Remembered Desert (2024)

Remembered Desert recreates five historical periods of the Chihuahuan Desert, the largest in North America. The work harnesses virtual reality's potential to create a strong sense of presence, allowing visitors to experientially explore the relationship between history, memory, and fiction

If history is mediated by memory and human perception, does it then become a fiction? Isaías Herrera seeks to answer this question by creating scenarios where virtual travelers can relive historical events and uncover stories marginalized by the predominant institutional narrative. By integrating their own experiences and memories, visitors can rediscover and reinterpret the past of the Chihuahuan Desert from a contemporary perspective.

Narratives and myths about national identity have focused on Mesoamerican civilizations, known for their cultural development and abundant natural wealth. This centralist view has overshadowed the stories of other regions like Aridoamérica. The generalized depiction of the desert as an inhospitable area with extreme climatic conditions has labeled the Northeast as a region of transit, uninhabitable, barbaric, and lacking culture, as suggested by the phrase attributed to José Vasconcelos: “Civilization ends where carne asada begins.”

The image of the "non-place" where migrants die, drug trafficking is concentrated, and resources are scarce contrasts with a region that is home to 9% of Mexico's population, 25% of the known cacti in the world, a high diversity of endemic flora and fauna, the aquifers of Cuatrociénegas with stromatolites and unique microbial biodiversity that offers valuable information about the evolution of life on Earth, fossils, important archaeological sites, and, in addition, the third state with the highest economic contribution to the country, with a GDP of 8%.

Despite the historical, cultural, and natural wealth of the Chihuahuan Desert, narratives of scarcity have led to economic and public policies that, along with the passivity of its inhabitants, have allowed the deterioration, exploitation of its resources, and the handing over of its territory to mining, soft drink, brewery, real estate, cement, and many other companies.

What implications do incomplete or partial narratives have on the identity formation of the inhabitants of a region? How would our identity be if our collective memory, mediated by perception, told different stories? Can we reconstruct and reclaim these narratives?

In collaboration with Andrés Gordillo López, a researcher and historian, scenarios from different eras were documented and recreated to explore both the events and the worldviews of the region's inhabitants in each period. The journey through time begins in the Mesozoic Era with species like the Aramberri monster and Coahuilaceratops, crosses the pre-Columbian era with the Wixárika indigenous people with almost a millennium of history, to the first Spanish settlements during the Chichimeca War in the 16th century; continues through the industrial era with the arrival of the railroads in the 19th century and concludes with the war on drug trafficking and the water crisis of recent years.

The fissures in memory and historical records, where details fade and subjective reinterpretations emerge, become the canvas where the essence of the work is captured. Imagination, which fills narrative gaps when confronted with the unknown, is fully integrated into our autobiographical narrative and that of the places to which we belong. It is in this intersection between memory's elusiveness and imagination's liberation where 'Remembered Desert' finds its aesthetic proposal in the design of its characters, virtual environments, and interactions.