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 of the world, their respective languages and cultures separated by the . The journey to 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 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 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. One of the most accessible generic classifications distributes deserts into four categories: subtropical deserts, which are the warmest; the cold coastal deserts, which in spite of being located on identical latitudes can often present contradictory symptoms; the cold winter deserts, where the differences in temperature change radically in summer and winter; and the polar region deserts.

Among the subtropical deserts we have the the Sahara -name which derives from the Arabic term “Sahra” for “desert”- which extends between Morocco, the Western Sahara, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Mauritania, Mali, Nigeria, Chad, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia; the Arabian Desert, which covers Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Yemen; the Kalahari Desert, in Botswana, South and Namibia; the Australian Desert; the Great Sandy Deserts, Great Victoria and Simpson, apart from Sturt Stony, in ; both Californian deserts, Mojave (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah) and Sonora (California, Mexico); the Chihuahua Desert in Mexico and southwest USA, and the Thar Desert in India. Contrary to popular belief, the material they are made up of is not always sand, but in some cases they are made up of gravel and stones, in spite of the fact that sand dunes are one of the most characteristic elements. The variety of subtropical deserts is the most diverse and abundant, with their undulating landscapes or their sandy plains, on occasion occupying large extensions like that occupied by the Sahara or the Arabian Desert. As for the coastal deserts, close to the sea, we have the Namib Desert, shared between Angola, Namibia and South Africa; and the Atacama Desert, considered the world's most arid, where a measurable rainfall, that is, 1mm or more, only happens once every 5 or 400 years. This desert of nitrate, sand and lava which was the object of Magdalena Correa's exploration shall be dealt with later in more detail. For now it simply needs to be classified in general terms in order to add context. The cold winter deserts are the Desert in Nevada, Oregon and Utah, the Colorado Plateau, in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming; the Argentinian and Chilean Patagonian Desert, the Kara-Kum in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, the Kyzyl-Kum Desert in Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, the Iranian Desert, the Taklamakan in China and the Gobi Desert, which invades China and Mongolia. Finally, we have the polar deserts, the vastest: the Desert, shared by USA, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, with snow, glaciers and tundra; and the Antarctic, settled upon a frozen platform. This classification is just an attempt at grouping distant locations which nonetheless have characteristics in common, and can be associated in order to establish certain relationships, which in turn complete the information obtained through the exploration of one or more “types of spaces”, often proving as wrong a majority of topics derived from the identification of what a desert is imagined to be.

The definition of “desert” often coincides with that of an ecosystem where the dryness of the environment due to scarce rainfall is predominant, though certain life-forms do exist, and the sand dunes often share space with vegetation resistent to the lack of humidity, growing among the rocks. The uniformity of the desert is denied by the existence of a variety such as that mentioned before, and due to an orography which depends on occasionally extreme weather conditions, depending on the time of day. In spite of their distribution over the surface of the five and the distances between them, they constitute the most extensive mass on the planet, occupying a total surface area of 50 million Km2, the equivalent of a third of the earth's surface. Deserts can present different types of soil and contain valuable mineral deposits. Their formation could have been influenced, basically, by wind or erosion, in spite of being an environment which has generously preserved fossils and human utensils. The classification of deserts into “types” generally responds to the number of rainfalls each year, the measurement of annual rainfall, temperature, humidity and other factors. In 1953, Peveril Meigs divided the earth's desert regions in three categories, according to their rainfall. Thus, extremely arid areas are those which have twelve consecutive rainless months, arid areas are those with less than 250mm of annual rainfall and semi-arid areas have an average rainfall of 250-500mm, giving rise, in some cases such as in the Gobi Desert, to a steppe. Deserts are subjected to classification due to their geographic location and weather pattern: deserts in the path of trade winds, like the Sahara Desert, where temperatures easily rise to 52º C.

These winds are produced within two strips of the earth, divided by the Equator and formed by the warm air in this region; deserts located within intermediate latitudes, between parallels 30º and 50º N and within the same latitudes on the in subtropical areas of high atmospheric pressure; deserts formed due to barriers against humid air (mountain ranges); deserts located close to the sea are greatly influenced by the cold ocean currents that run parallel to the coast; monsoon deserts, monsoon being an Arabic word for season, are those that encourage the wind systems known as monsoons, and which respond to the variations in temperature between continents and oceans, as can be seen from the phenomena associated to the Rajasthan Desert in India or the Thar Desert in Pakistan; the polar deserts which cover a surface area of over 90 million Km2 are not characteristic because of their sandy dunes, but due to their snow dunes, rain and snow which go through a process of freezing and thawing that in turn generates an important seasonal dependency; paleodeserts are those which preserve fossil remains from up to 500 million years ago, while at the same time there are ancient deserts that became humid tropical forests. The Martian Deserts also belong to this classification, considered to be the only planet aside from Earth where eolic activity has been detected, the cause of atmospheric circulation and the formation of sand seas with an extension of up to 5 million Km2.

Contrary to conventions that describe the desert as a place void of vegetation, with no north nor south, no organic life, there are many deserts inhabited not only by fauna and flora that resist the tough conditions, but also by human beings, nomadic tribes or settlements like those that transit the Gobi Desert or those that occupied the saltpeter “offices” in the Atacama Desert. Not only are the immeasurable spaces of these regions presented in this project, but also the wildlife and their inhabitants. The oral testimonies collected are a first-hand material documenting the claims of the inhabitants regarding their abandon by the authorities. Deserts are not idyllic landscapes which we sometimes want to believe in to identify a region in the world where civilization has not yet imposed its social pact, but to the contrary, in spite of the need for these ecosystems where man's intervention does not manage to take control of nature. The expeditions to terrestrial deserts that have been and still are carried out show us the difficulties that have to be overcome to cross these inhospitable regions, often bearing extreme temperatures day and night, struggling against adverse winds and in very precarious conditions. It does not cease to be surprising that the artist insisted on linking two expeditions located in countries so far apart, in different hemispheres and latitudes. For her the meaning of this double project resided in the chance to give continuity to an exploration which started in a place never visited before, and to another which she had certain knowledge of, located as it was in her country of origin, and to where she had made sporadic trips. On the other hand, what encouraged her to establish links between one territory and another where the differences she sensed between these two types of space, and her fascination with the actual concept of the desert, in addition to the fact that one of them was located in China and the other in Chile. This gave her tools to organise a system of analogies and comparisons with which she would attempt to integrate both regions and the phenomena that characterise them, identifying the constants found over the course of her travels.

Peter Wild, Professor at the University of Utah, took a literary approach in his typification of deserts with “The Desert as Literature: A Survey and a Sampling”(4), pointing out the attraction deserts have exerted on writers, novelists, poets and artists over the last two centuries. In his opinion, authors like Pierre Loti, Albert Camus or North American writer Edward Abbey show the impact a journey to the desert had on them. However, Wild soon makes a difference between the prior “discovery” of deserts, dating back to the pioneers who like Marco Polo crossed Central and travelled to the Mongol Empire, in spite of insisting that in Western cultures desert literature had a greater influence in than in the USA, where there author highlights the pragmatic and utilitarian purpose of the expeditions, until the publication of the text “The Desert”, by John C. Van Dyke (1856-1932), where his sensitivity towards the beauty of this natural landscape can be appreciated. On the other hand, French, Swiss, Norwegian, British or German travellers had sought in the desert that which was exotic, loneliness, silence, emptiness and the Void for over two centuries. The possibility of discovery and of being the sole witness of visions which imagination or fantasy had associated with the word “desert”, an arid place with impossible temperatures, where nature is manifested in all its violence or in all its stillness. Surprise benefits whoever investigates their different frames of mind and compares them to the variations that nature in its extreme states can present over a period of time no greater than twenty-four hours.

Day and night are often the representation of opposites in absolute terms. Pierre Loti (1850- 1923) was one of the first in the tradition of travel literature, after Nerval or Flaubert, in whose “Journey to the East”(5) we can find descriptions very similar to those of subsequent writers, and which supposedly proposes a modern understanding of the desert giving preference to the experiences of the individual in contact with a Nature that resists any classification through “westernised” colonial topics. “Le Désert”(6) was published in 1984 and over a century later this book is still a reference for Western narrative concerning the desert. Loti makes sublime descriptions of the infinite void lashed by the warm or cold winds, depending on the time of day, and the pleasure of dropping his European habits, dressing in imitation of the Arabian Sheikhs in order to combine the adequacy to the region travelled through and the resistance to the harshness of a tough and aggressive environment. When you travel for three days across a waterless plain, following the vague tracks of men and animals who over different ages have crossed the dry sands of the desert, you inevitably put any preconceived ideas of the world and of existence itself to the test. Loti speaks of the camels and of the monotonous swaying of their bodies while they walk, the changing colours of the sand dunes, the disappearance of all signs of life -”no birds, no insects, not even the flies that are everywhere”. He compares terrestrial deserts with marine deserts, to later point out that while the former are normally sterile and smothered by Death, the latter show an extraordinary vitality with the marine lifeforms that inhabit its depths. However, in defence of terrestrial deserts, he tells us that at the same time we have the impression we are seeing the world before Creation, in this land we imagine to be the world before the world. Everything coming from the outside world is transformed into a relationship which integrates its being with that of Nature, what he ascribes to the act of perceiving with the clarity of “pure enlightenment”, free from obstacles, the shape of mountain ranges and of all other elements as if untouched, giving one the impression that they are the first to discover the eternal character of all things. The writer is referring to the geological splendour of the world before Creation, before the hand of man transformed it.

Words try to translate the intensity of superimposed sensations and project what is seen, devoted to the solitude of the landscape in order to feel more deeply the passing of time, the camels surrounding the tents at dusk and the arrival of nightfall to a place where silence is comparable to death, a disaffected sea of soil. Loti mentions the terror he feels when faced with the cosmic depths he believes he perceives as if it were a religious experience. The great Arabian Desert is compared to a flat ocean which surprises us at every step with the ceaseless mirages that become visible, making him say nonetheless that this is the land where nothing changes -”the true East, immutable in its dust and dreams”. There where “the Arabian Desert unfurls the infinite trail of its reddish desolation”. Contemplating the blue sky, the profound solitude of the great Tih Desert, inhabited by savage Bedouin tribes, he imagines the caravans of over thirty thousand pilgrims who travel to the Mecca every year. “Our dromedaries, excited by the vast open space before them, raise their heads and sniff the wind, changing their languid pace to something more similar to a trot”. The idea is to identify all the symptoms that indicate the possibility of defining the place that becomes a territory even when it is only momentarily occupied. The changes of colour across the landscape, the temperature, the force of the wind, the scars on the ground, any variation of the assumed stability of the region are the focus of incessant observation for the traveller who sets out to register everything they see and everything that makes them feel the journey, out in the depths of the open desert.

The mention of the term “desert” often seems to arouse an enigmatic fascination which is usually superimposed on any classification of the different toponymic and geographic modalities suggested or contained within it, such as those already mentioned, insofar as its description is prone to a kind of intertextuality, by means of which general allusions sharply enlarge the capacity of the signifier. The pronunciation of this word, with independence from its perceptible location, evokes in itself a landscape which repeats itself in a number of locations around the world, occupying large extensions of land as if they were uninhabited terrestrial oceans; but we could also refer to a mood, a subjective experience at a given level, and to a perception of emptiness and the Void associated with it. The desert has always fed an imaginery eager for adventure and freedom, which seeks in spaces represented by this term a refuge from the obstacles of everyday life. Nature is presented in its pure state, like in the rainforest, the unexplored woods, the open oceans and seas, the white glaciers, though its experience with reality may not be so idyllic or liberating, insofar as its image can be easily transformed into an abstraction which admits the shapes of plenitude and emptiness, of life and Death. It is essential to be “prepared” in order to face the expressions or manifestations of a natural environment not dominated by man, but whose power of seduction is, however, a constant, starting with romantic literature, which encouraged travelling and knowledge of ruins from the past, to today's narrative, where the nomadic condition of the individuals living in the “book” is registered. Obviously, any given generalisation is destined to be a failure, because each one of us are our own exceptions and our perception is proposed as “unique” and unrepeatable. But, the truth is that beyond the subjective experience, the description of the desert is obtained through a coincidence of opinions which refer to sensations and impressions experienced through a perceptible contact with reality and with what is real, where the truth of the desert is made manifest, the good and bad side of its landscapes, with independence of the differences each person perceives through their own experience.

“The Desert”, by John C. Van Dyke(7), originally published in 1901, is considered in the USA as one of the books that compete at the summit of 20th century travel literature. It is the desert that occupies parts of California, Nevada, Baja California, Arizona and Sonora. More distant geographic locations, but whose common feature is the desert, without this necessarily meaning a plain only altered by sandy dunes formed by aggressive winds that blow across them. Though according to this author, what determines the appearance of the desert is the lack of water and the corresponding aridity, which affects the physiognomy of its landscape. The initial identification of the desert coincides with a vision of the land whereby large extensions of sand coexist with blue skies and mountain ranges, whose variable height generate uncertainty, surrounding with their valleys the moving plateaus or the rocky terrain where the beginning of the end seems to be announced on the beds of ancient lakes dried up long ago. The author starts from the assumption that water is the factor determining the change of climatic seasons, nature's and man's essential nourishment; its scarcity or absence, as in the case of the Atacama Desert, is the cause for this “malformation” which obstructs the growth of vegetation and imposes a struggle for survival that is only successful in a handful of cases. Van Dyke insists on the idea that living things contained within its limits seem to struggle against destructive forces which threaten to eradicate them. He interprets this as a war of the elements and a struggle for existence, the ferocity of which is unrivalled. “One becomes aware of this ferocity as you get to know the desert”. A place where he considers “life is particularly wild” and where “everything is at war with whatever is closest, meaning the conflict never ends, far from the harmony of the “romantic landscape” and its representations in paintings, where the individual is integrated into the natural medium. “The desert is brutally silent”, but silence, instead of hiding it, reveals the struggle for life and the struggle for space of its inhabitants, day after day.

