Desert Traces – Approaching Atacama by Michael Hirschbichler and Guillaume Othenin-Girard

DESERT TRACES – APPROACHING ATACAMA BY MICHAEL HIRSCHBICHLER AND GUILLAUME OTHENIN-GIRARD

Any extractive industrial process requires approximation tools to probe the territory and make it tame. This preparatory production to face an unknown place allows an access mode to an environment such as the desert, whose aridity and desolation make it a priori inhospitable, adverse and unmanageable. Prospecting devices do not only determine the presence of the desired resources but also generate an order of the landscape that smoothes its discovery. Following this logic, photography has played an important role here. Its portrayal of space has allowed an unconquerable geological extension, when portrayed, to be included in a productive mythology. In this case, as a producer of the landscape for its reduction and management, photography acts not only as a representation tool but even as an order of intervention in the environment. Based on this complicity between photography and industrial progress, the images gathered in Desert Traces - Approaching Atacama explore a series of characteristic gestures of the visual prospection that Michael Hirschbichler and Guillaume Othenin-Girard raise from the use of archives.

Sketches, diagrams and intervened photos provide the subtlety of an abstract and historical landscape to the delicate black and white scenes the two researchers bring together in their exhibition. This recovery of the industrial patrimony resides between the models and rocks that make up the Museum of the Huanchaca Ruins, created to show the historical process of mineral exploitation in the region. The intervened images by Michael and Guillaume have a mission of their own: to revisit an abstract and distant place –the pre-industrial Atacama Desert– in its process of transformation into an enormous mineral deposit. We can imagine these aerial photographs as distant views of a place that preserves an original “desertitude.” A certain nostalgia begins to show in these “traces of the desert.” Because perhaps, the progress of industrial procedures has finally reduced the Atacama landscape to a potential extraction field where they no longer exist.

Therefore, recovering an aesthetic dimension from this visual reassessment of the archived images of the mining industry strays from the complicity with which the momentum of modernity drowns the landscape and suggests a new form of architecture of images. What we thought was known, these images seem to tell us, still holds an unfathomable mystery in sepia tones. In this nostalgia for rethinking diagrams of landscape appreciation, the authors unashamedly leave their own fingerprints, which are marked on the passe-partouts that border each image. The rejection of the impersonal neatness of the modern method is blurred here in each piece, stained and covered with adhesive tape. The appearance of these sloppy traces is not circumstantial to the images but appears as the authors’ own signature in their approach to a desert they no longer conceive as subjected to an image that technology aimed at its domination. On the contrary, Michael and Guillaume’s photos recover plasticity close to the shaky and stained essay that imprints a personal stamp.