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The Atacama Desert in Chile is marked as a colonial and imperial ‘empty’ space, conquered, occupied, plundered, and polluted for centuries. The first mineral extracted was silver, mined by the Spanish Empire in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. In the 19th century, sodium nitrate was ‘discovered,’ which led to the Pacific War with Bolivia and Peru. Atacama and the nitrate industry ended up under the Chilean flag, but in British hands until the late 1940s, when Germany invented synthetic nitrate. The Great Copper Mine emerged in the late 1940s as an alternative to the crisis in the nitrate industry. US private investment developed the Great Copper Mine in Atacama and the creation of the mining town of Chuquicamata. Constanza Mendoza was born in Chuquicamata in the year that President Salvador Allende nationalized copper mining. Using a multi-scalar approach, the artist relates the history and politics of Chuquicamata to her own family, linking times, spaces, and urban ecologies that have been separated for too long.
Constanza Mendoza’s video talk is based on the following article: https://berlinergazette.de/chuquicamata-necropolitics-and-autopoiesis-of-a-mining-city
The video talk was recorded at the “Kin City” festival, October 17-19, 2024 at the ZK/U – Center for Arts and Urbanistics.
More information about the “Kin City” festival: https://berlinergazette.de/projects/kin-city