The descriptions this author makes of its anatomy are the result of the observation and deep knowledge of the subject of his investigation. Contrary to popular belief whereby stability is predominant in the desert, the apparent stillness of its landscapes, he opposes the constant changes of the land, due to the movement of sand which he describes in these terms: “The moving sands! They move slowly, overlapping each other wave by wave, grain by grain; though by day or by night, they pile up. They devastate, bury, destroy, and the untiring spirit shakes them, blowing them somewhere else (...). So the surface of the desert is far from being permanent”. Later, he continues adding that the vegetation is too scarce to obstruct the movement of the sand, carried by the winds. “The strength of these desert winds can be, in open spaces, terrifying”(8). According to his observations, the wind always beats on the stone it erodes, while on the other hand it shapes the sand into forms comparable to the human body. The wind is the determining factor for erosion and the changes on the ground's surface, but at the same time it is what keeps these arid places alive, places that would otherwise be identified with death, immutable and eternal. Van Dyke warns us that the first incursion into the desert always holds surprises, as our imagination always constructs picturesque and exotic scenarios which reality is quick to deny. He even asks why we seem to think a desert is just a sea of sand, and in spite of the fact that it is an elemental feature of most deserts, as are the sandstorms, the camels and the nomads that inhabit them, the desert is more than that and is often a hostile environment. He must have been aware of the fact that in the desert, though the lack of water may be decisive, it rains, except those regions where rain is an event that might take place every ten or twenty years, as is the case in the Atacama Desert. And this rain, in spite of its “rareness”, becomes on occasions a violent and brief downpour concentrated in one single spot, though it may have been announced with threatening black clouds covering a much wider area. Rain that, on touching the ground, mixes with the sand and the gravel, becoming yellowish in colour, and due to its aggressiveness, can cause damage similar to that caused by a lack of water. No less true is the fact that in almost every desert there are isolated places where rainwater is stored near palm trees, creating the disconcerting oases which seem out of place in such landscapes, where there is little hope of finding vegetation or humidity. These oases have received the name of Gardens of Paradise, because their discovery often means a truce for the traveller who sometimes needs two days or more to get there.

Before quoting the second monograph dedicated to the identification between the desert and literature, published in 2001, it is interesting to point out the references that Peter Wild, director of the first, makes to European writers such as Paul Klee, Saint-Exupéry and Philippe Diolé. Klee (1870-1940) went to the Tunisian desert in 1914 with August Macke, also visited by André Gide, Oscar Wilde and Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom he shared his enthusiasm for orientalism in the north of Africa. When he narrates his experience, he insistently mentions that he felt he was possessed by colour in an initiatic way, convinced that from then on his paintings would never be the same again. He believed he had discovered the secrets of colour during his journey to the territory now known as Ez-Zahra, a fact he tried to communicate through his work. In fact, his orientalism is also projected onto the figure of the Mandala(9), a term which according to Klee can be applied to the entire cosmos, as he illustrated in one of his key paintings in this respect, titled “The Mandala: Sacred Circle in Tibetan Buddhism”. Delacroix, Ingres, Fortuny, Matisse and Klee invented an orientalism which proved very influential for the historical vanguard and the contemporary or immediately posterior generations which met in the north of Africa, from Morocco to Egypt, in the end very close geographically, but also very different to what we understand today as the East and the Eastern world.

In the history of 20th century travel literature, a key figure is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who turned his crossings into journeys across the deserts, in the heights where he had the visions which inspire most of his literature. “Wind, Sand and Stars”, published in 1936, is a collection of the six episodes he wrote for the newspaper “L'Intransigent”, replacing the original assignment to cover the expedition from Paris to Saigon which he was to embark on, for the forced landing in the Libyan desert he had to make when he crashed into the summit of a plateau at 260Km/h, and which he entitled “Le Vol brisé. Prison de Sable” (“The interrupted flight. Sand Prison”). In 1933, he had flown Marseille-Saigon, which ended in a forced landing at the mouth of the Mekong River when he was flying towards Angkor. In spite of the spectacular accident, he was unhurt, but in his account he transmits the experience of solitary death in the desert. Two days later, himself and his companion were located, but if they had not stumbled upon the Bedouin who offered them his own water, they would not have survived. The passion for writing felt by the pilot – writer, or the writer who was a pilot, the order does not matter, seems to be the result of his need to communicate his experiences and discoveries thanks to aviation. The antecedents of his work are always found in the personal experiences of professional life. Almost like a premonition, his plane was shot down when taking off on a mission in Corsica at the end of WWII, the 31st July 1944, causing an accident in which he was killed after having survived so many times throughout his professional career.

Saint-Exupéry's testimony becomes a tragic tale which assumes the poetry of solitude in the real desert he builds in the air and can see from the sky, during the day or at night, and the desert in which a Bedouin saves his life, after having suffered a panic attack due to the crash. The desert is the life and the death he always considered inseparable and always questioned, reflecting about the essence of man and his existence on earth. Peter Wild also quotes another less popular French author, Philippe Diolé, who wrote about his adventures in the Sahara Desert. He speaks of the desert's power over our state of mind and the constructions our imagination imposes on the individual isolated there, where Nature does not allow for any mediation. For this author, the desert is not an empty space, but rather it is full of elements that contribute to the formation of the terrestrial bed like the wind, the extreme temperatures, the lack of water, the wealth in minerals, the shifting of the terrain, the rocky ground, the sandy dunes and the specific flora and fauna which manage to survive in such an environment. His contribution to the existing narrative about deserts is part of the abundant literature concerning these “places”, which have characteristics of their own according to their location, but also have in common the typification meant by the actual word “desert”. In his inventory, Wild does not forget to include the women missionaries who accompanied Mildred Cable to the Gobi Desert. She was one of the first British women to travel to this desert, and later, with Francesca French, they wrote the tale of their expedition, based on their experiences. In the following number of “ARIDLANDS”, dedicated to the desert as literature in 2001, Katherine Waser announced that the volume focused basically on European writers and to a lesser extent to Americans, questioning whether there actually is a literature of the desert, or a literature “of” and “about” nature. An issue which seems to interest her in particular is that which has to do with the identity of the inhabitants of the deserts, among which she mentions the Australian Aboriginals, Africans, Arabians, Mongols, Mexicans and Native Americans.

The year 2006 was declared the “Year of the deserts and dry lands” with the intention of celebrating the “unique” biological and cultural diversity of our deserts. The recommendations which were made in this respect mentioned the need for scientific development in order to understand and grasp the complexity of the desert regions, to implement useful strategies that may address the chronic problems originated by the lack of water. The awareness campaign concerning the environment and the need to enforce regulations for the protection of natural habitats is starting to see its first results. Though it is not easy for the observatories created to this effect, or the programmes proposed to address deficiencies such as lack of water and the damage we inflict on nature on a daily basis to avoid rebukes regarding climatic change or the transformations that can change the face of the planet, as indicated by the more rapid processes which threaten the future of humanity. Desertification poses a threat derived from the climatic change in which man has played, and still can play, a decisive role. In spite of the reports and investigations dedicated to this aspect and others that are related, the threat has not subsided nor has the gravity of the current situation regarding the future ceased to be real. Quite the opposite, it seems that we are trying to avoid the inevitable, knowing what the cost of our current squandering of energy will be for future generations. True, nature presents a specific behaviour and most phenomena produced within it are predictable because they respond to the cause/effect relationship verified through observation and experience, which are the main instruments of particular sciences, though this is not the case with ecosystems subjected to countless variables which transform both rural and urban areas of the planet.

Some testimonies concerning expeditions carried out to one or another of the deserts mentioned are also highly inspiring, as they contribute to fabricate the history of these apparently timeless regions, though nothing further from the truth. The tale of American archaeologist Charles Gallenkamp about explorer Roy Chapman Andrews, who along with his team drew the first detailed map of the Gobi Desert is stimulating, inasmuch as it illustrates the scope of a scientific expedition carried out in the 20's, with the aim of discovering this desert(10). Though the author of the book describes him as an adventurer and treasure- hunter, an image which does not correspond to what is considered today as an archaeologist or paleontologist, identifying him more with the Indiana Jones prototype than with an explorer. In accordance with these precedents, Gallenkamp faithfully documents the character of the expedition using a journalistic and adventure-book style, but faithfully describing the actual events in order to integrate the reader into that imaginary space, becoming part of the same even if only passively. The expedition was conceived as interdisciplinary, with a team of fifteen scientists and technicians, who were joined by twenty-six native assistants. In order to scout the area, the explorer organised a caravan of twenty-eight camels, five cars and two trucks. The aim of the expedition was the excavation of Paleolithic and Neolithic archaeological sites, and the study of the flora and fauna, turning the place into a sort of testing area where thousands of botanical specimens were collected. The geological observations led to the discovery of fossilised dinosaur nests and extinct mammals.

However, the powerful reason behind this expedition was the demonstration that the origin of man had to be looked for in Asian lands, instead of doing so on the African continent, as Charles Darwin had defended in “The Origin of Species”, claiming that man descended from primates similar to today's chimpanzees. Contrary to the evolutionist theories which place man's origin in primates, in the USA a a school of thought is developing which considers it necessary to carry out the investigation of the human species' first ancestor in Asia. Roy Chapman managed to get the New York Natural History Museum to be the main sponsor of the expedition, which was followed by a further four journeys. Though no human remains were found, the exploration had other successes. The expedition to the Gobi Desert and the steppes of Mongolia was full of danger, due to attacks on the caravans from local bandits, the administrative obstacles of the various bureaucracies, the supplies for the expedition, the climate, the sandstorms, the treacherous wind, and the unanticipated events that can happen in any situation. The descriptions of the organisation and planning of the expedition are very instructive, as they introduce us to the author's geography and imbue us with the passion for discovery. The author also conveniently warns us of the change in toponomy that has taken place in the region throughout the 20th century, such as the names Iren Dabasu () which became Erhlien or Erhlin; or Urga, the capital of Outer Mongolia, which in 1924 became Ulan Batar or Ulan Baatar. Most places, according to him, where they camped or focused their investigations during their Central Asian expeditions have disappeared from current maps, partly due to the fact that they were mostly nomad camps, wells close to caravan routes, sanctuaries, or names the explorers themselves gave to their camps.

This review is not complete without the lunar landscapes, whose deserts have been declared the oldest yet explored, if we consider that the Moon's age is greater than that of Earth, which has led to the exploration of its enigmatic surface in search of the slightest hint of organic life. In 2001, photographer Michael Light presented a selection of 129 photographs in San Francisco, taken from the archives of NASA, where a calculated total of 32.000 photographs had been collected during missions of the Apollo program, carried out from 1969 to 1972. From the first moon landing by the Apollo 11 to the program's last mission with Apollo 17 in 1972, the photographic documentation of the Moon collected by NASA had never been made public except for convenient releases to the media. Light's project, “Full Moon”, consisted of an exhibition and a book in order to reference the various flights to the Moon within the framework of the program mentioned, divided in three parts: the Journey (1), the orbit around the Moon (2) and the moon landing (3).The first of the three sections included images of Earth taken since take-off; the second, the lunar surface, and the third the images taken after the moon landing, and from the first moon-walk to the last, which was carried out in a lunar rover equipped with photographic cameras, antennas, 16mm cameras, TV cameras, in order to capture everything that could be seen. Through the selected photographs and the classification carried out later, the information captured during the course of four years of space travel and walks on the Moon, the duration of which was lengthened from two and a half hours during the first landing on the Sea of Tranquility, to the 22 hours of activity on the lunar surface during the three day stay on the Moon which ended the Apollo Program in December 1972. The objectives were to land a man on the Moon, examine the ground, take photographs to document the face of the Earth from the 384.000 Km distance that separates it from the Moon, never before explored, and the face of the Moon, to collect samples of the lunar surface and carry out seismological, geological, and fossil fuel research, and that which has to do with lunar winds. The exhibition of the images digitalised by Light using the negatives he selected from among the photographs taken automatically and those taken manually took place in Sydney, (Museum of Contemporary Art), New York (American Museum of Natural History), London (Hayward Gallery), Huis Marseille / Amsterdam Foundation, and San Francisco (Museum of Modern Art), and the book was published in seven languages, including in Spanish. The objective was to show how our perception of the planet changes when viewed at a distance only made possible through technological progress and information technology applications, and to experiment the different stages of a journey to the Moon, trying to discover the process of separation from Earth, the orbital trip around the Moon and the moon landing, followed by a walk on the Moon's surface during the course of the NASA missions that made possible the completion of the Apollo program as planned and having met their expectations. The Moon is no longer unknown nor can it be ignored, and the fact that it is mentioned here is because the concept corresponding to the different deserts on Earth, though the terms of comparison are not equivalent, is the nearest thing to the expeditions planned by NASA technicians to explore the Moon and the conditions of organic or inorganic life found, or yet to be found (11).

