Fiesta de la Tirana is an annual festival held in the unusual stands of Tamarugo trees, in the midst of the rolling pampas of the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. The celebration happens in the locality of La Tirana during the week of July 16 in honor of both the Virgin of Carmen and the Virgen de La Tirana. La Tirana is the biggest geographically localized religious festival in Chile and attracts between 200,000 and 250,000 visitors during the week of celebrations, while the village’s permanent population normally numbers 5,000 inhabitants.
This includes a diverse array of visitors: the devoted, the curious, the observant, the vow-makers or pilgrims/dancers fulfilling their spiritual promises, and business folk selling their wares.
This small village streets are full of costumed, shielded, and masked dancers and brass bands with flutes, drums, and matracas, marching, fondas selling food, dust as they call it chuspa is everywhere, it is both extremely hot under a burning sun all day and freezing by night, fireworks exploding amid an atmosphere that carries the air of mystery, tradition, playful enactments, devotional expression, all sustained by the cult, the concept, the veneration of one of the two versions of the sacred virgins.
We should note that the Atacama Desert is mining territory, dominated historically by copper, silver, nitrate or saltpeter, and now lithium. The population of these hot rolling pampas and Andean Altiplano are forced to survive in this dangerous dance of the underground forces, dominated by what the Andean god of the underworld Supay, supreme lord of the Uku Pacha or underworld, a multifaceted force that represented shadow, night, darkness, chaos, and the inevitable transition of death.
Some in the Catholic Church see them as devils, but they are purveyors of both positive and negative forces in the universe. Others call them Uncle of the Mines. Thus was born the Diabladas, Dances of the Diablos between the good and the bad, the light and the shadow, played out at La Tirana and many other festivals across Bolivia and Peru.
Racial stereotypes; Chinese people as slaves, the portrayal of North American Indigenous peoples, the morenos or black Indigenous, the gypsies who we would not regularly use that derogatory term. My apologies to listeners who find these references offensive. All I can say is the portrayal of all these peoples is meant in veneration, in identifying with their place in society, in their way of living in the world. The dancers in La Tirana see these peoples as brothers and sisters to emulate through song, dance, and costume. I think Rodolfo makes this point well, but for those listening who might take this out of context, when you investigate further and actually experience the dances…
Rodolfo Andaur [https://rodolfoandaur.com/] is a visual arts curator and cultural manager and Director of Actinómetro, based in the Tarapacá region of the Atacama Desert in Chile. He studied journalism and holds an MA in Art History. He has worked in directing, promoting, and diffusing transdisciplinary projects. Furthermore Rodolfo Andaur has taken part in curatorial teams that focus on critical analysis and reflection about anthropocene, climate change, and eco-geopolitics in Latin America.
Not only those proposals produce knowledge through the visual arts, but they have also contributed to the dissemination of renewed thoughts to research into unknown territories. With this background his work has been prized both by Tarapacá Regional Government for his contribution to cultural management (2011), and for his participation in the international project called “examples to follow, expedition in aesthetics and sustainability” (2017).
Also he has been involved in curatorial residencies in Brazil, Denmark, Germany, México, Morocco, New Zealand, Poland, Scotland, Singapore, Spain, South Korea, and the United States. Rodolfo is currently a columnist in several online art magazines and visiting lecturer in a couple of universities and art institutions.
Jack Eidt is an environmental journalist, urban theorist and designer, and advocate for the wild, as well as award-winning fiction writer. He is Co-Founder of SoCal 350 Climate Action and Executive Producer of EcoJustice Radio. He writes for a PBS SoCal Artbound project called High & Dry [https://www.pbssocal.org/people/high-dry]. He is also Founder and Publisher of WilderUtopia [https://wilderutopia.com], a website dedicated to the question of Earth sustainability, finding society-level solutions to environmental, community, economic, transportation and energy needs. He also publishes articles and podcasts on Substack [
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