Follow the Highway
Magaly Ponce
October 1, 2002 - January 12, 2003
This project first began when I found seventy-two small-scale chest x-rays of mine workers dated from 1977 in an office of the Victoria, an abandoned mining town in the Northern desert of Chile. These x-rays inspired me to make a project that dealt with the cycle of exploiting the desert in order to live, but also to eventually die there. The town I was born, Maria Elena, became a ghost town just like Victoria as a result of this same struggle.
The principal idea is that the exploitation occurs mutually. Ironically, while man extracts the resources from the earth, the desert is extracting the resources from the man: his life and energy. Furthermore, we can think of the earth and the man as being made from the same material. Neruda used to say that ' the stones are the bones of the earth'. Manuel de Landa, in his analysis of the 'mineralization' in living organisms 500 million years ago offers a view complementary to Neruda's, that the stones are the bones of man.
The earth, like the human body, bears marks or scars that define its identity and reveal its history. These marks manifest themselves both physically and psychologically. For example, the presence of minerals and metals give the hills their color and the mining projects modify its shape. Events in its history create a psychological atmosphere, like the massacre of Santa Maria and the 'disappeared' of Pisag·. The desert also bears the marks of the artist, from the indigenous pictograms on the sides of the mountains to the artistic interventions of Eugenio Dittborn, Lotty Rosenfeld and Ra? Zurita. Rosenfeld and Zurita both reference the ultimate scar on the desert, the highway. The highway in the desert is the most evident scar, the most dramatic in terms of its scale and size, and yet it is also the one that takes us the longest to notice. It is a path that allows us to experience the desert without getting disoriented, and metaphorically becomes a path to experience unknown territory. All of these marks are part of the Chilean desert landscape, which I use in my work, emphasizing the ephemeral, minuscule and yet important nature of our presence in the earth.
-Magaly Ponce
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