Sal de Pisagua
2025 - Ongoing
Sal de Pisagua is an ongoing series of multimedia animations and physical environments exploring time, emotion, and ancestry as physical elements exploring what remains preserved in flesh and bone.
The title references Pisagua, an isolated coastal area of Northern Chile boarding the Atacama Desert. Founded in 1611, the Peruvian port town was originally created for its natural deposits of Guano, a rich fertilizer found along the coast. In 1879, during the war of the Pacific, Chilean troops occupied the port adopting it as part of Chile. Pisagua is known locally as a natural prison by way of its remote location and history as use for concentration camps, most notably by dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Graveyard in the sands of Pisagura, Image by Bonnie Truax
In September 1970 during a 15 minute conversation, President Nixon ordered the CIA to to initiate a massive covert intervention in Chile to block democratically elected Salvador Allende from taking and holding office. During a later White House meeting with Henry Kissinger (Secretary of State), Attorney General John Mitchell, and CIA Director Richard Helms, Nixon issued explicit instructions to foment a coup that would prevent Allende from being inaugurated on November 4th. The following handwritten notes of Richard Helms were confirmed as follows:
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1 in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile!
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worth spending
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not concerned risks involved
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no involvement of embassy
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$10,000,00 available, more if necessary
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full-time job - best men we have
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game plan
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make economy scream
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48 hours for plan of action
3 years later, on September 11th 1970, military jets would bomb La Moneda Palace, assassinating President Allende inside. In the following years, over 2,300 people (deemed leftist by Pinochet's regime) would be disappeared. In the national stadium, Estadio Nacional, a concentration and torture camp began holding between 20,000-40,000 people. Including these captives murdered was folk singer Victor Jara, whose hands were crushed to prevent him from singing.
Many remain unidentified in the disappearances following September 11th, their bodies often too brutally beaten or discarded to account for, if they were found at all.
Many were sent to Pisagua, where years later, the mass graves of leftists taken were found preserved in the mineral rich desert soil.
"On June 1, 1990, magistrate Nelson Muñoz convened at the site accompanied by an anthropologist, an archeologist, a chemical engineer, court officials, excavators and witnesses. During that initial day of work, they unearthed human remains from an ancient period of time, evidence of a pre-Colombian burial ground. The next day, June 2, upon excavating another area, the mass grave was found. In the same place along a slope facing the ocean where they were shot, the prisoners, stuffed into burlap sacks, had been flung into a mass grave, then, covered with lime and dirt.
Eventually, 20 bundles were unearthed in the pit, which measured 2.10 meters wide, 11 meters long and 2.00 meters deep. The salt that impregnated the sand preserved the bodies as they were when the men were brought before the firing squad, hands tied behind their backs. The clothes they wore the day of the execution were intact, as were their blindfolds. The indisputable evidence of the impact of bullets represented a clear condemnation of Pinochet and the regional military commanders of the time.
The bodies corresponded to persons who had been executed, including prisoners who military officials claimed to have released. However, the remains of some of the persons executed in 1973 did not appear in the pit, and excavators found bodies of other prisoners whose deaths had never been officially recognized." ("Pisagua", Memoria y Justicia)
Energy in nature preserves history, even when people can’t. Our fear and pain embodied can be quietly lethal.
Fosa de Pisagua, Consejo de Monumentos Nacionales
Tree patterns become cyanotype, become fabric cyanotype, become particles of salt
