The Disappearance. Desert Crossings: from Gobi to Atacama

The disappearance. Desert crossings: from Gobi to Atacama. Menene Gras Balaguer I “The subject of a classical vision, though still bewildered by the vertigo of things, finally finds himself in confrontation with that same vertigo; crossing the world -travelling the world- he discovers his own truth, a truth that to start with was only potential and latent within him, becoming reality through his confrontation with the world (...). There is no journey unless barriers are crossed -political, linguistic, social, psychological, including those invisible barriers that separate one neighborhood from another in the same city, those among people, and the tortuous barriers which block our way in our own infernal depths” (1). The latest project by Magdalena Correa (Santiago, Chile, 1968) focuses on desert imaginery and implies at first the localization of the place or places where its production is carried out. The act of recognising and diagnosing the territory starts with the movement of the journey, usually taking the form of the most common expeditions and carrying out the preparation required for a journey of these characteristics. The “Austral” project (2), which precedes the present one, is from a current perspective a reference which is given continuity even before what was later to become an interpretation of two territories whose geomorphology respond to the definition of what is commonly known as a “desert”, represented by the Gobi and Atacama Deserts, successively, which are located in two clearly separated regions of the world, their respective languages and cultures separated by the Pacific Ocean. The journey to Patagonia was the start of an exploration between the subject and the territory as a space of origin and transit, where the former reproduces the cycle of life in each of the experiences gained. A territory whose sense of belonging confirmed her experience of possession and relationship with the “place” she planned to approach. To overcome one's own ignorance and take control over the physical space where it is represented was essential in order to approach the apparently infinite and boundless body of the region where she would concentrate her work. The exploration of this body consisted of the application of the most elementary methodology in experimental science, to which end she adopted the measures she deemed necessary for her initiation. After the results obtained on the ground, the artist put together a photographic and video archive which make up the material exhibited in AUSTRAL, name of the road or track which links the territory from north to south, connecting a space that had remained incommunicated. The Km “0” is located in Puerto Montt, and the road or track is structured in three sections, in such a manner that the first section reaches Chaitén; the second runs from this town to Coyhaique, and the third runs from there to Yugai, where the route ends, joining two territories which until recently had remained inaccassible, incommunicated and completely isolated from the rest of the world. The journey to Patagonia was also a journey to the “desert” which the artist was determined to carry out, as if she wanted to settle a debt she had contracted with origin and identity -a circular journey, not one towards Death, though, but towards the spiritual centre of gravity of an accidentally separated subject. The long distance between her usual place of residence and each of the two deserts she later planned to visit at first contributed to the confused identification of each location under the spell of an “illusion”. The artist journeyed across Patagonia for almost two months, experimenting her passage through the territory intent on her transitory and affective apprehension of it through physical contact, temporarily inhabiting the place or places of transit and feeling the harshness of an ever-changing and extreme environment. For this new project her intention was to cross two deserts located practically on opposite sides of the planet. Her approach concerning the sources was almost identical, but carrying out the preparations with a sense of pragmatism in order to carry only the bare essentials and the cameras she wanted to use. This journey was not just to one desert but to two testing grounds so to speak, characterised as deserts in spite of the toponymic differences between both locations, distance separating them and their historical identity. Not for one moment did she think of travelling to one desert without associating it with the next. When she started outlining this project, the Asian continent and the South American continent were exposed before her on the map as if they were a prolongation of the same territory, in spite of the division imposed by that immense oceanic lake which is the Pacific. She never understood her journey as a kind of “trip around the world”, where there could have been an uninterrupted expedition carried out over one single stretch of time, nor as a feat where she would have tested her resistance against adversity. After her experience in Patagonia, she understood that each one of those territories requires different preparation and equipment adequate to deal with ordinary circumstances as well as unforeseen situations. She also needed a break between one journey and another in order to build back her strength and take on a different type of experience, even if the period of time was only a few months, because in each case the journey had to be planned for the most suitable season, bearing in mind the extreme weather conditions in both deserts. But why the desert? We often identify the desert with an absence of time and space, the infinite and thick silence, impenetrable; the representation of abstract concepts we can not put to test anywhere else. The desert is the symbolic equivalent of silence, Nothingness and Death; often identified also with the sea, or simply with an extension with no beginning or end to a dominion that rejects limits and which extends as far as the eye can see and beyond. It is compared to the closest thing to an indivisible Totality which is impossible to appreciate from one single perspective, with one's own system for survival, but which needs to be explored and recognised in spite of the obstacles between the person undergoing their experience and a body that does not belong them, identified here with a natural space whose autonomy defies any attempt at simplification. The poetic nature of the desert seduced the artist both to embark on the Austral project and on her journey through the Gobi and Atacama deserts, where her fascination for the system of relationships that derive from an expedition carried out over two stages to two confines of the earth which had fuelled her imagination for a long time can be clearly seen. The mere mention of the word “desert” in itself suggests a series of images which invoke totality, fullness, a relationship between the individual and totality, the immensity and the end of the opposition between space and non-space. The belonging of an individual to nature(3) seems achievable again through identical and indivisible landscapes, as if they had not yet been named and could be appropriated at will by the passing individual without contracting a debt. The image of the desert also responds to the imaginery of what we hold to be freedom, in absolute terms. The artist raises the issue of recovering ties with Nature without ruling out the doubt concerning the possibility, nor restricting the means of expression which are appropriate and adapt to the disunited individual, who never manages to gather the fragments that make up their own unity, and the unity of the world. The artist's itineraries are laid out separately on the map, though they are part of the same project which she has treated as a unit from the beginning. The first part took place in Gobi, though she had never travelled before to China nor Mongolia. The journey's stages were planned beforehand and were corrected at the location of the actual experience, where the program was carried out. The period of time which preceded both journeys was for preparation, in order to later carry out everything as planned and avoid any possible obstacles. The desert is outlined on a map and on paper before travelling there to scout the area: just like she did before travelling to Patagonia, the artist makes inventories of everything she will need during her journey, in spite of knowing it is never enough and that facing certain weather conditions out in the open can distort any previous plans. The Patagonian desert had certain characteristics that she was aware of, but even so the actual experience exceeded her expectations by far: “written” documents can attempt to warn about the unforeseeable, when conceived as an instrument to circumscribe, annotate, delimit an experience in an environment that is, in this case, unknown. Written documents point to a conceived itinerary and a plan to structure the routes on a terrain where latitudes lose their visibility, generating the mirages which vanish as soon as we approach them. Geography has little weight in the aforementioned poetic nature, aside from the details of symbolic deserts it provides to the user which try to explain and describe the spaces gathered under that name or term. Manuel Seco's dictionary defines the desert as a “very arid region almost or entirely void of vegetation or inhabitants”, and quotes the Sahara Desert, with an extension of 9 million Km2, as the world's largest. The rule, however, cannot be applied in the same manner to all types of deserts according to the existing classifications. These are usually useful in order to group different regions according to affinity, allowing for a better understanding of the natural phenomena that gave way to these formations.

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