Pacífico

I’m from a very special place in the south (end or beginning?) of the world.

Yet this place is the northest point of a political line recently drawn to separate an ancestral territory into Nations. Dividing what once was a whole. A whole space & time of exchange and migration. Arica is the name of this spot. A unique place with a rich cultural and natural heritage, located in the triple frontier with Peru and Bolivia, a historical point of mixture since beyond 10,000 years ago (that we know of).

You could not really say this is the driest dessert, or the widest beach, or even the thinnest valley, but all at once: the very heart of South America. A legendary corridor for the transit of man and beast and spirits alike. No frontier should ever remain closed to them. Not to the north, not to the east.

The experience I present here in the shape of sounds is one of sheer joy or even ecstasy from migrating birds that came all the way from North America to spend the warm summer across the coast of Arica. Perhaps the only beings that don’t need travel papers and know nothing of borders; they teach us every time that territories belong to no one.

Migration

This recording is about nature, specifically the sound of birds and insects and trees that inhabit in thin - petrified magma -valleys across the middle of the driest desert (Atacama), like an oasis on Mars at the feet of the ever dramatic Cordillera de Los Andes. 

This stereo piece was recorded specifically at the Codpa Valley, about 150 km south east from the city of Arica, in the Hacienda Santa Helena, with a pair of LOM Mikro Uzi microphones, a Shure FP33 mixer and an Edirol R44 digital recorder.

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