No se van los que se aman is both a dance work and an installation that cites the collective experience of more than 1,200 detainees who passed through the Chacabuco concentration camp between 1973 and 1975, the first years of the military dictatorship in Chile. Located among the ruins of an old nitrate mine in the heart of the Atacama Desert, Chacabuco exhibits the fake normality imposed by the dictatorial regime, as well as the stigmatizing wound it inflicted on the collective body of a large part of the country. 

In a present context of planetary collapse, the world's driest desert is announced to us as the likely landscape of a forthcoming scenario. This reframes the events in Chacabuco not merely as a passage of time, but rather draws our attention to humanity's resilience and adaptation amidst profoundly hostile conditions. We feel compelled to ponder such capacity for adaptation and persistence, not merely as survival imperatives, but as a force that evolves into a necessity and a love for others. 

The piece is supported by a large structure that works as a disruptive device in space, capable of capturing the gaze towards the game of projections and angles that allow the story to be told. Its technical development obeys situated production conditions that respond to technological dynamics of the global South, which we can see in the piece's particular meeting of bodies and scenarios in an arrangement that solves the gaps of the digital by means of the analogue.

Through a design that skillfully intertwines pre-recorded performance projections and site-specific documentation, this piece offers a poignant narrative on Chacabuco's memory as a living and present experience, challenging the linear perspective of time. It thus stands as an act of defiance against the desert's erasure, the relentless march of time, and the dictatorship's attempt to make that memory disappear.

Links: : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiuAdG6dr28

Direction and playwriting: Carla Redlich  

Sound and new media design: Jean Didier 

Choreographer: Diana Carvajal 

Performers: Karen Carreño and José Araya 

Stage design: Juan Soto 

Stage production: Taller Dinamo 

Video & photography: Sebastián Rojas Rojo 

Chief technician (On-site): Claudio Ortiz 

Costume & Graphic design: Antonella Redlich 

Community manager: Javiera Redlich 

Producers: Matar a un Panda 


With support from: Financed by the Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Regional \(FNDR\) de Antofagasta, 2023; Technical residency in Centro Cultural Casa Palacio; Chroma studio in Centro para la Revolución de las Industrias Creativas \(CRTIC\), Santiago; Gobierno Regional de Antofagasta \(GORE\); Fundación Cultural de Sierra Gorda.

Matar a un Panda (CL) is a transdisciplinary creation collective formed by Carla Redlich and Jean Didier, experimenting with crossovers between performing arts, medial arts, and sound.  Their work delves into the realm of memory, and as such confronts a challenge: memory, largely shaped by visual impressions, has been eroded by the overwhelming flood of images bombarding the contemporary eye, rendering it numb. In light of this situation, MAUP ponders how new media might stimulate a revival of experiential engagement, aiming to once again move, touch, and shake us.

This live performance project by the Chilean artist collective Matar a un Panda (Carla Redlich and Jean Didier) examines issues of individual and collective memory. It explores the experience of more than 1,200 detainees who passed through the Chacabuco concentration camp (a former mining town) in the Northern Chilean desert between 1973 and 1975 in the first years of the military dictatorship. Combining live movement, recorded bodies that are projection mapped onto architectural structures in the actual town with narrative testimonies of survivors,  No Se Van Los Que Se Aman successfully employs minimal means to reflect on the brutality of political oppression in Pinochet-era Chile and its continued resonances within the next generation.