Going back again to the late 19th century, when stopping to look at travel books based on an experience in a place which fantasy has already given specific qualities, we can perceive the interest that moves one to this kind of journey to a non-place, such as a desert which still allows for discovery. All deserts are the “desert”, meaning that while an reference may be made to one in particular, it is always the same and deserts are only variations of the same name or word designating a type of differentiated location, with its own characteristics. Deserts are not all the same, but have many things in common which make them equivalents. There are many examples of those who set out on journeys in search of knowledge, who received instruction before doing so, calculating itineraries and making preparations which had to end in a journey through the routes established in the travel plan and observing the most appropriate timetables for the march. The testimonies based on sensorial registers on the terrain try to communicate the discovery and perception of the environment to the reader, at a certain time of day or night, when sensations are intensified or the vision ahead is cause for surprise. A visit to the desert, to any desert, is never interpreted as entertainment or pleasure, but as an expedition where there is the hope of living a useful and singular experience, where the information obtained about oneself cannot be dissociated from the outside world, due to the close relationships established between the individual, the being, and what is multiple, as it is like a single experience which has required thousands of kilomtres of travel and the stoic bearing of the aggressiveness of an apparently placid and inert environment. The transformation the individual experiments internally from the journey can be similar to what Paul Celan describes in his poem “From Darkness to Darkness” when he refers to that timeless instant when “I see my darkness live / I see its depths: / there it is still mine and lives”. The desert could be that place where nothing interferes between the subject of the experience and the being, their being, that of all objects and the world. Or at least this is where it is conceivable.

Before and after, in the testimonies gathered from the captures and annotations concerning what happens in the desert, during the course of an expedition, first one writes for oneself, in order not to forget everything seen and felt, and afterwards for the rest, to tell them about the experience or communicate the same sensations. Testimonies from travellers such as Francis Edgard Younghusband(12), British delegate for matters related to the Tibetan border, and the Count de Lesdain, are representative of a literature abounding in adventures which illustrate the singularity of organised nomadism, with a beginning and an end to the route. The first of these books is entitled “The Heart of a Continent”, the first edition dating back to 1904 and narrating the journeys to through the Gobi Desert, carried out between 1884 and 1994. And the second is the account of the journey from Peking to Sikkim through the Gobi and Tibetan Deserts, between 1904 and 1905. Edgar Younghusband narrates in first person his daily progress, the Gobi Desert a passage route where anecdotes follow one another, drawing on the vital experience of the traveller who organises the expedition with a small compact group formed by the camel driver, who also acted as guide, a Mongol assistant, the Chinese “boy”, eight camels and himself, while the interpreter had fled to Peking after refusing to continue. The narrator is surprised at the knowledge the guide has of the path, of the places where wells could be found, his recognition of the invisible tracks left by previous caravans and the way he can tell the time without a watch. The tale tells of the aspect of the landscape and there are many descriptions of the wildlife the traveller finds on his way -the Mongolian camel, the herds of sheep and the horses. But also the dangers the caravans are exposed to, such as attacks by bandits and thieves who are at large around the desert. One of the caravans he meets has been travelling for sixty days and is made up of some one hundred and fifty camels, most of them with no load though some carry boxes containing silver objects. Among his observations, his perception of distance and they way he feels deceived by appearances are interesting when he believes a small hill is five minutes away from where he stands and in reality is always further away: “there is nothing to guide the eye - no objects, no men, no trees to be appreciated. There is just a blank plain and a smooth naked hill, and it is difficult to tell whether a hill is half a mile or two miles away”.

As he reaches the “heart of the Gobi Desert”, he describes how the landscape gets more and more arid and the desert flora gradually disappears except for the scorched plants that resist the scarcity of water. As they travel through the unending plains where hardly a sound can be heard, for weeks, the traveller insists on the monotony of the journey, though he does tell us that the nights are extremely dazzling due to how the stars shine and the depth of the heavens. The journey was organised bearing in mind the environmental conditions of the desert during the month of May. The timetables for each section of the journey attempted to avoid the high temperatures both for the members of the expedition and for the loaded camels, so that they did not wander off during the night in search of food and get lost. The author of this “diary” or logbook explains that around three o'clock in the afternoon they started their march, which went on until midnight, on occasions even later, until the guide gave the signal to stop and decided on the place for the camels to rest, after a number of hours walking in the darkness, guided only by the light of the stars. At 8 am, a new day started, and after contemplating the landscape in the light of day, he breakfasted and took down his notes. His observations refer to the clarity of the atmosphere, which he ascribes to the almost total absence of humidity. The temperatures that were registered were considered to be highly important, due to the extreme variations between night and day, in addition to the wind, which could start to be strong at around 10 am, unleashing its extreme violence until evening. “If the wind blew from the north -he writes- the weather would be good, though cold. If it blew from the south, it would be warmer, clouds could form and it could rain”. This rain, however, would disappear before it touched the ground, and when the area where the mass of water had fallen was reached, there were chances that not a trace of water would be found. On occasions, when the wind was very aggressive, the caravan had to stop because the camels could not cope with the particles of sand whirled by the storms, transforming the orography and erasing the traces on the ground. Out of the passers-by in the Mongolian desert, the tale mentions the sheep that graze and seek water here and there, guided by a shepherd, unlike the wild horses which move around freely in herds with twenty mules with one or two riders who guide them in search of food, not returning until nightfall. The vegetation is scarce though there are many small shrubs and trees, and in some places even grass can be seen sprouting among the rocks. The worst, according to this narrator, is having to pitch the tent when the wind is blowing, because as soon as one side is secured and the other is approached, the wind pulls it out while it fills one's eyes with sand, and until the tent is fully assembled the process is pure torture, made even tougher if it is raining. The worst part is the wind which erases the tracks, changing the signs that point in the right direction, guaranteeing disorientation.

Conditions in the Gobi Desert have changed little during the century and a half elapsed between this expedition and the journey Magdalena Correa embarked on in 2006. The seductive power the place has over the artist is an essential circumstance so that she can experiment the urgency of satisfying her curiosity. During the preparatives for the expedition, she recognised the identification of the desert as an idea or concept with the exotism of what is understood as the East and what “Oriental”, mainly as regards to the Gobi Desert, whose legendary history in the West dates back to the description made by Marco Polo (1254-1324), the first to travel Asia from one end to the other, and to describe each kingdom, one after another, over the 24-year period he spent on the continent. Without being an historian nor a geographer, his descriptions are considered the precursors of true history and scientific geography. His description of the Gobi Desert takes into account the distances and the time needed to travel through them: “The desert is so large that it would take a year to travel from one end to the other, because at its narrowest point it takes a month's crossing. It consists entirely of mountains, sand dunes and valleys. There is nothing to eat”(14). This traveller wrote a detailed account of the life of the Great Khan and of the Mongol Empire. His narrative tackles the objective facts, but also the life and habits, highlighting among other aspects the practice of polygamy: according to him, Mongols could have as many wives as they chose, and when the head of the family died, the oldest son could keep all of his father's wives except his biological mother. And, as regards to nutrition, it may be interesting to know that perhaps tastes have not changed that much, nor have eating habits.

The literary and scientific diagnoses merge in some areas, while they diverge in others, as the objectives gradually differ. The East has been compared to deserts in northern Africa and to those in Central and Eastern Asia. These equivalence were perceived in the works of 19th century orientalist paintings and were later modified, as is the case of the work of artists such as Marina Abramovic, where the desert is not a represented image nor is it understood as a model for its own representation, but the setting of an experience stemming from her own project, to transform certain occurrences into an experience of knowledge, encouraged by silence and solitude. The journey to the desert during the first years of her career was foundational of an artistic practice where experience prevails over the object, because it was conceived as a simultaneous sliding into within herself. If the main territory for creation has developed within the limits of her body, the external manifestations of her introspection were projected onto her actions and performances, which made a decisive contribution towards the shaping of body art. The Sahara Desert (Northern Africa), the Thar Desert (Northeastern India and the east of Pakistan), the Gobi Desert (Mongolia) and the Western Desert in Australia have been the true basis of her artistic production, understood more as a practice than the construction of an object(15). The aim of the expedition was the exploration of the desert inasmuch as it became a discovery, understood as an exploration of herself, of life and death, which she transferred to her artistic production in an attempt at integrating herself within experience and the sensible act through which its visibility is achieved. Its mention responds to the paradoxical essence of an artistic practice in a medium which adapts to the characteristics of the desert, which is also comparatively associated with the expressions of Land art, which involves the subject of the landscape and the landscape itself in a single experience. The purpose of any action carried out in this setting corresponds to the conviction that “art” cannot be practised if it is not associated with the experience of travel and what it means, requiring as it does the full attention of the traveller.

II

The expeditions carried out by Magdalena Correa to the Gobi and Atacama Deserts are conceived more as a project undertaken from the moment the preparations are made and the itineraries are laid out on the map, until the journey itself, which just like a geologist's or an archaeologist's expedition -and to a lesser extent, that of a geographer-, who conceive their journey as the scientific research of a given territory. In spite of wanting to be any of these things, the truth is that her journey has nothing in common with the motives that move professionals to organise this type of incursion with the aim identified with the object of their discipline. For Magdalena Correa, the same as in “Austral”(16), the journey is the foundation of the project, its consistency acquired through the confrontation between being and nature, art and life, unity and totality, the particular and the universal, which she needs to carry out in an original setting where the intervention of man has hardly left a trace in comparison to the development of urban spaces since the start of modernity until today, and where time seems to have vanished, without an image of itself apart from silence and the apparent absence of movement. Though the diagnosis of popular imagination in this respect is often answered by the reality of landscapes which contrast with the most widespread beliefs concerning these and other qualities of the terrain, the skepticism of contemporary literature has contributed to the dissipation of all illusions which idealised Nature and its different expressions. In the particular case of the deserts related to this project, the author considers the power of attraction of the respective locations a determining factor for the traveller eager for adventure or for whoever wants to establish an unmediated relationship between the subject and the object of the experience, with the aim of attaining knowledge of oneself which would otherwise be impossible. Agreeing with Patricia Almarcegui when she says that “To travel is to establish a connection between the outside world and the identity of the traveller”(17), the artist's journey is the movement of the subject who travels from a world within to a world without, projecting herself and interiorising the experience acquired externally, in a process which brings together the search and the finding.

Without attempting to measure the terrain nor having elaborated a detailed plan, and having predicted an itinerary which is often altered on the way, as had happened to her in Patagonia, due to incidents with the weather or unfavourable winds which obstructed their way , the artist set out to imitate the great travellers who have temporarily lived as nomads, crossing the great Gobi and Atacama Deserts with the local guide and her caravan. But, her objective was the contemplation necessary to reach the information that “fixes” the visions captured in her photographs and the videos that make up the material exhibited. Awaiting for that kind of birth-giving through which not only what is unique is held still for an instant, but is also preserved, the artist understood the journey more like a form of wandering aimlessly, without the need of reaching any goals except the journey in itself. The non-existence of paths or routes which the wind often erases, undoubtedly favoured her conception of a wandering nomadism in no-mans-land, absorbed by nature, whose immensity is revealed when she encounters obstacles not invariably produced by herself. Her notebook only registers the development of the itinerary previously programmed with a few indications associated with different states of nature and states of mind, without intermediaries of any sort. What she writes betrays the lack of writing and that it is not a priority instrument for communication or transmission. However, her project consists not as much of the experience in itself of the relationship between the individual and nature within a space where the former can be confused with the latter and recognise their belonging, as in probing it and establishing a kind of dialogue between herself and the organic and inorganic elements.

The visions that make up the successive “appearances” produced before her in her transmigration from one place to another during the various stages of the journey, both in the Gobi and Atacama deserts, reveal an exclusive dedication to the kidnapping of the “models” she turns into images, by means of her photographic or video cameras. Images which narrate what writing cannot unless deficiently and clumsily. Images which are at the same time literal translations or not of what is seen and what is stored by the eye until their printing or digitalisation. However, collecting visual impressions which are stored for their selection later, the artist avoids descriptions, though does narrate or rather uses a narrative procedure through which it is possible to propose a reading of the images she provides, the reverse of the process which investigates “models of seeing” through the reading of the literary text. Without a complete certainty regarding this proposal, nor of the results of its practice, the artist knows, however, that the images exhibited are the result of a syntactic construction and an elaboration which presupposes the existence of a prior criteria to organise them and structure the final project. The numerous scenes and settings collected are proof of this.

