Felipe Cona Aracena

The children from the Alihuén Rural School in Challupen, along with their teachers and guardians, travel to Santiago, the capital of Chile, to see the Metawes—millennia-old potterypieces—that were looted from their ancestors’ cemeteries. For many of them, this is their first trip to the city, making it a significant event for both the children and their families.This narrative of a journey reveals the contradictions between historical preservation and the extraction of resources from communities and their ways of life. It is a manifestation ofcentralism and, at the same time, a gesture of reconnection for the new generations with their recent past.