Desde la montaña vemos la montaña

Two men surround a horse. They patiently clear a path for it to jump over a barbed-wire fence. We observe the scene from a distance, paying attention to the movements of the animal —noble, impetuous — which disappears without a trace. But the camera lingers and introduces us to these young men who, aboard a pickup truck, travel through the landscape as witnesses to a way of life and an ancestral tradition on the brink of extinction.

We are in Ñorquincó, deep in the Argentinian Patagonia, where a wildfire was the latest and most painful of the threats endured by the indigenous community. “The part that burned is at night; the other is in daylight,” one of the many voices of the Mapuche people tells us, voices working to reforest the National Park. We might say that the visual record behaves that way as well, moving between light and shadow, entering a state of wakefulness that questions all the possible ways of filming a forest. Guided by the faint red signal of a night camera, from the privileged vantage point of a treetop, to the careful work of reforesting the forest seed by seed, plant by plant.

A task as artisanal as it is spiritual, which we witness just as we do the caress of a loved one who is withering away. From that caress emerges an ancient soul, a sorrowful witness to the Mapuche people’s struggle centuries ago, returning to the viewer the ineffable — the spectral gaze of the mountain itself.

Antonio Miguel Arenas