Nomadism as a form of travel in the desert in this case is not as much a travel plan as a way of interpreting human “time” within a space where the subject seems able to be inscribed with total freedom. Both of the strategies she employs, photography and video, oppose the fixed image and the image in movement: with the first, the reproduction of the landscape is done with a procedure which attends to the preservation of what is given, only obtainable through mechanical devices, while with the second representation is constructed according to the indicators of movement given by the tangible image, subject to the environmental conditions and circumstances. Not once are the settings or decorations fabricated for their portrayal; the event is awaited before it is captured. For years, she has used both resources and combines them in order to formalise her own particular narrative technique. There are no tales that do not contain other tales; when something is told, the references to previous events is inevitable: the meta-tale constitutes a starting point for this last project, as it cannot be considered as separate from her previous work. In fact, it is highly probable that had she not travelled to Patagonia before, the artist would never have conceived the idea of going to the Gobi or Atacama deserts as part of the same expedition, which could be observed through the method of comparative linguistics. The truth is that it may seem slightly surprising that she should cover such large territories separated by the Pacific, the world's largest ocean, as if it were possible to ignore the separation that exists between both continents where they are located, and should seek to explore them as if she knew them beforehand. But, obviously, she was conscious of her limitations and that the project cannot be understood without bearing this in mind.

The journey's map is inseparable from the “place” or places the artist set out to visit: anyone who stops to explore the artist's project will want to know what itinerary or itineraries were followed and the details of the experience acquired in the course of her travels from one place to another, though the artist has chosen the visual image, thus limiting herself to this form of translation and hardly using words. The names of the locations are not mere localisations which identify landscapes, sometimes different and sometimes very uniform and hard to distinguish. The march imposes the order of events and gives the impression that the geography of the territory does not matter as much as the tangible experience which derives from physical contact with the same and the circumstances or climatic conditions where perception is decisive. However, the location on the map of the space where the artist creates her world and the object of her project are essential in order to understand the locations she visits and thus acquire the information needed to elaborate the meaning of the project. The artist, with a local guide and a companion, first travelled by plane from Peking to Hohhot, from the Chinese and Huhehaote, the capital of the Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia of the People's Republic of China since 1952. An Autonomous region is understood as an administrative sub-division similar to a province, but associated to minority ethnic groups. The name in Mongolian means “Blue City”, where the first stage of the journey truly began. An old city founded in 1580 by Althur Kan -before that it was just an oasis- it developed during the times of the Ping dynasty, becoming one of the political centres of the region. Buddhist temples, a monastery and a mosque are the main architectural features, with the Temple of the five Pagodas, on whose walls are carved over 1500 figures of Buddha, the also Buddhist monastery built in 1579 and the Tomb of the maiden Zhaojun located nine kilometres south of the city. Inner Mongolia forms a kind of belt bordering Outer Mongolia in the south, coinciding with the north of China. Outer Mongolia is the name in common use for the People's Republic of China to refer to the area occupied by Independent Mongolia and the Russian region of Tannu Tuva. However, Mongols prefer to use the terms Southern Mongolia for Inner Mongolia and Northern Mongolia for Outer Mongolia, considering the terms “inner” and “outer” as derivations of an excessively Sino-centrist ideology and seem to refer more pejoratively to a more Chinese Mongolia as opposed to the part that is not. From east to west, the bordering provinces of Inner Mongolia are Heilongiang, Jilin, Liaoning, hebel, Shanxi, Shaanxi, the Autonomous Regions of Hui, Ningxia and Gansu.

Considerably smaller that the territory occupied by Outer Mongolia, the surface area covers an extension of 1'18 million Km2 and a population of approximately 24 million inhabitants. Throughout history, the central and western regions of Inner Mongolia have been dominated alternatively by farmers from the south, of Chinese origin, and the nomadic Xiongnu, Xanbei, Kitan, Nurchen and Mongolian tribes in the north. The eastern region, however, is part of Manchuria and its historical possession has moved more between the different groups than between sedentary and nomadic farmers. The transformation of the territory over the centuries has notably altered the destiny of the region until the end of the Second World War, when the Chinese Communist Party seized almost the whole of Manchuria with help from the Soviet Union, and established the Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia in 1947, with further incorporations as its power consolidated over Continental China, giving the country its elongated shape. However, the Cultural Revolution brought about more significant territorial alterations, in 1969, and later in 1979, with the revocation of most of the former. The region's demand of independence is supported by a number of groups, though it lacks the visibility within and outside the country that analogous movements have, such as the recent demonstrations in Tibet, or the movements in Xinjiang or Taiwan.

The orography of the terrain contrasts with the mountain ranges -the Greater Khingan Range to the east and the Yin and Langshan Mountains in the centre- and the vast plateaus of the Manchuria plains. The Gobi Desert is formed along the border which separates Inner Mongolia from Outer Mongolia, though there are other desert areas such as Mu Us and Hobq, south of the curve of the Yellow River, and the Badain Desert in the western area. The Yellow River (Huang He) penetrates in the north, passing near Hohnot and Batou, before retreating to the south, forming a kind of inverted “U” and the region is called “Hetao”, as it is surrounded by the river. In the central and western areas of Mongolia there are numerous salt lakes or salt pans. The largest fresh water lake is Hulun, on the opposite side, in the northeast bordering with Outer Mongolia and Russia. Long, cold winters, with temperatures ranging between -23ºC in the north and -10ºC in the south, and short summers with mild temperatures of 17ºC to 24ºC characterise a region where desertification has worsened over the last few years. The artist visited the main cities in this autonomous region during a few days before catching the Transmongolian to Ulan Bator, the capital of Outer Mongolia and considered the centre of the world. The cities she traveled through from Hohnot were Baoutou, Wuhai, and , which along with other cities -Ordos, , Baymunnur and Ulan Chab- are those that have the status of Prefectures. There are at least eight representative ethnic groups of the cultural diversity of its inhabitants, though the Chinese Han are the largest community, accounting for 80% of the population and located mainly in the Hetao region and in various areas in the centre and east of this autonomous region. Mongols account for 17% and many of them, previously nomads, established themselves during the massive collectivisations during the Maoist period. The Manchu groups (2'14%), the Hui (0'900%), Daur (0'331%), Ewenki (0'112%), Koreans (0'094%) and Russians (5'020%) are a clear minority.

However, if an approximation is taken at the the languages spoken in Inner Mongolia, the dialectal variety within each ethnic group, as is the case with the Chinese Han, depends on the corresponding region it belongs to. Mongols themselves have a number of Mongolian dialects, though the most common pronunciation is based on the Blue Flag Chahar dialect, located in the centre of the country, and the rest of ethnic groups have their own languages. These identify the cultural diversity and the identity of their respective users. The culture of linguistic diversity cannot be separated from the economic culture, based on local resources: cereals are grown in the valleys, especially wheat, while in the more arid areas the livestock industry based on the abundance of goats and sheep answers to the needs of a traditional lifestyle, as is the case in regions with similar terrain, pastures and climate. There is an abundance of natural resources: coal, Cashmere wool, natural gas, other metals and the largest deposits in China of niobium, zirconium and beryllium, though exploitation has not been competitive until recently, with a drastic turn in favour of the economic development of the region forecasted, including the processing of agricultural products or equipment and services which are expected to improve enormously.

The first part of the expedition the artist carries out to the Gobi Desert is focused on Inner Mongolia, on Hohhot and its surroundings, among which are the mentioned locations -Baotuo and Wuhai in the west, and Datong in the east, to name a few- before catching the Transmongolian, heading for Ulan Bator, from where she would start her journey through the part of the Gobi Desert which is part of Outer Mongolia. The first stage of the journey implies an examination of the area and the identification of the places on the map, in order to check distances and perceive that which arises from the cultural and linguistic differences imposed by the environmental conditions and the economic and political geography of the region, whose past is still valid if the different ethnic groups are taken into account. In Hohhot, the artist catches the Transmongolian to travel the distance between that city and the capital of Outer Mongolia, Ulan Bator, which can also be accessed with the Transiberian which travels between Moscow and Peking. The border town of Erlian or Erlyan (Erenhot in Mongolian) is the last city before passing from Inner Mongolia to the other Mongolia, through Zamiin-Ulud.

Located deep in the Gobi Desert, it is a plain with 16.330 inhabitants, characterised by the change in width of the track when leaving the city, which in Outer Mongolia is the same as in Russia. The area surrounding Erlian is dominated by lake Ereenand and is famous for the Ereen basin where for the past eighty years excavations have been carried out after the first dinosaur fossils were found, as illustrated by the arch formed by two dinosaurs over the motorway entering the city. Outer Mongolia has a different regime to Inner Mongolia, in the sense that it is a sovereign nation which joined United Nations in 1961, preceded a long history that goes back to the ancient Mongol Empire, which under the rule of Genghis Khan and his successors dominated a large portion of Asia during the 13th century. After the overthrowing in 1368 of the Mongol dynasty in China, the decline of the empire started. The most immediate consequence was the division of the Mongolian people and the loss of its unity, weakened after having been conquerors who had unremittingly demolished any border opposing their expansion, favouring the entrance of Tibetan Buddhism, which established itself when the Mongolian Khan of Urga became the incarnation of the Living Buddha in 1650. From the second half of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, when the secularisation process began, Outer Mongolia was governed by an alliance between Buddhist theocracy and the Mongolian aristocracy, under the Qing dynasty.

In the 17th century, Mongolia was assimilated by Manchuria, when the Manchu tribal group conquered China in 1644 and founded the Qing dynasty, which held its power, based in Peking, until 1911, in spite of their condition of foreigners. Mongolian independence in 1911 is the consequence of the overthrowing of said dynasty at the hands of Chinese republican forces. But, in 1919, Chinese troops occupied the capital, where they stayed until 1921, when the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, with support from the Soviet Union, declared the sovereignty of Outer Mongolia (Mongol Uls), forming the new government in 1924, after the death of the Living Buddha and the proclamation of the People's Republic of Mongolia. Until 1946, China did not recognise Mongolia's independence, but the commercial and cultural relationships were only established when the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949, though not for long, as the Chinese/Soviet split in the 50's provoked a new crisis which put an end to this period. In 1962, the China-Mongolia Border Treaty was finally signed, while in 1966 Russia signed the Treaty of Mutual Friendship, Commerce and Assistance, whereby the former USSR would install military bases in the country. Outer Mongolia has been for a long time a cause for litigation for the USSR who, in return for support, obtained permission to establish its military bases, which were not withdrawn until after the fall of communism in 1990. Thus, the proclamation of the first democratic Constitution took place in 1992, under which a multi-party system was accepted and the MRPP was no longer the only legal party, finally leading to the celebration of the first presidential elections of the People's Republic of Mongolia which, as a consequence, became just Mongolia. The political and administrative organisation of the country divides the national territory in twenty-one aimags or provinces and a municipality (khot) under a provincial regime associated with the capital, Ulan Bator, and which in turn are subdivided into 258 districts (somons). The hurals are the local centres of power, comprised of worker's representatives, though Ulan Bator, Darhan and Erdenot are separate administrative units, governed by hurals from the city. The provinces which make up the nation are: Bayan Jongor, Bayan Ulgui, Bulagan, Darhan-Uul, Dsavjan, Este, Gobi- Altai, Central Gobi, Southern Gobi, Eastern Gobi, Gobisumber, North Jangai, South Jángai, Jenti, Jobdo, Jubsugul, Orjon, Selenga, Suj Bator, Tub, Ubsanor, and Ulan Bator, which is the only city with provincial status. The route the artist follows starts in Ulan Bator, arrival station of the Transmongolian, from where she plans the approach to the other side of the Gobi, deciding to avoid certain areas in the north, ruling out the provincial demarcations of Dsavjan, Ubsanor, Jubsugul, Selenga and the Este Province, located in the northeastern extreme of the country. The itinerary focuses on the provinces that invade the Gobi Desert (Central Gobi, Eastern Gobi, Southern Gobi, and the Gobi-Altai region), though in the east Suj Bator is reached, in the north Jenti, in the west Jobdo and Bayan Ulgai, crossing through part of the province of Bayan-Jongor. In less than two months, she travels through the provinces mentioned with the aim of crossing the legendary Gobi Desert which invades part of the centre and south of Mongolia, isolating the cities in the north, whose development has been encouraged by the proximity of Russia, their ally throughout the 20th century who strategically managed to design a geographic area to relax the tension between the two superpowers of the communist block.

Mongolia's topography is characterised by a great flat highland, with an average altitude that ranges between 900m and 1500m, giving rise to the wide Mongolian steppes, covering vast green extensions, though to the east and west of the country, such as part of the bordering area with Russia, it is walled in by mountain ranges like in the province of Gobi-Altai, where Mongolia's highest summit is to be found, the Nayramadlin Orgil, 4.374m high. The Selenga river and its affluent the Orjon, along with lakes Har Us, Hiargas, Uvs and Hövsgöl, constitute the main sources of water in this country which has no access to the sea and an alarming desertification process, as instead of retreating, it keeps extending on the outskirts of the Gobi Desert, extremely arid in its central and southeastern areas. Ulan Bator was founded in 1649 as a monastery-town called Urga, whose prosperity from the mid 19th century was due to to its geostrategic location for commerce, as it was an intermediary point between China and Russia. Until it adopted the definitive name of Ulan Bator in 1924 (or Ulaanbataar, which means red hero, in honour of Mongolia's national hero, who liberated the country from the anti-Bolshevik invading troops supported by Japan, and from Chinese rule, and whose statue still stands in the city's central square), the country had received a number of names over the centuries, with meanings such as “residence” and “camp”, owing to the lifestyle of its inhabitants, while the term used by the Chinese for this territory has always been Kulun. In contrast to Inner Mongolia, with almost 25.000.000 inhabitants and a population density of 20'2 inhabitants per Km2, Outer Mongolia has less than 3.000.000 inhabitants of whom a third are concentrated in Ulan Bator. With a surface area of 1.565.000 Km2, half of India's and three times that of Spain, the country has a population density of just 1'8 to 2 inhabitants per Km2, making it the country with the lowest density on Earth, in spite of being the nineteenth largest country. Most natives, 90%, are from the ethnic group of the khaika Mongolians, though the Kazakh ethnic group must also be taken into account, most of them rooted in the aymag of Bayan-Ölgiy, created in 1940 and located in the westernmost extreme of Outer Mongolia with a surface area of 45.700 Km2 and a population of approximately 95.000 inhabitants, whose language, religion and traditions differ from those of the rest of the country. Other minority ethnic groups should be taken into account, like the Uiguros and Tuvans, who do not have the same weight as the others.

