Invoking the priestesses of Vesta, virgin caretakers of the home fire, which should never go out. The home considered as mother Earth.

A ton of composting soil in what was our living room and dining room of our workshop house in Santiago (2021), together with the SIUMA collective, made up of: Ume Dahlia, Josefina Justiniano, Pascal Nordenflycht, Manuela PO, María José Rebolledo and Trinidad Vildosola. The fireplace filled with beeswax candles that we lit, ceramics modeled and hand-painted by us to serve an infusion of herbs from our patio, all the plants from the garden that we were able to put and bury in this installation (Vestales I); the walls written with black paint, with thoughts from the collective and poetry of Elicura Chihuailaf and Raúl Zurita that refer to the human-nature relationship, a jasmine grandiflorum as a symbol of love and spirituality, a glass jug with a piece of melting ice and many crystal glasses to serve the water dripping from the ice (as main message: caring for water and our glaciers in Vestales II), composed what was Vestales I and II during the months of August and November. Vestales II being part of the CH.aco fair circuit that year.

In the context of a world where the Earth is not considered and cared for as home, these performative-ritual and protest acts invite viewers to live an immersive experience in poetry, bare feet on the ground inside a house and a moment in honor of the awakening of collective consciousness to care for Mother Earth.

To do this work we made an alliance with “De Raíz”, a company that is dedicated to making compost soil, instead of using the classic leaf soil that is sold everywhere, which is extracted from the soil of native forests, since they are very high in nutrients and the damage caused by the extraction of this land is also very high, breaking an entire ecosystem of the formation of the soils of the few native forests that remain in our country. Instead, this composting soil is made in a way where organic waste produced by humans is converted, through an elaborate process in their composting plant, into ideal soil for gardening use.