[2014]
This series was begun during a trip to Northern Chile in 2014, after meeting local families who accompanied me to discover the Atacama Desert, and that’s where I saw a carved hand more than eleven meters high coming out of the sand. A real request for help, which aimed to bear witness to all those hands underneath belonging to people still without name, without identity, victims of the Pinochet dictatorship: the disappeared. The dictator had all those suspected of having anti-government ideas kidnapped, tortured, killed and made them disappear. Many times the victims were taken to real concentration camps from which they never left except to make ‘death flights’, sadly given this name because the corpses were thrown into the Atlantic Ocean. Several prison camps were located in the Atacama Desert and therefore many remains are still buried in mass graves and covered with layers and layers of sand. From that moment, there have been poor daughters, wives and mothers still looking for some remnants of their beloved fathers, husbands and sons. They are known as mujeres del desierto – the wives of the desert.
They just want to mourn their loved ones and bring coloured paper flowers to their graves, which not even the sun will ever dry out.
I worked on the emotions of a mother who loses her child, on the disappearance, on the indescribable emptiness after a kidnapping, on the story only hinted at in school.
The indifference of many in the face of war crimes envelops the entire desert like a thick and impossible fog, because those who do not see forget, and those who forget do not believe in what has happened.
The fog devours the streets, the mountains, the whole sea. Fog is oblivion.