The Atacama desert is the driest place on earth, visible from outer space, and the stone heart of our origin story. I have always been fascinated by its dual narratives of visibility and invisibility- it is where the most advanced astronomical observatories and telescopes are pointed at the sky, the A.L.M.A (Soul, in Spanish) or  Atacama Light Millimetre Array for example, which looks for the origins of our planet. Thousands of meteorites have been found there, fragments of comets and asteroids, and in some cases, pieces of the moon or Mars. We carry these traces, as minerals in our bones, and others like gold, silver and platinum, we wear on our fingers. These appeared on earth from violent collisions of supernovas in outer space. We search these lunar landscapes as part of our origin story, when really we carry these traces inside ourselves. We extract these elements from the core of the earth, digging down into its dry underbelly, to power our lives. I went to see the moons of Saturn from a telescope in the desert and took otherworldly photographs of the Martian geologies. I collected salt from the salt flats on the Altiplano, copper debris from the abandoned copper mines and iron ore from stones I walked on. Pinochet dropped the bodies of the ‘Desaparecidos’ there in the 70s and 80s, where their bones would blend into its rocky dry surface, hiding them from view. He didn’t reckon on the grandmothers and mothers who, years later, would comb its terrain metre by metre to find their loved ones in an impossibly forensic resistance to these state crimes. In the Atacama,  we remember that we are born of a stone heart, of the deep pulse and slow rhythm of deep geological and sidereal time. Here, I have taken photographs, videos and made solar plates, to create an installation that explores and reimagines my encounter with these landscapes- the very places that provide the minerals we need to create photographs and photo etchings in the first place: copper, for the plates, salt for development, silver for the light sensitivity, iron and lithium for digital batteries. By introducing these colours and minerals into the images, it reminds me of photography’s own alchemical origin story, of the stardust in my bones, and our need to understand these embedded and intertwined histories.

These photographs were taken in the open desert, in its lunar landscapes and filtered with saturated colours to enhance the otherworldly nature of their geologies.

Here are details of the photo etchings, using collected stone pigments and highlighting the heat of the desert in its red carmine ink. This ink is made from the cochineal beatles that live on cactae that grow south and north of these desert areas, in Peru, Bolivia and Argentina.

The installation includes a projected looped film onto the surface of the photographs. I made this film with footage of the Atacama and the coastlines of Chile, where pollution from the mining and extractive industries in the Atacama empty into the waters there. It is ephemeral and spectral, referring in turn to the ancestral waters and magma that would have created these geological formation billions of years ago