Poesía, identidad y desarrollo

The voices of southern Chile to the rescue of regional identity

“Poesía en la Austral” is a cultural and social association born in the austral (south) area of Chile, specifically in the so-called Los Lagos Region. In this article, I invite you to discover their actions, their goals, and how they mix poetry, identity, and, finally, development. I interviewed Javiera Arce, one of the association's active members of “Poesía en la Austral” who kindly agreed to share her story with us and with Pedro Aldunate, its president, who told me more about the association itself.

The activities of “Poesía en la Austral” started in 2015 with some public readings of poetry and seminars in the academic context of the Puerto Montt Headquarters of the Austral University of Chile, with members such as Pedro Puerto or Clé de Sol, who are still active members of the association. These activities progressively started to include the rest of the context of the Los Lagos Region society, starting from local initiatives in Puerto Montt and aiming for a regional scale of action, all around united by poetry.

However, the collective's most notorious intervention was “Proyecto Interferencia – Metamorfosis” in 2023, which was inspired by the work of Christo Javacheff, when the iconic statue “Sentados Frente al Mar,” a symbol of Puerto Montt's culture, was covered, to invite people to reflect on the absence of the elements that we usually consider constitutive of our regional identity, one characterized by the link between the human being, the water, the forest, and the fog. A place in which the indigenous way of understanding life has more strength than in the rest of Chile, due to the relatively recent incorporation of the territory into the nation-state.

In this regard, it is important to understand that the Los Lagos Region, as well as the rest of Chile, has undergone several transformations since the adoption of the neoliberal model during the 1980s. In this sense, along with the vertiginous globalization, the region has experienced a drastic change in the landscape, oriented to the mass production of elements such as salmon, cellulose for the paper industry, or mollusks, mainly for exporting to markets such as the US, China, Japan, or Europe. This transformation altered the functioning of the region, its biodiversity, and traditions, as well as the way of understanding the territory, orienting it more and more towards market logic.

Source: Inai-Segovia (2023)

We interviewed Javiera Arce to learn more about her role and her experiences in the association regarding the construction of a local identity and how this is connected to the idea of a local development.

Can you tell us about your story and what the role of the association is in it?

My story started with a desire to express myself. At that time, I was in my fourth year of college, and I met a professor [Pedro Aldunate] who had a group called “Poesía en la Austral”. They did a lot of activities around culture, specifically about poetry. I then realized everyone can write about everything, express themself, and live in the world through words. I joined the group and, with other people from my college, we cemented the work of the association.

What are your reasons for becoming part of the association?

Chile is a country of poets. We have two Nobel Prize winners in literature, Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral. We want to contribute to keeping the poetry of our country alive and highlight the new poets from this small part of the South American country. In Puerto Montt, there is not enough diffusion of poetry, and we hope to contribute to cultural activities as a means to this end.

What are your hopes regarding the future of the association?

My goal in the group is to be able to share what I express through the arts. For me, the mission of “Poesía en la Austral” is basically to share what we feel through words, through poetry, and to be able to resist them using our art as a means of expression, in addition to being an act of presence in the cultural panorama of the city of Puerto Montt.

What are the main themes of the poetry you publish?

There is no single theme that deals specifically with poetry in the Austral. Each poet and writer writes about what he or she wants. Perhaps we could say that they write from our southern point of view.

When writing as a person born and living in the region, it is inevitable to reflect on some of the problems of the region, such as conflicts with salmon or forestry companies. Lately, we have been writing about the beauty of the region as well as the animals and plants to appreciate this beauty.

~

The activities of “Poesía en la Austral” are highly rooted in its members' sense of belonging, not only to the Austral University of Chile but also to the Los Lagos, and to the local communities in particular. As Javiera shared, they try to be present in the cultural panorama of Puerto Montt while expressing themselves, taking the space to diffuse poetry as a key element to the cultural identity of the territory.

In the words of its president, Pedro Aldunate, “our mission is to be an agent of dissemination, outreach, and connection with the environment, positioning poetry and literature as fundamental expressions of humanity and establishing connections with other artistic expressions such as dance, theatre, performance, and audiovisual language.” Therefore, working also functions as an artistic bridge while giving poetry a major role due to its expressive capacity.

