Haunted Landscapes
Every landscape is haunted by its ghosts...
What began as a protest against the increase in the price of public transport turned a few days later into an unprecedented popular revolt against neoliberal policies in Chile. This is how on October 18. 2019, the city of Santiago burns, Plaza de la Dignidad fills up with rubble and the city fills with screams, dry and metalice sounds that like drums of war saturate the air and the night landscape (Francisca Márquez).
That same night, 19 metro stations were burned and destroyed in the capital and massive protests began from north to south demanding a dignified life and a new constitution to replace the one that has governed the country since the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. It is said that Chile woke up. And in this awakening, the hood has been a key element.
The residual materials left by these protests disorganized and destabilized the cities and the precepts of urban progress, forcing us to reread and rewrite its significant forms. Do the streets belong to us? What would it look like to dream of another public space? What has until now been called public space is in reality a space segmented by lines of class, race, sex, sexuality, and disability, where only the white, male, heterosexual and national body may circulate as a full-subject. Migrant, nonwhite, female, nonheterosexual and functionally diverse bodies are constantly subjected to various forms of restriction, violence, exclusion, surveillance, ghettoization, and death.
In this project I reconstruct Plaza de la Dignidad (the epicenter of the protest) and its surroundings using 3D scans and point clouds. Buildings, subway stations, painted walls, monuments, and statues that were intervened by protesters are re-combined to give birth to a landscape in which monuments and buildings will communicate a different message than the one originally intended. Since the signs of protest are erased over time, their preservation and analysis become highly relevant. The 3d scans of buildings and monuments used were made by Chileans during the outbreak and uploaded to the internet with copyright licenses that allow their public use.
In this context hundreds of women have appropriated the hood in Chile and their hoods became a symbol of their protest for equality. "They walk the painted streets like mythological beings. Scales, feathers and pearls line their colorful heads. There are hundreds, some alone, others grouped in a herd. They are all different, but at the same time they are the same body" These hoods maintain the idea of self-protection but have a new identity factor.
Along with other Chilean women and LGBT+ community living in Berlin, we made masks/hoods to create hybrid characters that will inhabit this virtual landscape in an attempt to challenge the Eurocentric paradigm of binary identity. We were inspired by the Chilean feminists but also by mythological beings such as monsters, aliens, cyborgs, and ghosts, which in Western culture have been used to speak of repressed identities. Viewers will be confronted with fragments of collective memory and hopefully, they will experience these memories as a creative force for collective transformation.
Every landscape is haunted by its ghosts...
What began as a protest against the increase in the price of public transport turned a few days later into an unprecedented popular revolt against neoliberal policies in Chile. This is how on October 18. 2019, the city of Santiago burns, Plaza de la Dignidad fills up with rubble and the city fills with screams, dry and metalice sounds that like drums of war saturate the air and the night landscape (Francisca Márquez).
That same night, 19 metro stations were burned and destroyed in the capital and massive protests began from north to south demanding a dignified life and a new constitution to replace the one that has governed the country since the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. It is said that Chile woke up. And in this awakening, the hood has been a key element.
The residual materials left by these protests disorganized and destabilized the cities and the precepts of urban progress, forcing us to reread and rewrite its significant forms. Do the streets belong to us? What would it look like to dream of another public space? What has until now been called public space is in reality a space segmented by lines of class, race, sex, sexuality, and disability, where only the white, male, heterosexual and national body may circulate as a full-subject. Migrant, nonwhite, female, nonheterosexual and functionally diverse bodies are constantly subjected to various forms of restriction, violence, exclusion, surveillance, ghettoization, and death.
In this project I reconstruct Plaza de la Dignidad (the epicenter of the protest) and its surroundings using 3D scans and point clouds. Buildings, subway stations, painted walls, monuments, and statues that were intervened by protesters are re-combined to give birth to a landscape in which monuments and buildings will communicate a different message than the one originally intended. Since the signs of protest are erased over time, their preservation and analysis become highly relevant. The 3d scans of buildings and monuments used were made by Chileans during the outbreak and uploaded to the internet with copyright licenses that allow their public use.
In this context hundreds of women have appropriated the hood in Chile and their hoods became a symbol of their protest for equality. "They walk the painted streets like mythological beings. Scales, feathers and pearls line their colorful heads. There are hundreds, some alone, others grouped in a herd. They are all different, but at the same time they are the same body" These hoods maintain the idea of self-protection but have a new identity factor.
Along with other Chilean women and LGBT+ community living in Berlin, we made masks/hoods to create hybrid characters that will inhabit this virtual landscape in an attempt to challenge the Eurocentric paradigm of binary identity. We were inspired by the Chilean feminists but also by mythological beings such as monsters, aliens, cyborgs, and ghosts, which in Western culture have been used to speak of repressed identities. Viewers will be confronted with fragments of collective memory and hopefully, they will experience these memories as a creative force for collective transformation.