a lie-truth, in the sense that it opened our eyes to a way of seeing things that was not false. By trying to inhabit a territory in a transitory way, we had become invaders of that place in the eyes of those who inhabit it.