Contrary to the Mandarin and Mongolian languages, which are the official languages of Inner Mongolia, the official language of the country is Mongolian (Kaika), an Altaic language constituted by a family of forty languages, spanning from Turkey to the Sea of Okhotsk, and which is in turn formed by a further three groups or sub-families: the Turanic, the Mongolian family itself, and the Manchu, to which the Buryat (Eastern ), Kalmyk and Mongolian belong. The Altaic language presents a phonetic system which does not mix vowels in the same word, and lacks articles, prepositions and grammatical genders. Language and religion define the cultural identity of the Mongolian people who, as has been mentioned, are strongly influenced by Tibetan Buddhism, which adopts the name of Lamaism, and its temples that of shirt shops, in spite of the slow secularisation process started with the loss of the Living Buddha in 1924, and accelerated from 1990 onwards, coinciding with the new parliamentary constitution which favours the democratisation of the country and the progressive industrialisation which is transforming its rural society and the nomadic population, whose decrease also seems a consequence of domestic migration towards the cities.

The distribution of the population between the cities and the desert reveals that 30% is integrated by nomads and semi-nomads who inhabit the Gobi Desert, and whose tradition dates back to prehistory, with the first settlers in the region, of nomadic origins, and who formed the first Confederations. This also explains the division in many tribes, in permanent conflict in order to gain power over each other, until Genghis Khan, the first Mongol Emperor, forms the Mongolian State in 1206, and unites the Mongolian armies not only to defend the recently united territory, but to set out to conquer the world, with campaigns in the and to the west, occupying a large portion of . The country's nomadic nature can be found in the historically tribal character of the population, though the urban population is currently two-thirds of the total number of inhabitants, and in the extensive desert regions of the Gobi, where the severe conditions such as the almost total lack of water and the extreme temperatures encourage the movement of the autoctonous caravans which move on slowly, breaking camp and packing their tents with the same ease. The balance of the country is managed, however, due to its geo-diversity; its natural resources have not yet been exploited to their full capacity: oil, coal and copper are the base of its economy, and its industrial development, though centralised in Ulan Bator, has encouraged improvement of the telecommunications system and has raised the standard of living at least in the cities, moderating the nomadism and semi-nomadism of this eminently unpopulated and rural society. In the rest of the country, agriculture and livestock are the general sources of income. Since 1997, however, it is a member of the World Trade Organisation and is currently an exporter of some of its most precious assets, like cashmere wool, minerals, particularly copper, and some food supplies, to Russia, its ally and with whom it has contracted the largest foreign debt, as with USA, China, its main destinatary, Japan, Italy and several other European countries, to a lesser extent.

The Gobi is not a desert without a history, nor a part or a region of the country that can be isolated without bearing in mind the nation it belongs to, the same way the remaining provinces cannot be mentioned without speaking of the repercussion it has on the rest of the progressive desertification process in which climate change and other environmental factors undoubtedly play a role. The geography of the Gobi is characterised by the belt which acts as the border between Outer and Inner Mongolia, though its surface joins with that of the Gobi located in the north of the autonomous Chinese province, as if it were impossible. The low density of the Mongolian cities, except Ulan Bator, are an indication of the rural character of this mainly agricultural and farming society, which has reinforced the mining industry over the past few years, particularly in the copper mines. The centralisation of the country in the capital, Ulan Bator, has meant the political and economical weight resides in this urban centre whose development is undeniable. The industry is concentrated in Ulan Bator, which has not been excluded from the urban models established by an invasive globalisation no longer in the hands of the Soviet Union and the “models” it imposed on the countries under its area of influence, as can be seen in the architecture of its official buildings.

The desert landscapes become a model for the photographs without a tale, without a story, which the artist takes over the course of her journey, concentrating her interest on the optical impressions she receives from the place she territorialises with her gaze. In this relationship she establishes with the “place”, the image adopts a modality in which the projection of the eye on what is seen becomes an essential and definitive element. During the journey through the Gobi, the problem of communication resides specifically in the language, as the Chinese do not speak it, not to mention the dialects spoken in both Mongolias. Thus, the organ of vision is what gives perception of what is given internally and externally, in the same way the ear is limited to the reception of silence and the sounds of the wind as it passes, as a primary cause of movement, the transit of caravans, the construction of the yurts and the conversations between the members of a community or family whom the traveller meets here and there. Silence can be heard and becomes a powerful means of approaching knowledge of the outside and inside worlds, as has been repeatedly said. In many cases, it is a discovery which contributes to the creation of a state of consciousness of oneself and of nature, with no obstacles. However, Magdalena Correa's project does not end in the Gobi Desert, but continues in the Atacama Desert, its antipode, so to speak, not only due to the fact that it is an area of land on another continent, but also due to its specific variables. The Atacama Desert, the world's most arid desert, constitutes a singular and unique model, due to its environmental conditions, the climatic variables, and its recent history, making it the “place” which boosted the country's economy from the mid 19th century until the Great Depression in 1929, with a few exceptions.

The geomorphology of the Atacama Desert is elongated and runs from north to south, occupying a surface area which invades the fifteen administrative regions in which the country is currently divided -Tarapacá, Antofagasta, and the Atacama region itself- which in 1974 were only twelve plus the metropolitan area of Santiago, which became a region itself in 1976, when the country undertook a new political and administrative organisation in order to develop a process of regionalisation, under the direction of the Corporation for Administrative Reform. In 2007, a law was passed which established the creation of two new regions, the XV Region, of Arica and Parinacota, with the capital in Arica, and product of the split of the I Tarapacá Region; and the XIV Region, Los Ríos, the capital in Valdivia, invading a territory that used to belong to the X Region of Los Lagos. The Tarapacá region, with its capital in the port city of Iquique, is part of what is known in Chile as the Norte Grande (Big North) along with the Antofagasta Region, whose capital is another port city, Antofagasta, both crucial to the maritime traffic of labour force and merchant ships throughout the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. The geographic localisation of these two regions explains some of the phenomena such as the identity of its settlers and the migratory processes, from east to west and north to south, or south to north. The Tarapacá Region, before partition, bordered to the north with the south of Peru, to the south with the Antofagasta region, to the east with the Republic of Bolivia and to the west with the Pacific Ocean; the Antofagasta region, respectively, with the I Region to the north, to the south with the Atacama region, to the east with Bolivia and Argentina, and to the west with the Pacific Ocean. The “small” North starts in the III Region, Atacama, which borders to the north with Antofagasta, to the south with the IV Region of Coquimbo, to the east with Argentina, and to the west with the Pacific. The Tarapacá region has an extension of 42.225 Km2 and 286.105 inhabitants according to the 2006 census, and has two provinces, El Taramugal and Iquique; the Antofagasta region, 126.049 Km2, 547.933 inhabitants, according to the same census, and the provinces of Antofagasta, El Loa and Tocopila; and Atacama, with 75.176 Km2 and 272.402 inhabitants, the capital, in Copiapó. San Pedro de Atacama, located in the province of El Loa, the easternmost of the Antofagasta Region, is one of the most spectacular natural landscapes of the territory occupied by the Atacama Desert, with the Salar de Talar just a few kilometres from the city, the Tatio geysers at 4200 m altitude, with water erupting at 86º C, the altitude bringing it to the boil, originated in the volcanic rocks of the Andean Range and the Moon Valley, which fluvial and wind erosion have transformed into an almost archaeological landscape, as regards its physiognomy. The artist visited these places, in particular the Tatio geysers, which she records in action to contextualise the natural diversity of the Atacama Desert, which is far from being uniform, like the Gobi, where the arid and volcanic region of Gobi-Altai could be comparable.

Contrary to the Gobi Desert, which in Inner and Outer Mongolia is crossed horizontally, the Atacama Desert responds to the anatomy of a geology which imprisons plains, valleys and seas of sand, between the coastal area and the Andean Range. Among the most immediate observations, it is noted that the Gobi Desert is eminently nomadic, while the Atacama Desert is sedentary: in the Gobi, there is no trace of death. Death occurs somewhere else. Everything moves. The caravans of camels travel from one place to another and their owners build their yurts with same ease as they take them down, and though the nomadic and semi- nomadic population is reducing its number as part of the same process by which they have gradually swapped the camel for a mechanically-driven vehicle -a car or a motorcycle-, their lifestyle has not changed that much. In Atacama, the urban inheritance of the saltpeter offices has transformed the landscape, though the deceased multiply in improvised graveyards, the graves decorated with colourful festive motives under the torrid, dry, blue sky. These graves betray the life that existed and still exists here in the so-called ghost towns, where the country's main mining plants were once located. Sedentarism thus has its explanation in the creation of these complexes, where the industrial development of the country was concentrated for almost a century and a half, until 1930. The life that is “left” there is captured in the live testimonies of the inhabitants who descend from those workers, exploited by the foreign investor who was protected by the local administrations and the Chilean government.

What does not change from one desert to another is the dryness, the climatic constants, the scarcity of water, the extreme temperatures, the contrast between the volcanic areas and the sand dunes, or the mineral wealth of both. Neither does the isolation change, the impossibility of mapping the area due to the erosion of the traces that the wind displaces and buries. The distance between the Gobi and Atacama deserts is equivalent to that between the two extremes of the Earth, and, however, they share variables such as the silence, or differences, such as the nomadic and sedentary lifestyles. The perception is intensified when an attempt is made at verifying comparatively what one and another is from a perspective which assumes the experience within the territory. Though it may be an experience limited by the space/time aspect of the “journey” and the discovery, associated with the random circumstances of unforeseen events, the visual information which is printed on the retina of the artist gives way to the images which have been captured in the photographs and videos exhibited. The history of the Chilean desert responds to that of a unique “model” in the world, because the discovery and exploitation of potassium nitrate transformed the infertile and desert land into the main drive behind the industrialisation of the country throughout the 19th century. Saltpeter was a natural resource, its deposits were the country's main source of wealth during a period of over one hundred years, until the discovery of synthetic saltpeter by Germans Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. The locations where the exploitation took place of this mineral; white, translucid and shining, chemically composed of sodium nitrate and potassium nitrate, called saltpeter, or which, associated with deposits of gypsum, sodium chloride and other salts formed the “caliche”, were called “oficinas salitreras” (“saltpeter offices”). Based on models imported from Europe, from the centres created around the textile or mining industries in England (Ironbridge and New Lamark), Germany (Völkdingen, Rammelsberg or Essen) Sweden (Falun), Norway (Roros), Italy (Crespi) or Spain, where these complexes preferably adopted the term “colonias” (“colonies”), particularly in Catalonia, where during the height of the textile industry, the offices became self-sufficient communities, distinguishing themselves from the former by their geographic location and the tough conditions in which they developed.

In each “office” an urban complex was designed, with the essential equipment necessary for living and working there. The construction of these settlements took into account the nature and marital status of their occupants, and also the division of the work timetables -the saltpeter plants worked 24 hours in shifts and there were over 70 functions and specialities in the saltpeter process, not counting the employees and administrative staff which carried out accounting and services functions. The structure of a saltpeter plant had an urban structure with contained different types of housing, classifying the workers according to marital status and function: paired housing for married workers, corridor housing for married workers, housing for unmarried workers or “buques”, detached housing blocks for employees, paired housing for employees, groups of four houses for higher ranking staff (professionals), detached building or doctor's house, rows of houses and demolished blocks. In turn, urban development made room for a square, a market for supplies, a theatre, grocery stores, swimming pool, a hotel and social club, a chapel, hospital, school, kindergarten, tennis court, basketball court, football pitch, administration house, bank and ball alley. Lastly, in spite of the variations from one plant to another, according to the importance of the deposit or the characteristics of its location, all of them were structured following the same typology and urban layout. The employees mostly came from the domestic migratory process and the displacement of rural workers from bordering countries such as Bolivia, Peru and Argentina. Selection of the workers for the different tasks involved in the exploitation of saltpeter was based on the resistance and physical strength needed to endure the tough environmental and working conditions. Bolivians were the most appreciated as they chewed coca leaves and were the ones who could take on the largest volume of work, thanks to their resistance. Faced with the enormous demand, recruitment was carried out through various means, though there was a system whereby certain representatives of the saltpeter plants, called “enganchadores” (“drafters”) travelled to poor areas of the country in search of workers who were promised a better future and who were imbued with the hope of an improvement of their standard of living if they moved to the deposits from where the “white gold” was extracted, the main thrust behind the industrialisation of the country.

