Magellania

Magellania is an ongoing research project in various forms and an essay film. My startingpoint is a complex web of relationships both present and historical that all touch upon Isla Navarino at the southern tip of Patagonia. The project deals with memory, colonial history, extinction of language and the motifs of the artist.The film explores the lapse between image and language intertwining narrated moments of darkness with silent footage. It tells the story of Cristina Calderón, the last speaker of the Yaghan language. Referencing Jules Verne's final book Magellania.A meditation on affect and the dialectics of modernity resulting in both: revolutions and massacres, emancipations and exploitations; utopias and wars.

”Enqvist is asking complicated questions, undermining the supposedly innocent curiosities. Abuela Christina or, more officially, Cristina Calderon, is the last woman of her tribe. She is weaving wool, weaving threads, weaving baskets for sale and weaving stories of the Yaghan tribe. Cristina Calderon does not speak. She is weaving her story and her language, in an internal circuit, internal bleeding of meanings, of words already forgotten. She is maybe haunted by some spectres of the past conquistas, maybe she already dreams, weaves a fabric of the future. In the film we are confronted by our own images and projections concerning the last Yagan woman. We do not know who she is. But we learn that. We learn that when she dies, a part of history will close.We see with the eyes of someone who does not think that dreams are innocent, yet he also try to see, what they are. In his notes Love Enqvist writes: Anyway I thought I remembered this moment where a woman is diving. In fact I never saw it. I went back to stay with Dennis In Navarino and I wanted to meet this woman who could speak to no one in her own language. Within the painful history of the demolished dreams,within the end of a world 10 000 years old, within the story of witnessing a woman weaving her language now officially a secret within an intimate journey of a dreamer following his father's dream there might be a moment of doubt directed at the logic of commodification, an invitation to weave with the one that no one can speak to. The moment when we genuinely do not know, we are actually tempted to answer, we feel invited to speak. Somehow, accidentally, this path might be a path of reinstalling a new promise of a new beginning of a new world.

Ewa Majewska.