In the 19th century, Germans, among other Europeans, were invited by the Chilean state to inhabit lands taken from indigenous Mapuche communities in Wallmapu (southern Chile). This process combined bureaucracy and military force provoked the industrialization of the native forest, the decline of local cultural life and created a persistent political conflict.

Earthans, the Dance of the Moon on Earth, is an outdoor dance performance and visual art installation. The work addresses different types of ethics towards nature, which culminate in a cultural and conceptual clash as colonial and post-colonial cultures collide with Latin American ones. The exploitation of the land is seen here as an inherently colonizing idea that persists in today’s economy, where the interaction towards the land and the colonized is an interaction towards “another” that is not part of “me”. This logic creates a sense of legitimacy to extract and exploit trees for paper, or minerals for industry from afar. Because “we” are not connected, “I” do not witness or experience this violence, and geographic distance leaves no room for empathy. However, the environmental crisis is global and is demonstrating that this Western conception of disconnectedness is flawed, problematic, and harmful. This work explores connectivity through the ethics of power dynamics between each other and towards Nature. We work this dynamic through our own identities, which are fluid, complex and constructed from external (cultural, political) and internal (bodily senses and knowledge) forces. The work relates to the perspective that the Mapuche poet and activist Rayen Kvyeh raises about the clash of Cosmovision of the cultures of the sun and the moon. In the piece we explore our own present spirituality through a personal energetic work that invites the audience to feel, sense and experience vulnerability.

With the work we intend to denounce a problematic sense of entitlement, disseminated by the global and European market, to dominate and spread a global capitalist reality, where the stories that happen far away remain hidden. Suppressing other knowledge and ways of being, such as those of indigenous peoples who sustain ancestral ideals. We declare our support for Mapuche communities in nonviolent resistances.