The contingent of workers from the south and centre of Chile sailed from Valparaíso port after signing the respective contracts and receiving vaccination, and headed for the ports of Antofagasta or Iquique, where they would disembark and be led to the different “saltpeter offices”. Movement of the working population within the country responded to a number of causes, such as the completion of the railway in southern Peru, or the Pacific War (1879- 1883), the Civil War (1891) or the obligatory military service which started in 1900, and which moved a large sector to the Great North of Chile, where the service was fulfilled. When the military campaigns or the large State projects, such as the railway, were over, the mass of jobless workers moved to the saltpeter offices in the I and II Regions, where by means of a Notebook the number of hours of work and wages were outlined. Instead of money, the wages were paid with metal, plastic, or even cardboard “tokens”, issued by the office on a weekly basis. They could only be used at the “pulperías” (grocery stores) belonging to that plant, so when anybody got sacked or decided to end their contract, there were no savings or any kind of compensation, due to the absence of social security or any other similar system. Use of the “payment token” or “salary token” was invented in England around 1600, with the name “token”, without an equivalent in any legal tender issued by some large companies, and which was soon adopted in Scotland and Ireland too, reaching its peak during the Gold Rush in California in the 19th century. The English investors who founded the first saltpeter plants introduced them in Chile and Peru, becoming common practice in the over 200 plants in the Tarapacá and Antofagasta regions. This situation became unbearable, as demonstrated by the first worker's unions, which received the name “Mutuales” (“Mutuals”), and which during the first decade of the 20th century became known as “Mancomunales” (“Joint Communities”), coinciding with the period when political parties were established and the tension reached its peak, with the first conflicts between workers and their employers.

The worst conflict broke out in 1907, when the withdrawal of the token system and improvement of working conditions was demanded, ending in the massacre of over 2000 people, counting the men, women and children executed by the Chilean Army and Navy under the pretext of crushing the rebellion and answering to the request of the company owners who would not accept pressure from the workers and their demands. The victims took refuge in the Santa María School and the tragedy which took place on the 21st December has gone into history as the “Santa María de Iquique Massacre”, followed by other events such as the “Children's Strike” in 1924 and the “Coruña Massacre” in 1925. In “Canto General”, Pablo Neruda unremittingly invokes the “poor unfortunate labourers”, tied to “non existence, to the shade/ of the wild prairies”; the children who were never allowed to grow, because “they were denied bread and word”. His denunciation continues with the description of countless images such as the following: “the open pustule in the shade/ of the underwater evening,/ the scar of the rags,/ and the aged substance/ of the rugged and beaten man./ I entered the houses deep/ as a rat's cave/ humid from moulding saltpeter and salt,/ I saw hungry souls drag themselves,/ toothless shadows,/ who attempted to smile at me/ through the cursed air”. And later on, he sentences: “I was pierced by the stabs of pain/ of my people, they entangled/ like barbed wire around my soul”. Neruda was a militant of socially and politically compromised poetry. The poor unfortunate labourer is he who works in the saltpeter and copper mines, it is he who works in the factory, the labourer who builds his country's roads and the railway system. The destination of his words surpasses mere description to denounce the exploitation which knows nothing of gender, age or profession. For him, saltpeter was “full-moon flour”, “cereal of the scorched Pampa” and the “foam of harsh sands”. Gold obtained with the blood of an exploited people whom he loved above everything else and with whom he felt compromised. How could the poet remain detached from the fate of so many of his fellow countrymen who died working there, and not use his best weapon -writing- to expose the exploitation behind the saltpeter industry and the massacres which took place after the uprising of insurgents such as during the critical situation in 1921 with the closure of the first “offices”. In their defence, Neruda wrote these and other desperate verses: “I went out to scream along the trails,/ I went out to scream shrouded in smoke,/ I knocked on the doors and they hurt me/ like pointed knives,/ I called on impassive faces/ which like stars I had worshipped/ and they revealed their emptiness”(18).

Chiquicamata, the world's largest open pit copper mine, is also located in the Antofagasta region in the foothills of the Atacama Desert. This town is also marked on the map of the artist's route through the Atacama Desert. The copper mining history is also part of the country's history and is not left out of the project for a number of reasons. Today, these mines, which also contributed in the past to the country's industrial development, as did the saltpeter offices, have become property of the state-owned Codelco company, which has financed part of the project carried out by the artist in the Atacama Desert, in the same way another company, also in the mining business, financed in China the expedition undertaken in the Gobi Desert. For the exploitation of the copper mines, Codelco has joined, due to their proximity, the Chuquicamata and Radomiro Tomic divisions into a single mining complex called CODELCO NORTE, in order to optimise resources. The name Chuquicamata comes from “chuki”, the equivalent of “spear”, and “kamata”, the closest translation of which is “nicotiana glauca”. The compound noun is translated as hard spear or spear length, in reference to the first carved wood and stone tools used as weapons which were employed in the first copper mines around 500 BC, as indicated by archaeological remains found in the area. Chuquicamata is located 1650 Km from Santiago, 16 Km north of Calama and 2870m above sea level, while Radimiro Tomic is just a few kilometres further ahead and at an altitude of 3000m, in the Andean Range. The surface area occupied by the Chuquicamata mines is an elliptical shape of 8.000.000 m2 and they have a depth of up to 1250m. Between 1915 and 1917, exploitation of the mines started thanks to foreign investment, as had happened with nitrate, and copper production was led by the Guggenheim brothers, who in turn encouraged the construction of the engineers' and workers' residences, in what was called a camp formed by two complexes separated by a distance of three kilometres. The American camp, as it was called, survived until 1980 and its inhabitants, the 'chuquicamatinos' -though preceded by the Bolivians, until they suffered the same fate as the saltpeter labourers in spite of receiving their wages in cash. However, they also endured the bad housing conditions, the low pay, the shortage of food, eased by the ration cards, the robberies and limitations of the “pulperías”, warehouses where anything and everything was sold, like at the saltpeter plants.

The bibliography on Atacama is very extensive: essays, travel books, poetry, anthologies and testimonies of various kinds cover different aspects of what becomes a “case” study due to the importance the “saltpeter offices” and the potassium nitrate or “white gold” economies had in their time, their exploitation the thrust behind the country's industrialisation, thanks to foreign investment and the market generated from there on. The history of saltpeter has been the object of a number of studies, by stages or as a whole. The economic, political and sociological analysis is added to the personal recollections of the descendants of those who built the offices and knew what life was like in those self-sufficient communities, which knew no law other than that of their investors. Titles such as the following illustrate the variety of issues addressed and which have been the object of analysis along with the telling of recollections which throw light on the life of the saltpeter offices or the history of a country over a period of more than a century: “Narraciones históricas de Antofagasta” by Isaac Arce, “Antología de la Poesía Nortiña” by Mario Bahamonde, “Historia del Salitre desde sus orígenes hasta la Guerra del Pacífico” by Oscar Bermúdez Miral, author of a number of books where he collects extensive documentation concerning this issue, the same as Pedro Bravo Elizondo, who with Pedro González Miranda wrote about “corsairs” and “travellers” to the saltpeter Pampa, or about the “history” and “literary fiction” concerning saltpeter, the report by Belisario Díaz Ossa, “la Industria Salitrera Chilena” and the one by Ismael Espinosa, “Fichas, vales y billetes salitreros de Chile, Perú y Bolivia”, or the relatively recent essay published in 2003, by Enrique Fernández, “Estado y Sociedad en Chile, 1891-1931. El Estado excluyente, la lógica oligárquica y la formación de la sociedad”, and that by Alberto Gamboa, “Un viaje por el infierno”. With a similar orientation, it is also worth mentioning “La Matanza de san Gregorio. Crisis y Tragedia” (1921) by R. Floreal Recabarren, where the decline of the saltpeter economy, the closure of the offices and the conflictive final shutdown is analysed.

In this inventory, there are also books which tackle general or more particular themes, like “Crisis Social y Motines Populares en 1900” by Mario Garcés Durán, “Las Ciudades del Salitre” by Eugenio Garcés Feliz, where architectonic facts are described, in the sense that they were constructions coherent with the industrial settlements with sprang forth with the creation of the saltpeter industry for the exploitation of the “white gold”, which motivated the industrialisation of the country, understood as a true Revolution which introduced Modernity. In a different direction, though no less testimonial, “Cartas del Desierto” by Georgina Gubinns, published in 1966, is a personal testimony where the author lends her voice to Isabelle, an English girl who writes letters from the port of Iquique and the Atacama Desert to her grandmother in Scotland, telling her, at the height of the saltpeter industry, of her experiences, hopes, dreams. Or “Huáscar”, volume which includes the “lost letters”, dated between 1879 and 1884, considered an essential document about the Pacific War, along with “Rebelión en la Pampa Salitrera” by Theodor Pliever and “Bolivia y Chile. El Conflicto del Pacífico” by Emilio Ruíz-Tagle. There are many compilations or anthologies of texts on a single issue, such as “Episodios de la Historia Minera”, which is a collection of social and economic history studies on Chilean mining during the 18th and 19th centuries. The bibliography cited(19) in most cases updates the archives which document the country's history, where most publications are dated from the late 80's until the early 21st century, demonstrating a renewed interest in aspects of a crucial history, the repercussions of which are still felt today.

The project responds to the logic which laid the ground for the work dedicated to the ruins of the Santiago prison, the burnt forests and “Austral” on account of her journey to Patagonia, conceived as a journey to the roots and a journey to the depths of being. Accepting the differences that identify them, the results obtained during the journey to the desert were predictable. As has been repeatedly mentioned, what encouraged the conception of this work was the journey to the desert, the creation of knowledge for this individual who understands the practice of art better in the conceptual space of Land art, imposing the experience over the object, than in the production of an object disconnected from experience. From this perspective, localisation becomes a decisive factor to approach the typology of what is intended to be approached in a movement that at the same time involves the delocalisation of the conventional experience of the specific place or places associated to it. The desert responds to a figure of the imaginery in absolute terms, which identifies the being of the fragmented individual, the division of whom is irreversible, and basing herself on this reflection the artist has attempted to embark on a project which links art and nature, from the perspective of a derivation of Land art, becoming involved in the landscape as if to become part of it, though still an external element that observes and even experiments what could be the “states of the desert”, identified with the moods of the individual contemplating or reflecting, indicating a readiness to become part of the natural environment. The distribution of captures with the video camera and the photographic camera meant the repetition once and again of the journey without moving. A much slower journey, due to the numerous interruptions caused by doubt and the execution of the translation of the image viewed from a critical viewpoint, which demanded that the artist resolve to discard useless material and evaluate what really could be useful for the exhibition. The project is approached bearing in mind that its localisation in the desert and its development in the Gobi and Atacama deserts, respectively, introduce demands that cannot be ignored. The question of location is crucial to be aware of the many variations introduced by the fact itself that it is an uninhabited land, not familiar, incomplete, but, however, with its appearances and disappearances which endlessly alter the landscape, confusing the individual occupied in resisting the harshness of an aggressive and violent climate, “lived” by the artist(20) in her experience of the territory.

For the first presentation of the project three video installations of adjustable size and five monochannel videos have been used, where five testimonies are grouped and through which the landscape is expressed verbally. The five plasma screens make up the background of the respective portraits of a human figure that “talks”, a demonstration of the subject of the word, without whom the landscape would not be understood in the same way. The light boxes, the photographs on paper and the projected photographic image in movement make up the remaining resources which have made possible the narration of the expedition to the two deserts the artist insisted on linking from the start. The three video installations, maintaining an important cohesion, cover a wide area of the project: they are “The Transmongolian: from Beijing-Ulan Bator.”; “From Gobi to Atacama” and “The Desert”(21). The first consists of a monochannel video projected over-sized on a screen or wall and registers fragments of notes taken with the video camera during the course of the journey on the Transmongolian from Hohhot to Outer Mongolia's capital, Ulan Bator, passing through Erlian, the border town where the width of the track changes, following the Soviet track, in contrast to the Chinese track which crosses through the province of Inner Mongolia before reaching this town. Before that, the artist had visited the desert in Inner Mongolia setting out from the outskirts of Hohhot, where she had arrived by plane from Peking. The video recorded from the train with the glass window in between, puts the spectator in an identical position as the artist and can assume an analogous perspective. The hours of recording on the train are edited in post-production down to a few minutes, taking care of the syntax and morphology most common to the “video” format. The intention was to communicate the intensity of the experience in contact with an unknown landscape on which she only had elemental information as regards to the duration of the journey, the characteristics of its geography and the location on the map of the main places visited. The selected images only attempt to situate, locate and transmit what surprises the artist: the rain at the station before the train departed, the raindrops on the window, the infinite melancholy expanding within and without, the force of which impregnates everything, seeming to induce the abandon of a journey that does not promises to be very agreeable.

