Mutually assured devotion: a stratafiction

This project follows a collective consciousness formed of the non-consensually inhumed and exhumed of the Atacama desert. We reimagine these unknowns as a spectral body of “warm data.” Aflame with love for the mineral body that has held them, they bestow a series of funerary rites upon the landscape through terraforming gestures: scratching and extracting, caressing, choking, holding, burying. Entombing anything they perceive to be dead, they write a devotional poetry of wounds. The non-buried can develop a new set of relationships with the crust—carnal, suicidal, ritual.

One imagines soft matter as a fiction around a mineral body; the false memory of flesh on a bone. QR to video.

Many have been protected in the crust, the wound, the womb of Chuquicamata’s extended mineral body.

New topologies are created for the infrastructural dead, while the non-buried can develop a new set of relationships with the crust—carnal, suicidal, ritual.

Video stills: a massage from the invisible hand.

Funeral rites, terraforming gestures