At the beginning, you had to cross a midden to reach the shiny white and coarse sandy beach... there was also a tiny stream that smelled of moss and rocks, of resinous plants from the hill. I was still so young that I remember the sharpness of the shells on my feet and the water, the scent of hot salt, I knew nothing of Changos or Chinchorros, let alone that they inhabited my pulse. However, the memory vibrates intensely in my heart, the inner voice that García-Alix speaks of, that one that among a thousand thoughts, struggles to make itself heard.
The light was that of the sun on the shells, we knew that winter was over when they began to shine among the huilles (endemic herbs of Chile) that sprouted staining the hill of blue. The shadow was a dark shack in the middle of the midden. The "Queda"... Although I feared it, peeking through its boards and imagining what they hid made my heart race.
When hungry, I would eat dry huiros (seaweed) from the beach, sitting over the loco abalone) shells... we ate locos every day, chicken was far too expensive. Locos and mushrooms from the hill, sold by some kids not older than me. My mother would buy from them confidently, she said that they knew, that they had always known, since their ancestors. The same people who have built the Quedas since ancient times to take refuge during the fishing days far from their clans. Precarious nomadic covers surrounded by shells... traces of those who, collection after collection, have lived there some nights and days.
Today, however, they are surrounded by bottles, diapers, mattresses or tires. What became of that sun and that wet morning on the shells? How many more coves will have disappeared in the course of my generation, one born without garbage dumps, and now, those dumps it reigns among them?
Recording the coast I witnessed the change: rocks strewn with industrial and domestic waste, garbage has been finding me... How do I turn my trip into a document that gives an account of this landscape we have built? How to make it visible? How to propose repair actions?
If we give garbage to the sea, the tides draw with it on the sand... I would like to once again find hüiros, flowers, and seashells along its trail.
I hear ancient voices in my heartbeat. Like the Camanchacos sailing in their wolf hides, I walk along the shore and I wonder what the ocean would be like when it was an ocean, what the Pacific would be like before the Pacific and I know that I want to see the face of Mamacocha (Mother Ocean) clean again.