Sebastián Figueroa

“Desert Matters” presents the Atacama Desert as a literary and visual archive of mineral stories shaped by colonialism, capitalism, and climate change. It reimagines the territory not as an empty wasteland or a pictorial landscape, but as a vibrant repository of indigenous cultures, scientific discourses, migrant narratives, and artistic experimentation. Attending to the overlapping temporalities sedimented in the Atacama, from geological formations and archaeological ruins to modern mining infrastructures, the project adopts an interdisciplinary approach around the notion of space as a material entanglement of human and nonhuman inscriptions. Focusing on modern and contemporary literature, film, and art as well as material culture from labor and environmental movements, the project develops the concept of “mineral poetics” to explore specifically how the mining, use, and experimentation with calcium, nitrate, copper, and lithium mediate aesthetic and environmental practices in the Atacama, linking deep geological pasts with planetary futures. By foregrounding these different entanglements, the project positions the Atacama Desert as a critical lens to understanding how extractive histories and ecological crises are recorded, contested, and reimagined by communities living in extreme environments.