Source: Comunicaciones Sede Puerto Montt (2024)

In fact, the Los Lagos Region has been characterised by a strong sense of belonging that comes at least from colonial times, during the so-called Arauco Wars between colonial Spaniards and the indigenous Mapuche people, from the 16th to the 18th century. More recently, protests against the negative consequences of industrial projects, such as hydroelectric initiatives or the salmon industry, have the strength to influence the political agenda, and to promote structural changes. Regarding the last case, the salmon industry in Chile, which was introduced during the last authoritarian regime, a process that some authors call a “blue revolution”, modified the entire territorial organisation of the country to increase regional productivity. Such reorganisation threatens traditional ways of living, transforming the landscape, and introducing new sources of vulnerability, a regional dependency on the industry or even the dangerous episodes of red tides.

The red tides are expected to be even more frequent in the following years, a consequence of the intensive aquaculture and the lack of policies tackling the issue. Source: Center of Climate and Resilience Research (CR2, 2022)

Following this idea, “Poesía en la Austral” released “El Queltehue: Un Heraldo de poesía” taking the name of one of the region’s endemic birds. The only journal that focuses on poetry produced in the Los Lagos Region, with a remarkable territorial focus, the journal presents itself as a space to share poetry made by people from the region, acting as a critical instance to reflect on change and identity in the country's South and Austral zones.

Source: Poesía en la Austral (2024)

Here is where the mission of “Poesía en la Austral” appears. By adopting both a critical and emotional focus, from the intimate perspective that poetry allows, they act as a reminder of where we come from and as an instance to rethink how we imagine the future that we want.

However, its definition of poetry goes far beyond a critical exercise, as mentioned by its president “We are fascinated by the beauty of southern Chile, but our roots are not entirely in southern Chile... at Queltehue we publish national and international poetry, and although we recognize the power of lyric poetry, popular poetry, and the narratives of southern Chile, we believe in the universal value of poetry”.

From this perspective, I would like to share three lyrical fragments, published in “El Queltehue: Un Heraldo de poesía”. The first one shows this willingness to rescue what is typical from the region, in which the author presents to us Pukem, a tiuque bird, in the middle of an odyssey shaped by natural elements of the Los Lagos Region.

The second one takes a personal perspective to describe a land described as a village of mist, in which both human and physical elements that characterize the Southern Chile landscape are presented as a whole, which shapes not only the experience of the poetic speaker, but of the children who once stepped on its forest.

The last one consists of a poem that reads like a future legend. On the coast of Calbuco in the year 2524. However, more than a science fiction story, it is a meditation on time, memory, and encounters that transcend centuries, all located in the same territory.

I kindly invite you to read the poetry released in “El Queltehue: Un Heraldo de poesía” and to reflect on how we can construct our local identities using poetry as an element of social cohesion. In a world full of challenges, sometimes coming back to the fundamental, the feelings, seems to be the most crucial step, one that our friends from “Poesía en la Austral” clearly understand.

@poesiaenlaaustral

References

Comunicaciones Sede Puerto Montt. (23 May 2024). Agrupación Poesía en la Austral lanza tercer número de revista “El Queltehue. Un heraldo de poesía”. Diario UACh. https://diario.uach.cl/agrupacion-poesia-en-la-austral-lanza-tercer-numero-de-revista-el- queltehue-un-heraldo-de-poesia/

Center of Climate and Resilience Research. (22 December 2022). Marea roja: El peligro de un evento que será cada vez más común en Chile (Radio Duna). https://www.cr2.cl/marea-roja-el-peligro-de-un-evento-que-sera-cada-vez-mas-comun-en-chile-radio-duna/

Inai-Segovia, D. (05 May 2023). Proyectos «Interferencia/Metamorfosis» y «Poesía en la Austral» de la Sede Puerto Montt realizaron intervención artística en escultura de “Los Enamorados”. Diario UACh. https://diario.uach.cl/proyectos-interferencia-metamorfosis-y- poesia-en-la-austral-de-la-sede-puerto-montt-realizaron-intervencion-artistica-en- escultura-de-los-enamorados/

Poesía en la Austral (2024). N°10 El Queltehue - Un Heraldo de Poesía. https://www.instagram.com/poesiaenlaaustral?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw==