The World's Longest Poem, Part I -- Santiago, Chile
William L. Fox
Chile is so narrow a country that when you fly into Santiago you see the Andes (and the border with Argentina) on your left, and the Pacific Ocean on your right--but the country itself lies mostly hidden under the body of the plane. Between the immense mountains and its almost unmeasurable and fractal coastline run a number of anthropic lines. The most prominent are the Inca Road, the Pan-American Highway, and the longest line of poetry in the world, Raul Zurita’s 3.17-kilometer-long ni peña ni miedo--approximately “neither pain, nor fear.” I’m writing about them to conclude a book about lines in the landscape titled All Along the Line. Although I was in Chile’s Atacama Desert two years ago as part of a project organized by Chris Taylor, a Land Arts class called Atacama Lab, I didn’t even know then that the poem existed.
I’m traveling this time with Jerry Moore, an anthropologist who speaks Spanish, is an authority on Andean cultures, and cooks better than I do--all essential qualities for a companion while working here. Together, we’ll attempt to find some segments of the Inca Road constructed through the Atacama in the late fifteenth century, and hope to find the poem, which is tucked away in an obscure valley. We can see the poem on Google Earth, but are unsure from the aerial image if the tracks heading west to it from the Pan-American Highway go all the way.
But our first stop is in Santiago where our host, the artist Josefina Gulisasti (and co-founder of the international curatorial exchange program Incubo), takes us to the Museo del Belles Artes to see what she claims is a show designed for my benefit. I soon see why: it’s the first retrospective look at landscape representation in Chile. Extending from the earliest maps and coastal profiles made by Spanish explorers, it presents us with 18th-century topographical drawings, the inevitable landscape oils of the 19th century, and then ends with contemporary works, an aerial photograph of Zurita’s poem among them. It’s as complete a survey of a country’s landscape as you would imagine in terms of covering the modes of artistic interaction with landscape--from mapping, to imaging, to intervention.
A couple of examples. Pedro José Amado Pissis (1812-1889, and in French known as Aime Pissis) was a French geologist and the father of South American cartography. He worked from 1848-1868 on an atlas of Chile in cross-sections, 13 of the 15 maps from which are displayed, and that are accompanied by a visual lexicon of Chilean landscape: watercolor sketches of mountains, volcanoes, the immense salt pans and interior lagoons, the fjords and islets. Comparing his mapwork with that of other Chilean cartographers, you can see how they struggle with a primary issue--do you represent the country in vertical maps or horizontal ones, as did Pissis?
Next: #9: The World’s Longest Poem, Part 2--Atacama Desert, Chile
Chile is so narrow a country that when you fly into Santiago you see the Andes (and the border with Argentina) on your left, and the Pacific Ocean on your right--but the country itself lies mostly hidden under the body of the plane. Between the immense mountains and its almost unmeasurable and fractal coastline run a number of anthropic lines. The most prominent are the Inca Road, the Pan-American Highway, and the longest line of poetry in the world, Raul Zurita’s 3.17-kilometer-long ni peña ni miedo--approximately “neither pain, nor fear.” I’m writing about them to conclude a book about lines in the landscape titled All Along the Line. Although I was in Chile’s Atacama Desert two years ago as part of a project organized by Chris Taylor, a Land Arts class called Atacama Lab, I didn’t even know then that the poem existed.
I’m traveling this time with Jerry Moore, an anthropologist who speaks Spanish, is an authority on Andean cultures, and cooks better than I do--all essential qualities for a companion while working here. Together, we’ll attempt to find some segments of the Inca Road constructed through the Atacama in the late fifteenth century, and hope to find the poem, which is tucked away in an obscure valley. We can see the poem on Google Earth, but are unsure from the aerial image if the tracks heading west to it from the Pan-American Highway go all the way.
But our first stop is in Santiago where our host, the artist Josefina Gulisasti (and co-founder of the international curatorial exchange program Incubo), takes us to the Museo del Belles Artes to see what she claims is a show designed for my benefit. I soon see why: it’s the first retrospective look at landscape representation in Chile. Extending from the earliest maps and coastal profiles made by Spanish explorers, it presents us with 18th-century topographical drawings, the inevitable landscape oils of the 19th century, and then ends with contemporary works, an aerial photograph of Zurita’s poem among them. It’s as complete a survey of a country’s landscape as you would imagine in terms of covering the modes of artistic interaction with landscape--from mapping, to imaging, to intervention.
A couple of examples. Pedro José Amado Pissis (1812-1889, and in French known as Aime Pissis) was a French geologist and the father of South American cartography. He worked from 1848-1868 on an atlas of Chile in cross-sections, 13 of the 15 maps from which are displayed, and that are accompanied by a visual lexicon of Chilean landscape: watercolor sketches of mountains, volcanoes, the immense salt pans and interior lagoons, the fjords and islets. Comparing his mapwork with that of other Chilean cartographers, you can see how they struggle with a primary issue--do you represent the country in vertical maps or horizontal ones, as did Pissis?
Next: #9: The World’s Longest Poem, Part 2--Atacama Desert, Chile
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