During the Pandemic that we have all lived through, we have had to modify our habitual behaviors and adapt to circumstances that, until not so long ago, seemed to only exist in the most dystopian imagination. Each one of us has dealt with their ghosts in their own way. I have found mine, returning to the habit of leaving the city to photograph whatever the Magellanic landscape could offer me. And I photographed the most solitary places of the steppe, going into those interior paths that few people travel. There are no human beings in these images, but there is the mark they have left, in the form of abandoned buildings corroded by time. Old houses and empty sheep stalls. Little shrines raised on the side of the road in memory of people who never returned home. Machine gun nests where soldiers waited for a war that never came. Remains of a forest burned by ranchers decades ago. And in the midst of all this, the non-human inhabitants who continue their eternal wandering through the land of the Aonikenk, today crossed by barbed wire that the guanacos jump until they get entangled and die.

Today I share with you the result of a creative exercise: composing and recording music inspired by this photographic record of Magellanic solitude, in a very short time and only using synthesizers, electric bass and an electroacoustic guitar. By doing this I wanted to draw a more complete vision of how I see my habitat and what catches my attention about it. With images and sounds I can express in a deeper way than with words the sensation of strangeness and melancholy that certain places produce in me. And thus reveal new textures under the hard light that illuminates this boundary. I hope you enjoy this brief visual and sonic pass through places where it is easy to imagine that the world has already ended. Because I believe that what would come after our disappearance will be just as calm as that interior path I love to lose myself on.

Rafael Cheuquelaf
(Punta Arenas, Chile. May 2022)