Weaving the creative experience in the territory was essential for Sara and me. Each of us performed two artistic actions, one in the river in the mountains, and the other in the sea. The actions were deeply connected with our processes, materialities, and biographies.

In my case, in “Intimate Association,” I first explored the process of situated creation, embodied knowledge, and the paradoxical relationship of life and death between bodies of water, clay, and heavy metal contamination that clings to its molecules in our rivers. The hand that I modeled belongs to the paleoceanographer Dharma Reyes, who uses clays to investigate and reconstruct the currents of the past. Her work has led her to engage in community science and investigate heavy metal contamination in pottery communities in Chile. The gesture she chose is to find clay on the ground, the first gesture of recognition when exploring a territory, a gesture that I captured while we went to the field with her to the clay mines of Nacimiento.

On the other hand, in “Amniotic Dream,” I explored my inner experience with non-maternity and maternity, with the edges of what constitutes an individual, and the line between dreams and reality. I handbuilt the clay baby, a daughter of the sea, during a period of nine months while grieving my own biological infertility. In the artistic action, I walked into the ocean with the unfired sculpture and stayed with her until she dissolved in the sea. The locality chosen is the place where I have been performing scientific studies on the ecology and evolution of maternal behavior in marine worms (polychaetes).