The Memory of Rocks by Johannes Pfeiffer

Footsteps crunch on the ground of stones and sand. Above, the sky imposes its blue identity amidst an implacable sun. Johannes Pfeiffer steps through the desolation of the Atacama Desert, where “the stones scream as they crash against the air” as the poet Raúl Zurita writes. The questions that haunt Pfeiffer’s imagination contrast with the wind and the silence: it is the second time he has been invited to this landscape, the driest on the planet. Around him he now finds the solemnity exuded by the large rocks, inhabitants of these latitudes for thousands of years. The scenery is dramatic enough and requires a very precise intervention. To think of land art and its great excavations and displacements of material is untenable. Pffeifer must make decisions to act with a gesture that is both definitive and subtle at the same time.

Sometimes compared to the lunar landscape, the desert attracts by its emptiness. Everything there seems to be arranged as on the first day of the world when life had not yet arrived. Or perhaps like the last. And in all that uncountable time, the only presence that has remained there are the rocks, those enormous pieces made by a ceramist without purpose, shaped from the magma of the Earth. They concentrate the inclemency of time and keep in their body the furrows made by the wind, the notches of the sand with the rubbing of the centuries, the paintings and engravings of the native peoples who spent their lives in arduous exchange with that arid and hot environment. Circumstantial sculptures and witnesses of everything, the rocks concentrate the memory of the place: this is the subject matter that Pfeiffer deals with.

By tucking a number of stones in red canvases, the association with blood emerges, of course. “In beauty there is always a wound,” the German artist has pointed out. And if we think about it, the same color is present in the long strands of wool that artist Cecilia Vicuña uses to recall the menstrual character of the landscape. In Pfeiffer’s case, however, this textile gesture also alludes to the shroud, that cloth that wraps the corpse when it is laid out for burial. The paradox is that the red cloth serves here to unearth the rocks; to make them visible as genuine bearers of the silence of the desert. Because the enveloping action of the artist is completed by extracting the code inscribed on the rough surface of each stone and transferring it to the city of Antofagasta, to a site next to the port where the containers rest before being shipped full of merchandise. Pfeiffer’s rocky shrouds, despite being containers with an empty structure, will not set out to sea nor will they serve for any other trade than the recovery of the anonymous memory of these pieces of the planet’s surface. They will mark a pause in the shipping and commercial agitation. And in all that uncountable time, the only presence that has remained there are the rocks, those enormous pieces made by a ceramist without purpose, shaped from the magma of the Earth.

The structure left in the desert by the tons of weight of the mineral mass will serve as a scenographic gesture to allow us to rethink “the desert of the real,” to paraphrase the expression of the theorist Slavoj Žižek. The mention of the

transplanted rocks brings an image of the landscape where the stones, hard and silent, inhabit the immobility, the slow advance of what remains in geological time. We could imagine them as if they were bones of the landscape. And what Pfeiffer has rescued is their skin to assemble a fragmentary rendezvous in the middle of a productive port, forced into the frenzy of world trade. The transfer of these fragments of the landscape is an aesthetic gesture that proposes obvious questions about the weight of things and about our way of trading with the world. Their presence without market value and totally unknown reminds us that they have nevertheless survived for centuries in their original location: in the driest desert in the world, where “reality” has not yet made its presence felt. In silence, they have seen entire armies and civilizations march by, so should we think about establishing another relationship with these rocks and their memory, through a slow and silent dialog? Some years ago, the philosopher Michel Serres wrote about “a natural contract of symbiosis and reciprocity, in which our relationship with things would abandon dominion and possession for admiring listening, reciprocity, contemplation and respect, in which knowledge would no longer imply ownership, nor action, dominion.” We could begin to imagine something like this.