SACO9 Now or never

MAGUA | Simone Cortezão The landing in Antofagasta came at the end of a morning whose sun I did not recognize.

I’d never seen the desert before. That day I saw a yellowish light, a city trapped by dry hills. The architecture looked like the favelas in Brazil, what we call do-it-yourself construction.

I arrived at ISLA carrying my own impressions and queries into the world of mining.

After almost eleven years working in brazilian territory, I was able to recognize the deterioration of the land and the resulting disaster.

I came to Chile with the shock of having witnessed the bursting of two dams, a lot of mud, the regurgitation of melted earth and loads of dirt sweeping through the entire region.

My energy became focused on the mountains from years of research done in a landscape full of them, and which are disappearing due to extractivism and theft day by day. Whereas in the desert, the violence was clearly displayed in the open, arid landscape.

I went looking for the depths of the earth and its connection to the sky. Knowing the geographic situation of the Atacama Desert, I thought it would be possible to find some clues there, some cosmologies of that meeting. And it’s not that I didn’t find them, but I keep searching. Anyway, it was in the unforgiving surfaces of the desert where I found the necessary sideroad.

I was attracted to María Elena, a place with a woman’s name in the middle of the desert. For some days, I prepared for the trip while in Antofagasta. I spent a whole day walking, feeling the heat, perceiving the sounds and the light of the desert.

When I was about to leave, seated at the bus stop, an old lady with the skin aged by the sun arrived and joyfully said: “beautiful girl!, where do you come from?” The driver, who witnessed the conversation, murmured to me with a tone of prejudice: she is the oldest prostitute of María Elena, her name is Magua.

In Portuguese Mágoa is a meaningful word. It’s sadness and spite, the heaviness of sorrow, a pain that remains even after a long time has passed: a deep feeling. I found María to be like that, Magua. A couple of days later I returned to that mining city in the middle of the desert, whose principal and oldest living memory was called Magua. María, Magua, didn’t want me to, and so I was unable to find her again.

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