Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims

Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims is an experimental film essay shot in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Because of the extreme aridity and elevation of the terrain, the skies above the desert are completely clear, allowing for an unobstructed view of the stars. Scattered across the land are powerful telescopes, through which scientists gaze into the deep time of the cosmos, while the surrounding desert freezes history. Today you can find prehistoric stone drawings there, but also labor camps from colonial times, later reactivated during Augusto Pinochet’s authoritarian military dictatorship (1973–90) to exploit opponents of the regime—stories of violence that remain hidden in plain sight. The artists ask how there can be such clarity and obscurity at the same time.
Humanities Now film screening + conversation with directors Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman with Santiago Acosta (Spanish and Portuguese)

Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman’s work undermines ways of thinking about and relating to the Earth that have been shaped by European colonial modernity. They show how categories and distinctions that might seem self-evident to us—such as the interiority of the subject versus the exteriority of its surrounding—underlie a profoundly violent, unequal, racist world. Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims turns the spotlight on the persistence, though in altered form, of this modern relation to the Earth in the history of neoliberalism and one of its defining early episodes: Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship.