IT WOULD NEVER BE QUITE THE SAME AGAIN

Developed as three large, detailed photographs and two found images, alongside artist’s texts and copies of original documentation, It Would Never Be Quite The Same Again weaves together a series of contested sites and acts of dissent. The works interrogate a number of events and documents construed as distant echoes in the recent history of Chile, Great Britain and Spain of the detonations in the late 19th and early 20th century nitrate fields of the Atacama Desert. The series is an appendix to my long term project Nitrate, presented in 2014 at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona [MACBA], and conjures up a wide network of interconnected geographies and histories, of personal and collective memories on the distinctive political contexts of Spain and Chile around 1973, and on historical relationships between Chile and Great Britain – my country of residence since 2000 – which are at the heart of the Nitrate project. For both bodies of work, the Atacama Desert operates as a vanishing point.