Puerto Williams, Chile
Today is September 16, Mexican Independence Day.
On the night of September 16, 2006, exactly 15 years ago to the day, I was sitting by myself at another Independence Day celebration— Chilean independence (which is actually on September 18th). It was a military party at the naval base of Puerto Williams, Chile, the southernmost inhabited place on earth. In that part of the remote south, the winter was coming to an end, and we were on the first days of spring, although you could still see snow falling to the barren ground. Soldiers were dancing on the dance floor of a rustic salon and the party site was adorned with cheap color lights.
It was the strange conclusion to the most ambitious art project of my career, The School of Panamerican Unrest— a 4 month-long, 20,000 mile ground journey down the Pan-American Highway organizing discussions in over 27 cities to collectively reflect on the relationship between national identity and art making, and also on whether we can speak of a Pan-American identity.
I had arrived there a couple days before on a rubber boat steered by an Argentinian fisherman, crossing the Beagle channel from Ushuaia, Argentina, into Isla Navarino (there were no commercial crossings allowed that week because of heavy snowstorms). A Chilean soldier had to drive 45 minutes to meet me, the sole traveler, at the border to stamp my passport. I was in search of La Abuela, also known as Cristina Calderón, the elder resident of Villa Ukika. She was (and still is, at 93 today) the last speaker of Yaghan, the native language of Tierra del Fuego.
I had started my journey with an interview with Marie Smith Jones, the last speaker of Eyak in Alaska. She was a generous and wise individual who regaled us with stories about the Eyak language and even the meaning of her own Eyak name: ‘the voice that I follow”.
After that powerful initial meeting, and over the course of those four months, finding Cristina Calderón felt increasingly vital for me to finish that long journey.
With Marie Smith Jones, last speaker of Eyak, Anchorage, May 19, 2006
Over 120 days I had hundreds of conversations, organized dozens of discussions between artists, activists, writers, historians, and regular folks reflecting on their nation, their city, and the place of art in it. I remember thinking how I had been motivated by an essay written by Mario Vargas Llosa that I read in the late 90s about how globalization was erasing the local color and individuality of communities. As much as this journey was about finding common ground through the evocation of the utopian concept of Panamerica, I really was interested in highlighting specificity.
My process consisted in previously finding a host at every city where I would arrive; upon my arrival we would present a roundtable discussion on a local topic that mattered to the participants, and later we would hold a workshop where the participants, as representatives of the town where we were, would write a manifesto-like document outlining the local challenges faced by them in that moment and articulate specific steps that they would take to address those challenges.
This project took place before the ubiquity of social media (Twitter was launched in July of 2006), so my way of communicating the events of the day during my journey was through a blog. I would post every day from whichever internet café I was able to find. We did not have the kind of immediacy, nor the fluidity of communication, that Instagram and Facebook provide us with today.
Mexican poet Javier Trujillo speaking in Mexicali, June 2006
What was surprising to me, in my conversations with the hundreds of people I encountered throughout my travels was not the cultural differences between one country and another, but their similarities. More specifically, I found that the cultural influence of national identity paled in comparison to the power of geography. Conversations that I had in places as different as Anchorage, Alaska and Mexicali, Baja California were oddly similar. They revolved around the way in which the forces of nature (in the case of Alaska, the mountains, its three million lakes, and its 34,000 miles of tidal shoreline, in the case of Mexicali, the Sonoran Desert, also known as “El camino del diablo”, the Devil’s Road) shaped their lives. People from those places spoke about making art in a remote region of the world and about the inescapable reality of that surrounding natural environment. An artist in Alaska spoke about the influence of the Alaskan landscape in their work, prompting them to explore “the landscapes that I have grown from within”. A Texas transplant artist, Mariano Gonzalez, spoke about the counterpoint to romantic views of the Last Frontier: “when I first arrived here, the first thing that impressed me of the Alaskan highways were the white crosses with the number of the dead”, marking fatal car crashes. For all its beauty, the Alaskan landscape is rugged and dangerous. In Mexicali, poet Gabriel Trujillo described the condition of being an artist working in the isolation of the desert. “We are the frontal teeth of Latin America”— he said. “We are in the position to have our teeth broken, but also where we can show our smile”.
When I was in Ushuaia, the city at the southern tip of Argentina and self-described as “the city at the end of the world”, these conversations were similar. What they made me notice was how, the farther I arrived, the less relevant those supposedly important “art capitals” were to these locations. Time there was different, and the references to famous museums, artists and events were just distant echoes. They just didn’t really matter there.
Discussion in Ushuaia
Once could certainly dismiss this statement by thinking that these remote locations are just backwaters of the world, detached from the newsworthy, world-changing cultural forces at the geopolitical centers. But another way to see it is that those forces that seem so powerful to those of us who live in a city like New York barely register in the other end of the planet, and it is hard to even argue how they would even be relevant there.
Still, wherever I went I sought and local artists, thinking of them as ambassadors and bridges to the world I belonged. Excited of the cultural language we shared across the hemisphere I jokingly proposed at the time the term “The Republic of Contemporary Art”, a meta- nation based on the shared history of 20th century art.
At the entrance of Isla Navarino, September 14, 2006
But in spite of those geographic and cultural connections that I encountered I was still hungry for that difference, that specificity. And finding the last speaker of Yaghan in Villa Ukika —La Abuela—became essential to me.
When I arrived at Isla Navarino, I immediately asked one of the locals to drive me to her house.
I arrived at her house, the last in the village. Like at the end of the fairy tale, I knocked at the old green wooden door, and she opened it. She allowed me to interview her.
Cristina Calderón, last speaker of Yaghan
The encounter felt anticlimactic at first. Calderón was not a very forthcoming interview subject, and her motivation seemed to be —understandably— to sell me some Yaghan crafts. But she opened up a bit afterward. She told me of her childhood and her father’s spiritual beliefs rooted on Yaghan’s indigenous culture. She told me of the tragic suicide of her daughter. And in the end, she concluded with a nihilistic tone, when I asked her about the preservation of her language. She told me something along the lines of: “why should I bother teaching it, since no one wants to learn it?”
I walked out of her house, the fairy tale ending in a strange note. I had traveled 20,000 in search of cultural specificity, but mainly my journey had served to document the fact that this utopian idea of continental integration was only true when practiced at the cost of the loss of individuality.
Afterward, stranded in Isla Navarino because of bad weather, I had to stay there for a few days, with nothing to do. There was a celebration in town to which anyone was invited.
So on September 16 I sat at the Chilean Independence party, alone with a beer in my hand, seeing the soldiers dance. I wondered about the meaning of independence in terms of cultural identity, and how basic notions of liberty and freedom don’t often account for cultural interconnectedness. I asked myself: whether we think of art or the construction of national identity, if geography is destiny, what does it mean to have self-determination?