Bustamante, Macchiavello, Sotomayor, and Thiermann, Chilean Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale

About

Peatlands are in urgent need of conservation. All over this increasingly hot and arid world, these wetlands are imperiled. Their conservation is intrinsically linked to the future wellbeing of humankind and, in Patagonia, to the rebirth of the Selk'nam people. Peat bogs are clamoring to be represented as a living body, as the Selk'nam people are also clamoring to be recognized as a living culture. We are claiming a society of mutual care: peatlands and bog people are indivisible.

The Selk'nam Cultural Foundation Hach Saye teaches us that its rights and those of the peat bogs depend on each other. The Selk'nam freely inhabited Tierra del Fuego and coexisted with peat bogs in their ancestral territory for 8,000 years before the arrival of the colonizers who brought about their genocide. History insists that the Selk'nam people became extinct. Today, the Selk'nam Covadonga Ona community is organizing to be recognized as a living culture and language.

Peatlands play a critical role in the regulation of the planet’s climate by capturing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in deep layers of unaltered organic matter (peat). Although this capacity places them “among the most valuable ecosystems on earth” (Wildlife Conservation Society Chile), peatlands are an overlooked type of wetland—in part due to their fundamentally “buried” structure. This complex condition increases their vulnerability to serious threats such as mining, the extraction of vegetation, and drainage for the construction of infrastructure such as highways. Once drained and destroyed, peat bogs go from being carbon sinks to emitting enormous amounts of greenhouse gasses.

Peatlands challenge us to create a new, turbid, layered and multivocal aesthetic that highlights the stories of the healthy Patagonian peat bogs, emphasizing their role as a Southern bastion of vitality in the face of climate change.