Chiloé's Consciousness

In February 2025, my sister, biologist Rosemary Garland, and I traveled to Chiloé for a residency at the Chiloé Museum of Modern Art (MAM). We wanted to explore the long-term effects of one of Chile's worst socio-ecological crises. In 2016, a toxic red tide, exacerbated by decomposing farmed salmon (Armijo, 2020), devastated Chiloé’s coast, exposing its vulnerability to industrial exploitation. This disaster is part of a broader history of colonialism, extractivism, and ongoing coloniality. Since Spanish colonization, Chiloé’s ecosystems and indigenous communities have suffered from external economic interests. Today, the multinational-controlled salmon industry perpetuates colonial structures, commodifying land and sea under capitalist extraction.



Following the 2016 catastrophe, local movements emerged to raise awareness and conscience of the salmon industry’s damage. The crisis exposed the overpopulation of escaped farmed salmon and Chiloé's collapsing marine ecosystem. The industry's expansion, first led by Norwegian companies and now dominated by Japanese-Chinese corporations, is part of a larger extractivist network. Integrated into Chile’s economic model as “progress,” these industries reinforce economic dependence and environmental degradation. Viewing Chiloé through archipelagic thinking (Glissant, 1997) situates the crisis within postcolonial frameworks, highlighting how colonial legacies persist. It also underscores human and nonhuman struggles, resistances, and adaptation within ecosystems.

Listening to the
South Pacific Ocean 

To explore the 2016 disaster's traces, my sister and I recorded Chiloé’s underwater sounds. Walking along its coast, we searched for a spot to use a contact hydrophone, capturing vibrations through materials in water. The Chilote rocks became our connection point. As sound artist Leonel Vasquez calls them,

Canto de las Abuelas 
(Grandmothers' song), the rocks hold ancestral sonic knowledge and the layered histories of a changing archipelago. We listened as they conversed with the ocean, but the sound was often interrupted by vibrations of the distant hum of merchant ships—a constant presence in Chiloé’s waterscape. Could this be the sound underwater wildlife hear? Has noise pollution become their norm?

To delve deeper into these water sounds, we listened to Catálogo de Olas, a sonic archive by chilean sound artist Fernando Godoy, capturing human and nonhuman struggle narratives of Chiloé 's 2016 ecological fragility. The analog texture deepened our experience, allowing us to feel the recurring narratives of the Pacific’s "slow death," which locals described as "bleeding" during the 2016 red tide disaster.



After these deep listening exercises (Oliveros, 2005), we asked: What is an archipelago and what is their conscience? These questions guided our poetic sonority contribution, exploring ecological and sonority dimensions. Ecologically, an archipelago is a group of islands separated from the continent, creating isolation that leads to biological speciation—species evolving independently with distinct genetic differences (Garland, R., 2025). But the concept extends beyond biology into philosophical and spatial realms. The poet Eduard Glissant describes archipelagos as “a space of diffraction,” where diversity fosters relations in harmony with the world. This idea applies to urban space, where urban archipelago helps us understand Chiloé’s fragmented yet connected landscape. The damage caused by salmon farming further reinforces this fragmentation, yet it uncovers the growing consciousness of a changing archipelago, one that embraces an eco-social justice movement advocating for the rights of nature.

Thinking through an archipelago lens helps us reconsider Chiloé not just as an isolated region suffering environmental harm, but as a dynamic space shaped by shifting relationships. It offers a way to challenge the idea of separation—between land and sea, urban and rural—emphasizing instead how these elements are interconnected, fostering a more-than-human consciousness.