Perut+Osnovikoff´s Surire: Observing the End of The World in The Skin of The Desert

Abstract

In this article, I analyze the observational documentary Surire (2015) by filmmakers Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff from a methodological perspective that links ecocriticism with a haptic approach to the cinematographic image. This documentary shows, without commentary, interviews or music, the daily life of an Aymara community dwelling in the surroundings of the Surire salt flat, a natural area protected by the Chilean State. Surire also registers the operations of a borax mine which threatens the biodiversity of the salt flat. In this way, the documentary exposes the crisis experienced by the forms of life that converge in what Macarena Gómez-Barris (2017) has called the extractive zone, that is, those regions of high biodiversity which have become, from a colonial paradigm, in spaces of extractivism and racial exclusion. At the same time, the documentary reveals how the human and extra human inhabitants of the salt flat carry life forward despite the crisis in which they find themselves by way of establishing alliances at the edge of what Jens Andermann (2018) calls the inmundo. Starting from these theoretical operators, I focus on the use of extreme close-ups of the skin of indigenous bodies, animals, and the surface of the desert in Surire, which creates a haptic visualization of the environment of the salt flat and makes us feel the crisis in our own bodies, to analyze the violence towards the inhabitants of the salt flat as well as its survival strategies against extractivism.