Beyond Artifact:
Reframing the Chilean Desert

Fall 2021
MLA Thesis Advised by Dr. Rosalea Monacella 
Harvard Graduate School of Design 

This thesis explores design as a mode to challenge dominant cultural narratives of the Atacama Desert in Chile. The project reframes an understanding of life in the desert through alternate knowledge systems specific to this landscape and material actors plant, rock, and water. The proposed reframing is in response to a cultural imaginary that treats the Atacama as a desolate extractive zone, with a myopic focus on industrial artifacts and a legal policy framework that classifies all materials in the desert through a logic of mineral wealth and extraction. An observatory and garden program connect histories, living cultures, and ecologies while fostering submerged multi-species life to reframe living matter in the desert.