Aguaquimera — short in post-production

The project explores the conditions surrounding the disappearance of Laguna de Tagua Tagua in Chile’s O’Higgins Region in the mid-nineteenth century, and its consequences. Through interdisciplinary research and artistic production, we focus our investigation on this vast and rich territory, home to one of the oldest settlements in the Americas and a place where human and dinosaur remains are found.

Through field research involving the documentation of archaeological and palaeontological excavations, scientific archives, historical documents, dioramas, and the collection of local myths and legends, artists and filmmakers Celeste Rojas Mugica and Niles Atallah will create an interdisciplinary installation combining an audiovisual work shot on 16 mm film with a series of archival materials and objects from the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural and MELT (Museo Escolar Laguna Taguatagua).

The filming uses analogue techniques of multiple exposure and dissolves through photochemical materials, highlighting the transient and ghostly nature of the elements. Shot on celluloid (16 mm), the material proposes a distinctive dialogue between the texture and grain of the film itself and the archives and photographs to be exhibited in the same space, creating visual connections between the different materials in the installation and the short film.

The work is conceived as a multimedia constellation that embraces a diversity of elements in its language and form. Drawing on the concept of hidden interconnectedness—the concealed links among stories, events and traces that initially seem unrelated—we seek to reconnect elements whose relationships may emerge through critical observation.

Both in its research process and in its final form, the work seeks to emphasise the tension between the visible and the invisible, between what emerges and what disappears, by combining documents of reality with materials of mythical and imaginary origin. It seeks to create images and sounds that take on a ghostly form, evoking an ambiguous tone around a lagoon that, although it has disappeared, retains a latent presence. This might foreshadow a possible speculative and subversive future that escapes total disintegration.