Film Latitude 40° by Olaf Holzapfel, Poems by Elicura Chihuailaf, from the exhibition „ZAUN“

Latitude 40° by Olaf Holzapfel
Poems by Elicura Chihuailaf
Music by Nik Nowak, Allessandro Gaia
Montage by Bettina Blickwede
Sound by Renato Alvarado, Uwe Bossenz
Colorist by Achtfeld GmbH
Text by Paz Guevara
released at the documenta14 Kassel Germany

Clouds, forests, fences, geographers, nation-states, international mediators, animals, settlers, gauchos, historians, and poets leave their trace in the video by Olaf Holzapfel recorded in Patagonia, the far south of Chile and Argentina. These actors seem to draw their paths on Patagonian territory witnessing at the same time the traces of others. Nevertheless, the landscape is not depicted as a static natural backdrop to these agents, their desires and tragedies, but as a situation in formation and under negotiation: unstable, temporary, and affected by the inscription or concealment of any semiotic communication. In his video, Holzapfel shares a series of cinematic observations, encounters, conversations, and collaborations that took place in the continent’s south in dialogue with archival material of German geographer Hans Steffen’s investigations in the region.

Looking at all of these heterogeneous actors and traces requires sensibility and attentiveness in order to gather and assemble diverse actions and stories. Such looking is a way to perceive the political topography of a border negotiation, using Patagonia as a historical case study. From time to time, the film, as a medium of observation, lets us apprehend the moments when the (post-)colonial pact was signed, or when the terms of a certain kind of experience (that of the Indigenas) ceased to circulate, while in others, zones of collaboration emerge and characters return from the margins…..

A Revolution of Translation

Everyone is aware of the fact that the Mapuche on one side of Patagonia are related to the Mapuches on the other side. The Andes acted as a road instead of a fence. As we can hear in the video, the poems by Elicura Chihuailaf tell us about the old Andes paths, debunking the assumption that the Cordillera is a border delimiting two separate zones. For those who inhabit it, the Andes open up all their folds. “This means that the mountain isn’t an obstacle for someone living in the pampa or in the valley, they don’t prevent us from going to the other side of the Andes via paths that we all know and to reunite with the family that it is on the other side of the Andes … Not only humans come and go through the Andes, but also animals, like the puma, that still transit through the Andes.”

Conversations have been the most important medium to learn from nature. In this cosmology, the world is not centred on the human being; therefore, apparently inanimate things, like a stone, a cloud, or a tree, emerge in Chihuailaf’s poetry as spiritual entities. There is the concept “itrofilmongen” in Mapudungun, Elicura Chihuailaf tells us, which means “biodiversity” in the sense of “the totality without exclusion; integration of life without fragmentation and the integration of everything living.” “It is our duty,” , “to get to know the physical space of living beings and of all those who are situated in the same territory.” To understand that diversity is valuable, he reminds us to hear their language. The art of conversation has also been a political medium to preserve the stories, worldviews, and advice of the ancestors. Chihuailaf has coined the term “Oralitor,” a poetic figure who transverses between the Mapuche oral tradition and the colonial literary one, writing a bilingual poetry, in Mapudungun and Spanish. In contrast to the nation-state that provides a borderline, one official language (Spanish), and the policy of colonization, bilingual poetry has unfurled a borderless zone of coexistence and translation. In it lies the revolution of the “poetas traductores” (“poet-translators”). If Holzapfel’s film portrays the atmospheric scenes of Patagonia, following the interaction and subtle conversation of various beings, from voluptuous clouds and fenced plains to burnt trees, interrogating (post-)colonial topographies, it might be that he left Juan Steffen’s for Elicura Chihuailaf’s map:

Kura nieye pvllv
Feypikey taiñ pu Che
Fey mew
guyu gekelayay
Ñi Gvtramkangeael feyegvn

Las piedras tienen espíritu
dice nuestra Gente
por eso
no hay que olvidarse
de Conversar con ellas
(Piedra, Sueños de Luna Azul, 2008)

Tromv egu pekefiñ rupan ta kakerumen
Antv tripantv:
Wvtre alof kvyen (pukem), karv pewv kvyen (pwvn)
Wve fvnkun anvmka kvyen (afchi pewv mu
Ka epe konpachi waalvg mu)
Fillem fvnkun anvmka kvyen mew (walug)
Ka welu trvfkenvwchi choyvn kvyen (rimv)
(Kallfv Pewma mew, De Sueños Azules y Contrasueños, 2008)