CONNIE MENDOZA

RESEARCH

Alma Project contrasts two forms of originating mental images: the experience of the exile which produces images of the memory and numerical images produced by the techno-science observing the universe. Both image sources have in common that they reveal themselves as visions, optical phenomena, Fata Morganas or hallucinations. Maybe because both, the memory and the science search the secret origin that hasn’t to be revealed totally, may it be the origin of the universe in an infinite time or the origin of a particular and momentarily past.

ALMA are the initials of Atacama Large Millimeter Array. The construction of 66 antennas located on the Chajnantor plateau in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile at 5000m altitude, will be finished in 2010. Its main ambition is to obtain high-resolution images of traces of the origins of the universe.

Chuquicamata is the name of the biggest open pit copper-mine of the world [codelco.com]. Close to the mines were camps, auto sufficient production units in the middle of the desert, where all the workers, engineers and executives lived. In Chuquicamata lived up to 25.000 persons. The village was left behind in 2007 due to the heavy contamination of the ground, the workers and their families were relocated to Calama. I was born in 1971 when my father worked in the offices of the Chuquicamata copper mine. In 1974, after the coup d´état of Pinochet, my parents and me were exiled to Spain
The copper-mine and the astronomical observatory define some space and time coordinates in the Atacama Desert. Alma Project is about a journey using these coordinates.

Alma Project is a reflexion about what Vilém Flusser addresses “the forgotten act”: “Man has forgotten that it was him who generated the images for orientating himself in the world. When he lost the capacity to decode them, he started to live as a result of his own images: Imagination has turned into hallucination”.