SACO9 Now or never

REACHING PORT | Elisa Montesinos The most anticipated exhibition of the SACO festival, which every year brings seven international artists to Antofagasta to show pieces specifically designed for a public space, was mounted in spite of the constraints of the pandemic. Excited by the possibility of assembling and staging projects that had been submitted nearly eight months prior, the chosen artists each boarded a plane that carried them to the north of Chile. And so the installations began to appear, some monumental, others in a more scaled down format, audible, tactile, optical, textual, and as mutable as the times in which we live. Nor could changes to the date or location hinder their arrival to the port, both literally and figuratively, for their rendezvous with an admiring public for whom the works had been conceived.

In times when ‘Ground zeroes’ have become part of our everyday language – whether it was to describe places hit by a natural disasters, violent conflicts, accidents, industrial activity, or any other event that might leave a plot of land vacant– the exhibition was moved to a 4500 square meter lot adjacent to the port of Antofagasta casually referred to as Sitio Cero. It was necessary to clean up that empty space, so that the bare ground could become an adequate setting to host the exhibition Now or Never. The exhibition design called for moving shipping containers to certain defined points that would provide spatial context for the installations and in some cases would serve as support structures for the pieces.

And so, this particular ‘ground zero’ was turned into an urban arts district.

Dialog With the Landscape Built in 1934, the Molo de Abrigo lighthouse bears witness to the ceaseless activity of the towering cranes, in a bay where sea lions swim, and seabirds go plunging into the sea. It was also a suitable location to install Domes, by the Mexican artist Ernesto Walker.

From the old lighthouse, this sonic sculpture captured the sounds of nature along with the feverish movement of the port, transmitting radio waves that could be heard on radio from anywhere within a one kilometer radius of the lighthouse.

The sounds were simultaneously transmitted to speakers set up “on solid ground” in the exhibition area, where the works were arranged along a route in which one or another sense predominated. Walker’s idea had been to listen in on and then reconfigure this mix of urban and natural sounds in an endless loop.

Japanese artist Kotoaki Asano came with a heavy suitcase. It was not easy to explain its contents, which is why a little linguistic trick was required in order to get through customs. It held an unusual cargo of dark, dense earth, brought to Chile from his country in a poetic and performative act. From the suitcase, the sand was deposited onto a black table and glued to the tops of benches of the same color 56