Nostalgia de la Luz

Nostalgia de la Luz (2010) is a film about the distance between heaven and earth, between the light of the cosmos and human beings, and the mysterious travels back and forth that bound them. In Chile, at an altitude of three thousand meters, astronomers from around the world gather in the Atacama Desert to observe the stars. Up there, the transparency of the sky allows you to see the borders of the universe. Below, the extreme dryness of the earth preserves the human remains intact: mummies, explorers, adventurers, natives, miners and the bones of the political prisoners of the dictatorship. As the astronomers search for extraterrestrial life, a group of women remove the stones, looking for their missing relatives.

The film places us somewhere between the beginning and the end, beyond the present. The gaze travels between the earth and the sky, between life-before-life and life-after-death. It tells us about the possibility of perceiving the traces of a previous life, where no one sees anything: the desert or the darkness of the universe.

As part of the project Becoming Immortal and Then Dying, presented by curator Caterina Almirall at La Capella, the film explores two different searches that happen in the same place, the desert, and that share the need to solve the question of origin, the need to remember. In a way the desert is a space that preserves the traces of the past, being simultaneously a vast museum to decipher and a necropolis.