Myths of the Cosmos

This consists of an expedition on the Atacama Desert in the north of Chile, the plan is to film and explore the relationship between the Atacama Desert and the Cosmic. This project consisted of an expedition on the Atacama Desert in the north of  Chile, the plan is to film and explore the relationship between the Atacama Desert and the Cosmic. The focus is to examine this area and the impacts of technologies on the territories it occupies, documenting it from a social, environmental, economic, and critical perspective. We joined the expedition for the "Sky Commodified" Documentary by Locument and a group of MIT professors and students. This area has a huge indigenous presence and the first observatories date from pre-Columbian cultures (Licanantay, Aymara, Inka). They had a very important relationship with the skies and the celestial. This is the first on-site research around the Myths of the Cosmos project, which consists of a worldwide exploration of ancestral and local cosmologies that are linked to the celestial. This has the objective to understand the relationship between humans and outer space since the beginning of times in different communities and places.

In the Atacama Desert, we visited different observatories among them contemporary ones such as ALMA, as well as indigenous observatories and archeological sites such as Saiwas de Ramaditas, Ojos del Sirawi, and Taira.

We established collaborations with local communities to be able to learn about their perspectives and practices around their relationship to outer space. We also established a collaborative relationship to have the support of the Museo de Arte Precolombino for having access to their archives, connecting with local researchers and doing on-site activities with the communities. We got the chance to meet and work with people from the communities, as well as ethnographers, astronomers, ethnomusicologists and archeologists. This project connects with the complex entanglement of a landscape that contains the vast desert and the infinity of the universe. 

This expedition and research was funded by the Space Exploration Initiative and supported by the Opera of the Future, and Space Enabled group.