

ATA-CUENTOS: TALES OF THE ATACAMA

ATA-CUENTOS — Tales of the Atacama
This video project emerged from a period of research and artistic residency in Coyo, Chile, with LAWAYAKA CURRENT. ATA-CUENTOS unfolds as a triptych, each part offering a distinct yet interwoven meditation on the Atacama Desert as a living archive of time, myth, and matter.
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MOTHER: A visual poem that personifies the Atacama as a sentient, maternal presence; an ancient entity inscribed with memory, erosion, and silence.
SISTER: A speculative re-telling of the myth of the Three Star Sisters, celestial travellers whose descent to Earth entangles cosmology with local oral histories.
DAUGHTER: A performative gesture centred on the time-travelling microorganisms discovered in the Atacama’s subterranean salt pools, imagining the desert as a cradle of microbial futurity and ancestral memory.
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The work draws on eco-poetics and mythopoeia, positioning the desert not merely as backdrop but as protagonist; a site where geological deep-time meets speculative kinship.