It is the only one of the three video installations where only the tale of the journey through one of the two deserts is told, and signals the start of the first expedition. The other two always relate the Gobi and Atacama, as if the images captured during the journey through the two deserts could not be separated, in an unending alternation, because the idea was that it would be possible to go from one to the other, covering the distances taking advantage of the virtuality of the moving image, to possibilitate the journey for the passive individual who receives the stimuli of the elements, recognising in strangeness what individualises it due to its singularity. The images presented correspond to this wish of making two territories compatible, their analogies just as many as their differences. In some moments, we do not really know whether what we are shown is located in the Gobi or in Atacama, though after an instant it is easy to detect the where and how of these geographies culturally separated by an abyss of water and a history of the world there where it has no name. The artist has captured images of the desert landscape that the eye has chosen and stored faced with the fear of not seeing it again. “From Gobi to Atacama” attempts to give an explicit visibility to this comparative lecture of two deserts. The scenes of everyday life oppose the customs of the natives of both regions, food, clothes, habitat and mobility are some of the aspects shown to stimulate the comparison of the synthesis presented. The notes initially taken down by the artist are disconnected fragments that soon end, giving priority to the capture of images superimposed one over the other, though without competing among themselves. There are no traces of writing about the journey to Atacama; the artist does not write, she cannot translate what she sees into another language that is not that of images conceived as mirrors which create the illusion of reality there where representation produces similarity without depending on what is real. This lack of writing, however, hampers the comprehension of the enigmas of the project, more implicit than explicit, leaving it to the visitor to elaborate their own process of equivalences needed to satisfy the desire for knowledge.

The first-hand information proceeding from the images in movement and the fixed images which document this project are crucial to elaborate an interpretation of the same. Though, for her, the former carry meaning in themselves and can guide one towards their understanding. The journey on the Transmongolian is a journey through rain during which dusk and dawn are repeated twice, while the colour of nature and the temperature of the landscape changes. A melancholic journey into the unknown in a remote land, where the notion one generally has of distance and extension is lost. The preconceived idea usually entertained of the Transmongolian coincides with its ignorance, though the phonetic expression leads one to think it is a means of transport similar to the Transiberian, though this is only half-true. The route followed by the train and what it has in common with the Transiberian for most are facts without further details, but it is worth explaining briefly the railway track that joins Moscow and Peking, or the reverse, and the relationship between the Transmongolian, the Transiberian - the world's longest- and the Transmanchurian. The Transiberian, whose construction dates from the late 19th century, starting its service in 1905, responds to Russia's interest in joining the capital with the sea, in the same manner as the Transmanchurian reaches the Manchurian capital and the Transmongolian the capital of Mongolia, Ulan Bator. Leaving Moscow, the route of the Transmanchurian coincides with that of the Transiberian just like the Transmanchurian: the former until Toskaya and the latter until Ulan Ude. The distance covered by the Transmongolian until this location is of 5609 Km, while the total distance to Peking is 7621 Km. The length of the Transmanchurian is of 8960 Km, while the Transiberian has 9288 Km, joining Moscow and Vladivistok. In 1991, after fifty years of work, the fourth route which separates from the Transiberian line in Taishet, a few hundred kilometres west of Lake Baikal, joining Moscow with the Pacific through Sovestskaya.

The legendary Transmongolian covers the route from Moscow to Peking and back, maintaining the double perspective of the journey and the two directions travelled in, which change depending on the origin of the journey. The artist only travels from China towards Mongolia, returning by plane from Ulan Bator to Peking, meaning only one direction was travelled and her captures are chained in the ascending direction of the journey, making her aware of the fact that what she is seeing will be for the last time and in a unique way. This knowledge forces her to eagerly record what she finds, storing images in her retina and externally by means of her cameras, with which she takes possession of everything that moves before the eye crossing the landscape at the train's speed. As on previous occasions, the photography is revealed as the other eye that can see even more than the naked eye and filters what is meant to be kept, excluding whatever is unnecessary. The resulting monochannel video is the starting point of the project, which starts with the “journey” and develops over the course of the expedition organised in order to travel first to the Gobi in Inner Mongolia and later in Outer Mongolia, only to switch continents a few months later, arriving at the Atacama Desert, in Chile, where she would carry out a similar procedure with the aim of later showing the equivalences and the “linguistic” difference, understood in more general terms than what the word suggests, between both deserts.

The development of the project is presented after with the two video installations mentioned before, where the morphology of the desert (“The Desert”) is shown by means of a panoramic view achieved with the projection of a single image with two projectors, which can be complimented with a third, in such a manner that the fictional division gives the chance of broadening the image and the horizons discerned. The breadth and depth of the image seeks to imitate the real landscape captured on site by the artist, without an artificial organisation of the model. The exercise of watching and waiting for the event is not accidental, but indispensable in order to obtain results coherent with the proposed finality. The images evolve from a time of day when the shapes of things are perceived in the confusion of change, when darkness starts to give way to daylight in the Gobi Desert, to later start a fluid superposition of “scenes” that combine silhouettes from the Gobi and Atacama, as if they were uninterrupted prolongations of each other. The syntax of the narrative reveals the pictorial composition which is confused with the “editing” of the images in movement, and where the artist proposes a view imitating the procedure of imagination, for whom distances are not an obstacle when joining time and space, travelling from one place to another without meeting resistance. Thus, from a wild horse-race on the Gobi steppes, we can switch to a wind-swept landscape where anonymous figures struggle against it, crossing it in its perfect isolation, the place where they were born and where they live, among the abandon and ruins of the Atacama saltpeter offices.

In the last video installation “From Gobi to Atacama”, the artist juxtaposes images captured in the Gobi and in Atacama, instead of superimposing them, carrying the spectator to both places simultaneously to introduce them to the worlds which are the object of comparison and construct the “island” image of the desert and of all other deserts on Earth. The nomads of the Gobi Desert travel on their camels and in motorised vehicles to where they temporarily pitch their yurts, the spectator can assist to the erection of these “tents” by the aboriginals and at the same time see the ruins of the saltpeter constructions of the Chilean Pampa. The scenes of everyday life alternate between the two large screens in order to show the domestic aspect, what is not part of history, what can only be seen if the eye explores these lands and probes the environment. Obviously, the main obstacle for the artist in the Gobi was the lack of knowledge of the language, and her dependence on a guide who at best could translate into English. This did not happen in Atacama, where the natives speak her language. Communication, therefore, favours certain extensions of the project during this second phase of the journey, where there are spoken interviews with living witnesses of the stories passed down from parents to their children and which are shown on the five screens gathered in the same precinct. As a choral testimony, the silenced voices “speak”, taking the opportunity to be heard; the long monologues are only interrupted in order to start again. Each one of these videos is a document which contains a direct testimony concerning the vicissitudes of the figures and the place, showing the need for integrating the landscape and its inhabitants to understand the human dimension of the “place”, any place, even in the apparent void represented by the desert.

The four videos which include the documents mentioned were originally captured with the protagonists of the experiences shown, though the respective editing and mounting includes images from the artist's “takes”, in order to lend visibility to what is told. “White Gold”, “Crisis”, “La Tirana” and “Cantata”(22) constitute a portrait of four figures who narrate their inheritance from the past, the current state of abandon of the desert's cities, also called “ghost towns”, recalling the life of their ancestors in the saltpeter offices, the exploitation of the deposits of the so-called “white gold” and degraded conditions of the workers of the offices while justice remains to be done with the descendants of those who gave their lives for the country's industrial Revolution. The collection of testimonies take the form of a “protest” and denounce the economic precariousness in which this sector of the population lives, in the urban centres of the Atacama Desert, whose prosperity has given way to the ruined buildings, the lack of equipment and the scarcity of social services. Time seems to stand still when we hear the narrator who “talks” when he is given the chance of being listened to, so that his fate may be known. They are the “forgotten ones” of this planet; they are part of the contingent of defenceless people who do not pose a threat as they have no weapons or instruments to make themselves heard.

The anachronism of the communications systems and its isolation from the rest of the territories in the I, II and III Regions invaded by the Atacama Desert have hindered the social development and evolution of the native inhabitants, who nonetheless refuse to give up. The narrations become fragments of a single tale constructed by a number of voices who in turn articulate past and present as dimensions of the same problem which exists since the closure of the main nitrate plants in the 1930's and the saltpeter crisis with the ensuing problem of unemployment. From an industrial economy to a precarious rural economy, the inhabitant of the desert has no access to the country's political, economic or social power; the debt owed to the population still in the area will not be satisfied unless it is recognised. The artist has tried to lend her means to show the state of the situation and to show what measures need to be taken so Atacama becomes something more than just a cemetery. As for testimonies from the inhabitants of the Gobi Desert, there is only the tale of a Chinese student temporarily residing in Spain, Changsha (23), who has never been to the Gobi and has only heard of it, which does not prevent her from referring to the most extended legends concerning different aspects of the lifestyle of its inhabitants, landscapes and other anecdotal circumstances, though no less central, because her ignorance is also an indicator of the abyss separating the city from the desert, the city's history and the desert's history. The topics follow one after another, contributing to the burial of the true reality of life in the most deserted and devastated regions on Earth. The absence of interest in life in the desert –the barren land, nothingness, emptiness- is a very common phenomenon in the new consumerist China, fully engaged in progress and the accelerated transformation of the country. Meanwhile, it is not the case with the current scientific investigation of deserts in order to promote the improvement of the living standards of their inhabitants and the possible exploitation of their resources.

The visual collection the artist has elaborated of the Gobi and Atacama deserts is remarkable if we bear in mind the duration of both expeditions and the circumstances in which the captures were made. Having specific funding for each journey, guide, transport, food, among other expenses, demanded the distribution of the budget in order to complete the project. A larger budget might have given her the chance of returning to the places visited in a second phase, in order to add or exclude elements which at first seemed definitive. But, the conditions were known and therefore the abundant collection of captures was essential, faced with the impossibility of revisiting these “places” through which she “passed”, to make a selection of material on her return as complete as possible. The series of “windows” containing projected images in which movement is selective, is inspired by the vision seen through the windows of the Transmongolian: over an image fixed in appearance, like a projected photograph in which only one element moves -the clothes hanging in the sun beside a yurt in the Mongolian desert, the train crossing a territory in Atacama, or the camels advancing on the horizon in the Gobi, the Tatio geysers at 4.200m altitude in the Andean Range, already mentioned, among others. This interpretation of movement is circular and is the closest thing to the absolute quietness which seems to impress the retina of the traveller faced with the evenness of the landscape which does not change unless great distances are covered during long, slow hours and days. The images multiply, fixed or moving, with the intention of capturing everything that is seen in one sweep, because the traveller does not know what will be encountered no matter how well prepared. In this “moving forward” there is also de shedding of what one is, while what one was cannot be recovered. The route drawn previously, before setting out, does not always respond to the expectations originated starting with the information obtained before really embarking on the journey, and there are often surprises awaiting the traveller, forced to change their previous vision.

The journey to the desert is still the most exulting paradigm of the “journey” and of “travelling”, in spite of the drastic reduction experimented by distances in our information society and the options that encourage movement from one place to another. The reason why it can be said that a journey to the desert is a journey to the impossible infinite and to the solitude of the self identified in turn with the descent to the dark depths of one's self. This “self” which Chinese writer Gao Xingjian (Nobel Prize winner, 2000) identified with something strange that changes “as it is observed, like when you fix your gaze on the clouds in the sky, lying in the grass. At first, they look like a camel, then a woman, and at last it transforms into long-bearded old man”. Everything changes, nothing stays fixed, says the author: “this is why I would feel gripped by uncontrollable terror if I had to express the essential nature of my self”. The writer represented by a “you” who plays the role of the fictional protagonist travels by bus for over twelve hours to a small village in the south, before continuing towards Lingshan, the Soul's Mountain. The traveller's fate is uncertain, it somehow offers what fate has in store for him on a journey to the centre of his own self, in the middle of the surrounding solitude, understood as the natural extension of the “lone man's” solitude. In fact, “all I do is talk to myself”, because “my solitude has no cure”(24). Solitude which is the image of the desert or of that which is fictionally represented by emptiness and Nothingness, and takes the shape of a “self” unfolded in a “you” which “in actual fact is another self who listens carefully to me”, and is not “more than my own shadow”. The time during which this experience takes place coincides with the Cultural Revolution, a fact that must be taken into account even in spite of the subject's introspection of experience and his individuality, his being an island and in appearance indifferent to the circumstances which do not befall him. “You are carrying out your own spiritual journey, you wander around the entire world with me following your thoughts, and the further away you go, the closer you are, until it is impossible to separate us”. This self-”desert”(25) represents in absolute terms the essential self, which looks to the other without losing sight of itself, and which is convinced that “the problem resides in the inner awareness of my self, that monster who endlessly torments me”(26).

