The virtual line resulting from the migratory route comprehended between Colchane and Iquique in Chile in the last years triggers this project which aims to interrogate the Atacama Desert from the notions of extraction and bodies. This focus originates from the Atacama Desert’s stories, narratives, traces, and entanglements derived from the accumulation of layers of extractive power dynamics throughout the years. Then, the extraction of bodies is understood following the ideas of Haraway, Braidotti, and Latour, not merely as a migratory or industrial phenomenon but as a colonial enterprise predicated on the extraction and exploitation of myriad entities—ranging from humanity and culture to identity, time, and territory. By centring on this conception, this project aims to unravel the spatial intricacies of extraction dynamics and their ramifications across the desert's terrain upon bodies and relationships, as vehicles to enable the encompassing of the different events and phenomena happening simultaneously, as well as imagining realities and possibilities.

The Atacama Desert, traditionally seen as barren and desolate, is revealed as a complex and politically charged landscape shaped by human activity. Its vast geography has been transformed by modern phenomena like mass migration, lithium extraction, and fashion waste disposal. Historically, it has served as a site for resource exploitation, such as copper and saltpetre, tied to colonialism, industrialisation, and conflicts, including Pinochet's dictatorship. This history has resulted in narratives of oppression, cultural shifts, and ecological impacts. Despite its apparent emptiness, the Atacama is now a stage for pressing social, environmental, and political issues. Therefore, the Colchane-Iquique route is part of a strategic ancient route interconnecting theAymara territories distributed between today´s Bolivia and Chile, that grabbed the attention of the mass-media channels after the lockdown during the COVID-19pandemic due to an unprecedented number of ingresses throughout Colchane from2018 onwards. This situation made this route politically instrumental and conflictive. Similarly, apart from fostering natural Aymara crossings between nations, this route had been suffering the continuous incrementation in military presence and vigilance, resulting in the significance of different local infrastructures. Likewise, this route in its depiction not only interconnects human and cultural movement but also integrates and interrelates many narratives, temporalities, stories and extractive events throughout different times and epochs, spanning a conflictive relationship between settlements and particular extractive spots along the route, making it a critical narrative line to be understood. A case study which I believe can lead to a broader understanding of larger phenomena and regional matters happening all around the Atacama Desert and in the Americas.  

Thus, this proposal scrutinises the material and unmaterial vestiges and relationships engendered by extractive processes in the migratory route of Colchane-Iquique. Understood as a fictional but tangible line transforminggeographical relationships and understandings. Then, instigating discussions and consciousness-raising to ultimately provoke transformative actions by amultifaceted approach both onsite and abroad. Projectively, a critical cartography and a counter-route will be produced and displayed on site which will enable the re-narration of the geography in light of the unfolded and exposed stories and narratives accounted by the research and a physical and performative version of the same counter-route to be exhibited at a venue abroad. Then, models, images, sounds, noises, and any material registered and produced while conducting workshops and interviews will be exposed. These two sides of the project will be developed to complementarily originate discussions and consciousness, feeding back the entire proposal and setting it as a continuous work in progress.