The Future is Prehistory by Elia Gasparolo and Santiago Rey

Everything gets lost in the desert. Its unfilled and broad character signed by the water absence increases a depressive disposition. That abrasion under the sun is a memory of hell or of a distant and lonely planet. “The desert is real and symbolic. It’s empty, and the hero expects crowds,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges in the preface of Dino Buzzati´s The Desert of the Tartars. During their experiment, Elia Gasparolo and Santiago Rey penetrated that essential depopulation to bring back settlements between rocks and the Atacama dry dust. It was necessary to reinvent life there. In a long tour throughout its landscapes, the pair of artists developed a ludic process of reverting history. Thus, the future became the oldest thing.

One of the first aspects that surprise those who venture into the Atacama Desert is the raw naked fragility: the extreme conditions transform each act into a dramatic, epic gesture. Keeping oneself alive is the goal. Any mistake could have lethal and scorching consequences. The installation The Future is Prehistory proposes scenes of desertic life as a challenge and pilot to be observed at a later time. With dedication and caution, the couple of artists immersed themselves in different locations to install little life scenes starring by figures made of clay from the banks of the Loa River. This gesture refers to the pottery tradition through which archeology has interpreted whole cultures: clay vases and implements used to eat and drink have been a great source of coded information about extinct human Everything gets lost in groups’ aesthetic and cultural values. the desert. Its unfilled and broad character signed by the water absence increases a depressive disposition.

Gasparolo and Rey populated the cliffs and dry cracks surrounding Mejillones, Río Salado, Meteorite Valley and the ruins of saltpeter offices with these imaginary beings. They included many elements to boost life: “On some occasions, we also used seeds, wood, rocks, pigments, and so on. We included elements of the landscape materiality. Rock, wood, bones, as well as its symbolic energy. A molten glass, a fragment of pottery. Charcoal, salt. The scene is already part of the landscape. It is implanted but also arises from it.” A mise en scène thrown into the future that could give clues about what should happen then.

In the same way we send probes into space searching for information that one day will return to the planet to be interpreted, Gasparolo and Rey assembled the essential things that could exist in the future and left them under the sun with accurate geolocations. The second part of the project consisted in creating an appropriate archaeology to interpret results and the possible impact on the environment. In that fiction of a future and its potential calamities or successes, the desert was revealed as a vital laboratory to invent a myth, as the own artists would declare while they went ahead with the project.

The scenes were later gathered in room 13 of the Antofagasta Regional Museum, creating a narrative that inserts itself as an unsteady input into the region´s history. Once installed indoors, what happened in that prehistoric future resulted in a cautious provocation, guided by the illusion

of returning life to the desert and assuming other possible developments and minimal civilizations. Maybe for that reason, the exhibition ends with a shadow box projecting a couple of figures onto the wall. The Platonic myth of truth and the illusion we made of it appears here to make us understand what we already suspected: it is the sun out there the one that illuminates the truth of ideas. The next step is getting out of the cave and returning to the desert.