If the text starts with a quote from Claudio Magris, it should also end with another quote by the same author, where we again insist upon what the essential activity of “travelling” consists in for this unique individual representing it, uniting “life”, “travel” and “writing”, in spite of understanding the latter as a registry and process by means of which what is seen and experienced is processed, while writing can also be carried by means of other instruments analogous to words. A journey is always an external and internal experience, while it encourages knowledge of the “other” and of oneself, in the sense that it “teaches rootlessness, a feeling of always feeling foreign in life, even at home, though feeling like a foreigner may be the only way to truly be brothers. That is why the aim of the journey are the people”. The idea of Magris is that you do not travel anywhere but “among” the inhabitants of the place. To which he adds: “Sometimes places speak, sometimes they are silent, they have their epiphanies and hermetisms. Just like anything else, contact with places -and with whoever lives there- is hazardous, full of promise and risks”. Thus, though it may seem paradoxical, it is not said in vain that deserts speak although they represent limitless silence, like infinite space. Magdalena Correa's journey or journeys are not “to get there” -coinciding with the identification of the type of journey referred to by Magris- but for the journey in itself, with the understanding that the destiny is never reached, in the sense that in the celebration of a journey we always lose a part of ourselves in our movement, travelling, imitating the movement of life and coinciding with the eternal disappearance of all things caused by the temporality of existence. “Every journey more or less implies a similar experience: someone or something which was apparently close and well-known becomes foreign and indecipherable, or an individual, a landscape, a culture we considered different and strange is revealed as similar or related to us”(27). This is one of the consequences of “travelling”, its experience inviting us to “relativise” that which exists and to bear in mind the finite nature of that which is supposed to be permanent and imperishable.

Notes

1. Claudio Magris, in “El Viaje Infinito” (Anagrama, Barcelona, 2008), book in which Magris collects forty traveller's chronicles published in the “Corriere” newspaper and where he attempts to define the journey as a learning experience. In his case, “life”, “journey” and “writing” are indivisible.

2. AUSTRAL is an unavoidable reference in relation to this project, in which the artist originally proposed to join the Gobi and Atacama deserts in one single expedition produced in two stages, only separated by a truce of a few months, waiting for the best conditions to travel. The ideal season for travelling to the Gobi is July, and starting from December, to Atacama.

3. Concerning this belonging, the Deleuzian interpretation offers useful information regarding the reflection upon the relationship between man and Nature, as is pointed out in “Empirisme et Subjetivité (PUF, Paris, 1953). What is “given” in this case, says Gilles Deleuze, is the flow of what is sensible, identified with a collection of images and a series of perceptions. The quote tries to shorten the distance that exists between man and nature. Deleuze refers to this phenomenon in the following terms: “If the finality, that is, the agreement of the subject with what is given, with the powers of what is given, with Nature, is presented to us under such different expressions, it means that each and every one of these expressions corresponds to a moment of the subject, to a stage and another dimension”. This peripheral annotation arises from the relationship between man and nature which the desert encourages.

4. Peter Wild, in number 35 of the spring/summer edition of the Aridlands periodic publication, “Los desiertos en la Literatura”, which continued in the second volume of this publication in 2001, coinciding with number 49, of May/June, directed by Katherine Waser. ARIDLANDS is a publication specialised in multidisciplinary investigation in this field, and their head office is located at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, University of Arizona.

5. Gustave Flaubert is a one of the clear exponents of 19th century travel literature, as can be discovered in “El Viaje a Oriente” (“Journey to the East”), published by Ediciones Cátedra (Anaya, Madrid, 1st edition, 1993) and in the correspondence he maintains throughout the same. Flaubert's “orientalism” responds to the most extended prejudices at that time, though he tries to avoid the topics and generalisations through a subjective style where he shows that he is only interested in gaining knowledge of the other and of their landscapes, using a narrative style only comparable to the most descriptive pictorial techniques.

6. Pierre Loti is a modern classic who starts a new style of narrating within the contemporary genre of travel literature. “The Desert” is a referential work which provides information clearly referential to the subjective experience of the travelling narrator.

7. John C. Van Dyke registered his discoveries in the book “The Desert”, which the Arizona Historical Society published again in 1976, considered as a long poem written in prose, and at the same time as one of the most relevant pieces of work published on the subject of deserts. For this author, the characterisation of his landscapes must be attributed to the agent “water”, the scarcity of which prevents the growth of vegetation. So that the reader can understand, he tries to make them imagine what would happen if it only rained twice in the south of France over a period of twenty years. In the end, he says, it would look like the Sahara and a river like the Rhone would be the same as the yellow and muddy River Nile.

8. John C. Van Dyke, quoted.

9. See text by July Rauer, “How a Swiss orientalist mapped his Tibetan cosmos”, where the dimension adopted by Klee's orientalism in his mandalas can be appreciated. In the Diaries of the artist we can also find references to this.

10. Charles Gallenkamp, in his biography of the mentioned explorer, under the title “El Cazador del Desierto”, which he associates with the Gobi Desert, describing the true motives behind the five expeditions carried out by Roy Chapman Andrews. The most recent edition is dated in 2001 and the original title is the following: “Dragon Hunter: Roy Chapman Andrews and the Central Asiatic Expeditions”. One year earlier, the National Geographic Society published “Dragon Bones and Dinosaur Eggs: A Photobiography of Explorer Roy Chapman Andrews”, giving an account of his findings.

11. Literature produced since space travel to the Moon started taking place is quite extensive, if we bear in mind that its history is short and that its attractive nature promotes its diffusion, due to the popularity of the testimonies from the astronauts who travelled on board the different spaceships that landed on a mysterious and unreachable territory for common man. Among the most noteworthy books, we could mention “A Man in the Moon. The Voyages of the Apollo” by Andrew Chaikin, “From the Heart to the Moon” by Tom Hanks and “Beyond Visions of the Interplanetary Probes” by Michael Benson.

12. “The Heart of a Continent” by Francis Younghusband (first edition in 1904, John Murray / London) and which has been used for this text, is the reedition by the Asian Educational Services (New Delhi / Madras, 1993). The descriptions of the traveller and explorer concerning some everyday scenes which are repeated daily on the Gobi trails are now legendary, as are those which mention the caravans of over one hundred camels loaded with goods which pass by him, and are covered with blankets when it threatens rain. The references to the wild horses, the mules and camels are redundant, but contribute to the exotic nature of the desert.

13. “From Peking to Sikkim through the Ordos, the Gobi Desert and Tibet” by the Count de Lesdain, also published originally by John Murray (London, 1908), while the present reedition is by the Asian Educational Services (New Delhi / Madras, 1998). The book contains descriptions of buried cities, ruins, natives, anecdotes of everyday life in the desert, the extreme temperatures, and the aim is also the idea of travelling for the pleasure of learning and teaching.

14. Marco Polo dictated the “Book of Marvels” to a scribe when he was a prisoner in Geneva, between 1298 and 1299, a travel book par excellence which narrates the travels of the Venetian merchant in the 13th century, documenting the geographic, cultural and historical features of the lands he visited. The structure of the book in four sections gives us an idea of the magnitude of the project and the repercussions it could have had in its time as an irreplaceable first-hand testimony. In the first, he covers the and Central Asia; in the next, China and Kublai Khan's Court; in the third, Japan, India and Sri Lanka, and lastly, the wars which took place among the Mongols. Blasco Ibáñez, in his “Vuelta al mundo de un novelista” says that the Venetian even became Viceroy of a Chinese province.

15. Marina Abramovic (Belgrade, 1946) has always conceived her artistic practice as inseparable from vital experience, her chosen territory for both the actual body, whose exploration has meant the overcoming of the test of pain at the border between life and death, putting her physical and mental resistance to the test. Her journeys to the deserts mentioned constitute the thrust behind some of her most important actions and performances, like “Nightsea Crossing” (1981-1997), where herself and Ulay, after spending nine months in the Australian desert, on reaching Sydney, carried out the first of the 22 actions grouped under that title. Her proposal consisted in spending ninety non-consecutive days seated facing each other, fasting, completely still and in silence.

16. The “Austral” project was carried out between 2004 and 2006, when it was exhibited. The documentation on the project can be found in the interview held with the artist and included in the catalogue (La Virreina, Barcelona, 2006) and in the text “Mi Atlas entre los 48º 20´ y los 51º 30´ de latitud sur”, by M.G.B. and in the same publication.

17. See the chapter “Poéticas del Viaje” (pages 201 to 227) in “Alí Bey y los Viajeros europeos a Oriente” by Patricia Almarcegui (Edicions Bellaterra, Barcelona, 2007). Also very interesting is the chapter dedicated to the discovery of the East by European travellers (pages 235 to 265), included in the same volume. “The main characteristics which define travel since antiquity are the discovery of the Other, the tension between the separation from the place of origin and the aggregation of the elements that make up the destination and the elements which configure its structure: the start, the journey and the arrival” -according to the author, who has carried out a deep analysis of the journey and travel as the “saying” of time of the subject who is involved in the experience of changing within and without.

18. Pablo Neruda, in “Canto General”, originally published in Mexico and distributed in Chile clandestinely, speaks out strongly against the slavery of the Saltpeter Offices, as can also be seen in the IV Canto -”La Arena traicionada”, in the specific poem “Los Hombres del nitrato”, Neruda defends these “white gold” labourers, these forgotten people, joining his voice with their's: “I was in the saltpeter, with the dark heroes,/ with those who dig up fine and fertilising snow/ from the planet's hard crust/ and I proudly shook their clay hands./ They told me: “Look/ brother, at how we live,/ here in “Humberstone”, here in “Mapocho”/ (...)/ And they showed me their rations/ of miserable food/ the dirt floors in the houses/ the sun, the dust, the “vinchucas”/ and the immense solitude./ (...) I heard a voice that came/ from the bottom of the well/ as if from an infernal womb”/ (...) (It was a faceless creature, a dusty mask of blood and sweat)/ “And he said to me: Wherever you go,/ speak of the torment/ speak yourself, brother, of your brother,/ living down in Hell”.

19. Concerning the bibliography, it is worth mentioning that it is surprising due to the profusion of texts published, and is an indicator of the relevance of the issue. In specific essays on the subject and in general historic accounts of the country covering the 19th and 20th centuries, the phenomenon of the Saltpeter Offices is the object of study by historians, economic analysts and sociologists who highlight the importance of the events related to their appearance, height and decline.

20. The annotations the artist sporadically takes down try to describe the immediate impressions related to the heat or cold felt, the fatigue, thirst, the monotony of the landscape which suddenly changes before her surprised eyes, its influence on our mood, her encounter with the natives, her perception of time -”The desert devours you, it lulls and baffles you, as if you were living in a permanent mirage”. The artist asks herself how human beings can still live in deserts, when the sun scorches your eyes and skin, with no water, at the mercy of the relentless winds which destroy everything in their path. The anecdotes, insignificant though they may be, become valuable as stories, because the relationship with Nature and the environment becomes an essential experience, like when the caravan stopped for two or three days, points out the artist, because the vehicle they were travelling in with the local guide breaks down in the middle of the desert.

21. “The Transmongolian: from Beijing to Ullan Bator.” (7.50); “From Gobi to Atacama” (4.36) and “The Desert” (8.15). These video installations reproduce the journey to the Gobi and atacama deserts, in fragments of experience that are composed of brief narrations, and which the spectator can complete freely with the information provided through the successive images projected.

22. “White Gold” (3.40), “Crisis” (3.20), “La Tirana” (2.30) and “Cantata” (4.34) are four monochannel videos which constitute a choral installation, where the voices become irreplaceable testimonies of life in the Atacama Desert. Descendants of the workers of the Saltpeter Offices, they narrate the history and histories of part of the Chilean population who still live among the ruins of the buildings erected during the height of the saltpeter industry and left out of the country's progress, the improvised cemeteries in the middle of the desert and their dead, hoping that one day justice can be done.

23. “Changsha”(6') is the name of a Chinese student who conceded to an interview with the artist. She wanted someone who could talk about the Gobi Desert without having ever been there, to hear the first-hand testimony of someone who has only heard about this desert and whose references are no less real because of it. In the Gobi, it was impossible to carry out the same interviews as in Atacama, due to the language barrier and also because the local guide was not the most appropriate mediator.

24. “La Montaña del Alma” (“Soul Mountain”) (Ed. Del Bronce, Barcelona, 2001). “The fortunes and misfortunes of life were reduced to the path, I was lost in my imagination, with your inner journey like an echo; which is the most important of the two journeys? Which one is more real?”. Gao Xingjian asks himself these redundant questions, with which he questions existence and the essence of all things, comparing the journey without to the journey within, which is what seems to particularly interest him, knowing that the former encourages the latter, even if it is by means of mere analogy.

25. In reference to “El Libro de un Hombre solo” (Ed. del Bronce, Barcelona, 2002, where the author uses the third and second person to describe action and experience, as part of a totality which cannot exceed the limits of the sensible subject. The subject who feels observed and who needs to be free in order to preserve their “intimacy”, anywhere they can shout without being heard and live without being seen. As Liu Zaifu says in the book's epilogue, the author destroys masks, illusions, false appearances and idols, adding something which has characterised him from the start as the person who introduced modern literature in China, and which can be appreciated in the following expression: “this novel speaks of the escape, it is the sad and naked monologue of a stateless person without doctrines or camouflage who wanders around the world”.

26. “In the course of my journey, the fortunes and misfortunes of life were reduced to the path; I was lost in my imagination, with your inner journey like an echo; which is the most important of the two journeys? Which one is more real? (...) You are on your own spiritual journey, you wander around the world with me following your thoughts, and the further away you travel, the closer you are”. The novelist dialogues with himself, creating this double under the guise of a 'you' who he analyses and follows and with whom he talks, always speaking to himself. In “Soul Mountain”, quoted.

27. Claudio Magris, quoted. The writer even supposes that maybe the most authentic narrative is that which narrates “not through invention and fiction, but through the most direct registration of the facts”.