SACO9 Now or never

ISLA+: QUESTIONING THE (UN)REALITY OF THE PANDEMIC | Dagmara Wyskiel and Iván Ávila 2020 will be remembered as the date on the tombstone for a number of cultural spaces in the world, especially in Latin America, where neither the industry of culture, nor what it is able to provide to the community, were priorities for ruling governments. In Chile, the mandatory and indefinite closure of schools, universities, museums, galleries, cultural centers, theaters, cinemas and other places, in contrast with the uninterrupted operation of supermarkets, and other large scale industries of production and exportation, sketched out a map of predominance that went basically unaltered. We wanted to face this environment of mourning with a utopian gesture, since there is nothing more real than the persistent utopian ideal. When everyone else closes down, we open up. We sawed our way through the fence in order to step outside and to take it to the streets.

ISLA+ seeks to be a stimulus for experimentation with video, using a window that opens out onto the street, a public space where, now more than ever, art is needed.

The curatorial proposal for this new exhibition space, ISLA+, located in the headquarters of the ISLA Latin American Superior Art Institute in the Playa Blanca neighborhood, focuses on video art productions, experimental films, recordings of performance art, animation, visual and graphic creations, pursuing new forms and interpretations of moving images. The approach is intended for the people passing by, or the person next door, keeping in mind that one of the principle missions of art is to question everything.

That’s why there could have been no better choice than to inaugurate this new space with the short film, The Last Island of Heaven, by André Salva, a resident of Antofagasta.

Within a span of two minutes, we are immersed in a fantasy world of drawings that at first glance seem juvenile, but behind their innocence hides the heartrending gait of a giant whose steps cause the beauty of the last island in the sky to come crashing down.

His voracious appetite destroys every sign of life. With no show of remorse, his thirst consumes the water of the small territory that could be any city on Earth, or perhaps it is the whole Earth that is sketched out in forms and colors that are obliterated by this insatiable behemoth.

Is it but a dream, or perhaps a metaphor for a future lacking in life, nuance, or joy?

Through lucid sketches, Salva invites us to question the (un)reality of the current moment, suggesting the need to reflect upon how we relate with the environment, how (in)humane we have become at this point on the line of time in which we are forced to reconsider and reformulate, perhaps like never before, our systematic relation to the environment, managing to touch us at the deepest level with an urgent message that, rather abruptly, takes us on a rapid journey backwards towards the starting point of this dream, of this “now” to which we must react immediately, before it becomes a hopeless “never”.

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