The landmine project

‘The Landmine project’ is part of Border Agency art collective. In it, the cultural construction of landscape is explored, particularly in relation to the minefields of the Atacama Desert. We begin with the question of what role does technology play in mediating our experience of landscape? Considering the minefields as a singular case of landscape that can only be experienced as mediated, we propose to visualize that subject-space-technology that define the experience of the contemporary landscape. To investigate this concern we use two strategies of artistic research; the production of a technologically mediated (drone, video, photography) and also the creation of an imagined image of a landscape through the collective story (map, drawing, conversation).

Fieldwork

We conducted two different fieldworks. First one in January 2016 in San Pedro, and a second one in April 2017 in the limit between Chile and Peru near Arica. For the first field trip the whole team stayed a week in San Pedro de Atacama, located in the high Andes, very close to the border with Bolivia and Argentina. We tackled the minefields in three ways. First, we flighted the drone over the mined territories. We filmed different tours on the land imitating the height and speed of a walker, ie about 2 meters above the ground. In addition, we made a photographic and graphic record of the objects involved in the minefields, including the mines themselves, the mining and demining tools, military vehicles, signage, soil types, vegetation and rocks, among others. Among these materials, we accessed the original military maps with which the minefields were drawn. These same maps, -handmade in the 70 ‘and 80’- are being used today to find and remove mines from the fields. Afterwards we used these drawings as a basis for designing part of the exhibition. Finally, we interviewed approximately 20 people, residents and visitors to the area. We talked with a family of shepherds, tour guides, foreign tourists, academics, students, workers, municipal employees, teachers and military. All of them drew a map representing the way they travel the territory, including minefields. Thus we built a small archive of subjective maps that reveal the intimate and everyday side of minefields and desert landscape of San Pedro.

The second explored territory was the denominated 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 several countries. We arrived cautious, suspicious and fearful about the potential danger of the place. We first worried about solving logistics and personal protection, having enough drinking water, protecting ourselves from the sun, getting used to the meal schedule and getting sleep. We quickly noticed that there were not many comfortable places to be alone. We proposed a collective action that consisted in identifying places around the camp free from anti-personnel mines. Using rods, sticks and branches intervened with reflective tape, we demarcated a limit that allowed at all times – especially during the night – to identify the areas where one could circulate without fear. In this manner, the makeshift stakes began forming a diagram in the territory; a record of our most common routes, which made visible the way we were occupying this space. Once we were settled, the days passed placidly: the beach, the paradisiacal climate, the calm and silence. We had formed a dutiful group, in which people were willing to collaborate with one another, organised at the domestic levels, and only busy with participating in the “utopian citadel” (Alarcón and Saavedra, El Triángulo Terrestre, HAWAPI Catalog 2017) that we had managed to create. However, it was just then that a white municipal truck appeared on the edge of the beach, with officials accusing us of invading the territory with the objective of appropriating it. Our camp on the border also provoked complaints from the residents of the adjacent Peruvian town of Santa Rosa, which resulted in more decisive pressures for our expulsion from the area. What was published by the local press was a lie-truth, in the sense of opening our eyes to a way of seeing things that was not precisely false. Because, by trying to transitorily inhabit a territory, we became – in the eyes of those who inhabit it – invaders of that place.