Echoes: North… North

July 22, 2016

Encuentro 2016 (eXcéntrico: dissidence, sovereignties, performance) hosted by the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics. Photos available online.

GAM Cultural Centre (Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral), Santiago, Chile.

CONSTELACIONES embodies collective healing through kinship and vulnerability—rejecting isolation, silence, and disconnection in the face of trauma. Returning from the violent histories of the Atacama Desert, they bring back with them sand, twine, and bubble wrap remnants of their “Return Atacama” performance. From this experience they create “Echoes: North… North,” a narrative of exile; a life story of how we individuate when we unfurl from community and then seek to recreate connection.

CONSTELACIONES explores the psychic terrain of memory, drawing energy from the GAM with its radical history, its military takeover, and its reclamation as a site of community and culture. Here, we attempt to preserve cultural memory while holding experiences from the desert. Structuring and holding the entire performance, a sand, steel, and ice sculpture performs a passage of time.

We hold inspiration from various artists, interventions, and political movements, each with their own representative images in the video, “Vibrant Inter(in)animating Constellations.” This video is projected onto our bodies, materials, and surroundings. The collective orbits one another and creates performative tableaux, grappling with tension, time, support, and release through visceral and kinesthetic experimentation. “Echoes: North… North,” draws on experiences of disentanglement, violence, and diasporic dispersions as we wrestle with notions of solidarity and being together to create a performance of formations and reformations through time and memory.

Accompanying the performance with its experimental soundscape and video, “Elemental” projects bodies of water in different frozen forms, also naming traditional territories of the landscapes CONSTELACIONES have performed in—Lake Winnipeg, the city of Winnipeg, the Atacama Desert, and Santiago, Chile. “Echoes: North… North” is a pull toward memory with gravitational force. We are stars and water among other stars and water.