30 years after the Iceberg in Seville: new symbols appear in the Chile of 2022

In 1992, Chile participated in the Universal Exhibition of Seville carrying an iceberg brought directly from Antarctica on a long voyage of Navy ships. The idea was to show our country’s skills for commercial exchange: just as we could move a huge piece of ice, we would be able to export fresh products such as fruit and salmon. The ancient ice, extracted from the so-called “Chilean Antarctic territory”, generated such a stir that, of the million visitors that the Expo received, the Chilean pavilion was the busiest. The architects in charge of the work became well known and together with the Minister in charge went around the world as the face of an unknown country that won all the eyes of the international press. Over time, degree theses, papers and a novel were written, a film was made and the intervention became so famous that, many years later, a Bulgarian industrial refrigeration company would have taken its name from the event, Iceberg 1992 Lmt. 
Borges said that it was an anachronism to condemn with the canon of the present what was written in the past. However, in this case already in the past strong criticisms of the work were formulated. The organizations “Ice for Antarctica” and the National Committee for the Defense of Flora and Fauna (CODEFF) put the cry in the sky before the ecological damage, also considering the fuel spent in transport. Others exposed the obscenity of the state spending $12 million to move refrigerated blocks. In fact, the criticism forced the organizers to make it explicit that the Iceberg would be returned to the Antarctic depths, but then Time magazine wondered: “What is stupider than transporting 85 tons of Antarctic ice? Well, bring it back.” 
On the other hand, the irony of exposing a natural resource in an instance whose realization had been promised by the King of Spain to “celebrate” 500 years since the arrival of Columbus in America was also highlighted. One of the artists involved, however, suggested a different reading because ice would have been the only loot that the Spaniards did not take from America, precisely because they could not. But the fact that Chile could transport better and therefore trade, did not ensure that the conditions of exchange were now different for the colonized, no doubt. 
Beyond the obvious, the New York Times of the time noticed what was between the lines. The Iceberg was a way for Chileans to say that their country was as cold as a European country. It was an aspiration to show, fresh out of the Pinochet dictatorship, that Chile was pure, transparent, cold and ready to trade with foreign powers. The Iceberg, Moulian shrewdly noted, was actually the perfect sculpture of the “whitewashing operation.” of those who designed the conditions for the return to democracy. On the ice transported and then exhibited there were no traces of blood or traces of the painful recent past. The huge block, of pure blue with white veins, moulian said, was as if Chile was just born, sanitized by the crossing of the sea, where what was damaged and what had been suffered had been quickly purified. Thus, the story was told of a transition that traded stability for silence, before the imminence of fear (which provoked Pinochet), but where in reality this fear was used as a cunning trap of the deciding elite to impose a certain destiny. Fear, of course, existed in the masses of humble people who suffered the horror. But Moulian’s point is that he was coldly occupied by negotiators to continue the neoliberal revolution initiated by the dictatorship, although now without the problems of international image. For the first time, it gave birth to a reliable and valid Chile outward. The perfect agreed transition, without past, without apparent history. In short, the Iceberg.
Last week, almost thirty years after the Seville Expo, the environmental organization Fima installed ice cubes that made up the word “Chile” on the front of the Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago. In less than eight hours, the structure completely melted, showing the urgency of the climate crisis and the need for the ongoing Constitutional Convention to draft an ecological Constitution in harmony with nature. The intervention entitled “Chile melts without an Ecological Constitution”, work of the artist Daniel Reyes León in collaboration with Rubén Castillo, sought to reflect the worrying rise in the temperature of the planet and cities like Santiago. Against the grain of the ancient Iceberg, here it is not about showing the countries of the global north the firmness of the ice and our ability to keep the water in a solid state. Rather, the objective is to make visible, in the public space, the ephemeral condition of it, as a way of remembering how soon it can disappear if we do not manage its care.
Just as the eternal ice of the extreme south is once again signified, reflections have been born on copper, the desert, the mountain range, the water of the rivers and the ocean, as well as the trees that populate Chile, among many others. Sfeir inquires about the northern copper that is (re)constituted in the euro penny coins, popping them to return them to their mineral beauty. Guzman tells the story of the Atacama Desert, where astronomers search for the stars and relatives of the disappeared detainees still search for their remains in the sand. And it also shows the Andes Mountains, whose millenary presence isolates us but also keeps the memories of history that some try to deny. González captures the polluted river courses and puts them back into motion through sound installations and a microscopic sample of the Loa River water. Ramirez films the journey of a boat from Valparaiso to a city in northern France, in his acclaimed project Ocean 33° 02′ 47″S/ 51°04’00″N, which reflects on the territory and landscape from another perspective. In its own way, the Magellanic cypress that Boric climbed on his presidential strip knots an invitation to listen to the roots of the trees and reconcile with nature in decision-making. 
Although very different, these are symbols that appear in the Chile of 2022 and have been weaving new landscape myths that accompany the present political moment. Just as the Chile of the transition was narrated to be signified abroad, the new cycle opened up opportunities to tell the story, or perhaps it was the stories that opened the new cycle. This year, the country will make news abroad at least twice. In March, President-elect Boric will inaugurate his government and with it will launch a program of transformations for greater protection of the environment, social equality and recognition of diversities. In September, the Constitutional Convention in charge of drafting the new Magna Carta will present a final text whose approval will be plebiscite. As stated above, the landscape symbols that accompany both events have already begun to conform and it has not been the authorities who have created them. Unlike in 1992, this time they do not only express the expectations of the elites, but are more connected to the tragedies of the territory and thereby incorporate those who are left behind. Somehow, the shadows that the past, being denied, cast on tomorrow, those that plunged us into presentism and constrained the future, have begun to clarify. The new symbols are like lanterns that light the way.

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Original source in Spanish