THE DEATH OF MEMORY | SACO Team In 2011, Quillagua lost the only teacher it had. In a show of trust, the teacher gave the keys to the Museum of Anthropology to one of its oldest residents, doña Felisa Albornoz. She was one of the hundred people that, surprisingly, decided to remain in one of the oldest villages of the Atacama Desert, after the Loa River was contaminated by a toxic spill and the few available water rights passed into private hands. Doña Felisa and the rest of the neighbors living in that oasis became figureheads in the resistance against the depredation of industry, environmental devastation and the neglect and indifference of the state. Doña Felisa took care of the museum for nine years, until she finally passed away in the middle of 2020. From that point on, the museum remained closed. She looked after and spoke to the mummies, and became a link behind the present and the region’s precolumbian past. For SACO, she was a colleague and hostess. She was there with her stories for each of the immersion trips we took to Quillagua since 2012. She was a symbol of that which is meaningful, beautiful, moving and potent in the driest place on earth, but also of the delicate and vulnerable situation in which many of its communities find themselves. Moribund Quillagua must not die, because it would mean a loss of culture and memory. The death of doña Felisa invites us to reflect on those stories, experiences, anecdotes and feelings, so personal and at the same time so common, before they disappear, and with them, the people that have forged the past, present and future there.
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