In Christiane Pooley's work, waterfalls, ponds, wheat fields, and highways are recurring themes. These seemingly peaceful landscapes, whose exact locations and historical periods are unclear, contain dark undercurrents beneath their serene appearance. The Araucanía region of Chile, where the artist was born and raised, has long been a breeding ground for complex tensions. Conflicts between indigenous people (predominantly Mapuche) and the Chilean government intensified at the end of the 19th century when the Chilean government seized their land and imposed Chilean citizenship on them. Before that, the Mapuche had fought Spanish colonizers for over 300 years. Pooley’s work depicts Arcaunia’s hidden past and tensions over land ownership with a deceptively calm beauty. At what moment does a landscape represent nature, extraction and production, a repository of collective memories, or a homeland never to return to?
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