Hello
thank you for being here,
this work is called NAZCA
sometimes we call it The light falls on us from the sky.
Is about the stars, about an astronomical observatory and about a woman who went to the desert for fifty years to understand some figures on the ground of Nasca Peru.
I have been searching for an answer in the Nasca lines.
Before my son was born I had a dream.
My grandmother is dead,
and my mother takes her,
and her body begins to get smaller and smaller,
until she becomes very small,
until she becomes a little human.
In childbirth I had a prolapsed cord,
my son had a prolapsed cord,
a terrible emergency
and 10 nurses came in,
and they put me to sleep,
and I woke up,
and I asked,
is he alive?
Yes, he is.
and I asked
am I alive?
and from there I said,
my mom is dying,
this was not a question.
My son is obsessed with butterflies,
with monarch butterflies
those that migrate for miles across oceans, seas, rainforests
and on the way they die,
but first they lay eggs and others finish the journey.
On a star,
I said to my daughter when she asked me where she was before she was born.
No, I was dead before I was born,
she replied.
I say all this because I am establishing the rules of the game,
because this will be a game.
I tell all this because when my mother died I began to look up,
more than before,
I saw three stars if I was lucky, because I lived in Santiago,
and I looked for an answer in that explosion of stars,
and there was nothing in that explosion,
when my mother died my heart exploded.
All this already existed,
all this exists,
this microphone, this floor, this glass, this hand, this arm, me and you, because of the explosion of that.
because of the explosion of that,
and I feel accompanied by that,
even if this fails, even if the end is near.
Because I believe in the periodic table, as a summary of the universe.
What I want to say with all this,
is that I seek to survive, to many climates, to much death,
a lot of emptiness,
and the stars have been and are a map of survival,
but I don’t want it to be a play about death, don’t get me wrong.
When my mother was sick with cancer I gave her breast milk,
my son’s milk,
there is something milky in death,
something milky in the process of dying,
like a yogurt that expires.
Now I am declaring this before you,
I am laying my weapons aside, as they say,
my weapons buried in a desert,
and I am making this a desert
and that is the first rule of the game,
this is a desert.
I went to the ALMA observatory after my mother passed away
and I didn’t understand anything,
I was never good at mathematics,
I only understood that they were 66 giant antennas doing a beautiful choreography in the atacama pampa capturing light from the cosmos.
what I want to say with all this
is that today you will be observation machines,
satellites,
no, more like antennas and that’s the second rule of the game, because you are in that place, sitting there,
and you will pick up the signals that I will give you,
this order of words, of sounds, of movement.
This.
This.
What I mean by this is that
I want to study the smallest to tell the biggest.
And excuse me for talking about this with a hot head,
but it’s a subject that moves me, and that’s why I make so much noise,
And I know it’s not right,
I know that one of the best ways to eliminate noise is to be very, very, very cold.
that’s where you can see it clearly,
that’s why that’s why that’s why when my mother was dying, when my mother’s cells started to shut down,
when my mother who is not a jellyfish, who lives forever,
who is just a mother, began to die, perhaps,
she saw everything with such a beautiful clarity, because of the cold,
because I saw how my mother’s body cooled down.
I say I saw it because I did not touch it
I was afraid
and I don’t know how long ago she died
because when the carbon 14 stopped working in her blood she was dead.
and that made me a scientist, not a daughter
I wish I had the icy blood like the iguana drawn in nazca,
in order to have clarity,
it is necessary to cool
and in this path of cold,
of cooling my mind,
I meet Maria,
on this path of searching for order,
and it sounds religious,
I meet Mary,
This is the month of Mary, for me, January.
But i meet Maria Reiche, a German woman who in the first half of the 20th century dedicated herself to science, lived alone in the middle of the pampa and with a broom and a ladder unearthed the Nazca lines in Peru for fifty years.
And this is an elegy for her death,
for her madness, for her madness, of woman broom observatory lesbian witch witch sand star,
this is a funeral speech in the biggest cemetery a woman can have,
a desert,
and they are many figures,
that,
that today I will try to read to you.
to you,
with care, with fear, with love, keeping its mystery, for the desert, for the dead, for the silence.
because the phrase «the light falls from the sky on us» was not taken from a book of poetry,
but from the web page of the ALMA observatory,
and it is a fact,
the light falls from the sky on us, even here.