La balada de las sirenas secas

Emerging from the fourth chapter of Gaiaguardianxs, La balada de las sirenas secas materializes as a sculptural and sonic shrine to water justice. This evocative installation brings together ritual, ruin, and resistance in a multi-sensory assemblage centered around the hydrocommons of central Chile—particularly the Petorca region, devastated by drought and large-scale avocado monoculture.

At the core of the piece, a vertical video monitor rests like a relic on a bed of cracked earth, flanked by earthen mounds crowned with sculpted heads shaped like avocados—grim, thirsty, and accusatory. A mermaid figure, cloaked in mourning LEDs, kneels before the screen, evoking a votive posture—part lament, part invocation. The accompanying video work presents a series of scenes filmed near Palquico, where the land’s thirst is palpable. Set to a reinterpreted canto a lo divino—a syncretic musical form rooted in Jesuit tradition and local spiritual practices—the ballad becomes a prayer to absence: of water, of life, of balance.

By melding sacred music with contemporary ecological despair, Domínguez amplifies ancestral knowledge while articulating the violence of water commodification. La balada de las sirenas secas is not just an artwork—it is an elegy, a resistance altar, and a plea to reconsider the sacredness of water in an era of ecological collapse.