Litoral Pacífico Sulamericano

A massive earthquake erupts over the Andes, detaching Chile from South America. As a consequence, the sea returns to Bolivia restoring its lost coastline, Argentina gains coasts with both the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans, and Chile becomes a floating island adrift in the seas. In a recent trip to Bolivia, I was affected by the way the loss of the sea to Chile in the bloody Pacific War (1879-1884) was a delicate subject, unresolved, a real historical taboo. Even the smallest Bolivian bookshops sell educational material for schools that didactically speaks about the injustice of what was done, ideologically speaking of the ‘Chilean cowardliness,’ and the need to regain the lost sea and to defend the coast’s sovereignty. In Chile, the existence of the war is not emphasized: generally, people speak as if the whole coast has always been Chilean. The work experiments with delirium for what only could be possible with war and violence. The sea is given back to Bolivia as if the Andes had suffered an earthquake and the whole Chile displaced to the ocean becoming an island. This aesthetic approach allows me to touch upon some other topics: the notion of truth as an ideological construction, the document’s relative trustworthiness, the historical resentment as a social feeling, and the fabrication of mass commotion/emotion as political artifice.

–Jonathas de Andrade