Imaginary Explosions
Episode 2
Chaitén

Like each one of us, the volcano is a dense, energetic node. It’s part of an extended social and biological ecosystem. To perceive a system, many impressions are necessary. We weave our perceptions together… We find that there are often missing pieces. As well as surplus. We didn’t quite feel around a corner… or we forgot to feel the ground when we were so focused on the sky. When that happens, we leave holes.

In Chaitén, the network follows signals coming from a cave at the foot of the Chaitén volcano in Chile, where the first human settlers carved the walls with vulvas—including a hybrid spider vulva. Interweaving documentary footage of a research team into the narrative, Chaitén departs from the evolutionary theory of holobionts to speculate about acquiring military radar cartography into the bodily sensorium.

Chaitén is the second episode in Imaginary Explosions (2018-2023), a speculative cosmology that blurs research science with art and fiction. The episodic series centers inhuman animacies and an alliance of transfeminist scientists who cooperate with the desires of the mineral earth to simultaneously erupt all volcanoes. Improvised with real-life scientists and media researchers, the films follow members of the network as they traverse geological sites across place and time and attempt to divest technoscientific instruments of their corporate and military infrastructures of power.

The Imaginary Explosions cosmology translates aesthetic forms of communication across sensory modalities while being in relation to inhuman alterities and non-normative bodies. How can we understand and interpret the inhuman world? How can we practice other ways of being in a body? Focusing on communication with geologic subjects through technologies and mutual alliances, the cosmology explores how human and mineral subjectivities are entangled, emphasizing moments when the earthly asserts its agency in the political sphere.