Verás is the result of an idea that Raúl Zurita had been conceiving for over two decades: to write a poem with light on the cliffs of northern Chile. Finally realised in 2024 in Caleta Vítor, this project constitutes the third major undertaking in a career in which Zurita’s poetry has repeatedly left the page to be inscribed directly onto the landscape. At MEMORIA (Centro), the exhibition presents the records of that intervention, created by the filmmaker Felipe Ríos and the photographer Gonzalo Donoso, and allows visitors to observe the work through its traces: images of a form of writing that existed for a few hours on the rock before disappearing with the break of day.

From his earliest books, Zurita’s work has conceived of poetry as a means of engaging with historical and socio-political experience, deeply shaped by the Chilean dictatorship. In his poems, violence, memory, love, the body, the landscape and death appear as dimensions of a single experience. This breadth also explains why his poetry has sought forms that extend beyond the book. In 1982, aeroplanes traced verses from ‘La vida nueva’ across the New York sky. Eleven years later, ‘Ni pena ni miedo’ was inscribed on a grand scale in the Atacama Desert. With Verás Zurita completes this trilogy by taking the word to another frontier of Chilean territory: the cliffs overlooking the Pacific. In all three cases, the poem takes on a physical and public dimension. The aim is to find words embedded within a space that alters them and which, at the same time, is transformed by them.

Verás adds a particularly significant temporal dimension. The action took place between sunset and sunrise. The writing appeared against the darkness of the rock and remained there throughout the night until natural light began to gradually fade the poem away. The very duration of the work forms part of its meaning: the writing appears, endures for a few hours and finally disappears. What remains is the landscape and the record of something that can no longer be seen in the same way.

This work was made possible thanks to a collaboration with Delight Lab, a Chilean collective formed by siblings Andrea and Octavio Gana. Since 2009, their practice has been situated at the intersection of art, light, space, sound and technology. Their interventions use projections, light mapping and other audiovisual resources to transform buildings and landscapes into temporary surfaces upon which light appears, conveying a message. A significant part of their career has also been dedicated to addressing social, political, environmental and memory-related issues.

In Verás, this technical and artistic expertise proves decisive. To project the poem onto the cliff face, Delight Lab had to develop a solution capable of scaling the text to an extraordinary size. The projection had to span approximately 1.2 kilometres to reach the far end of Caleta Vítor (Arica). The collaboration between Zurita and Delight Lab thus produces something more than merely a luminous illustration of a poem. Light becomes writing, and writing, in turn, alters the way we perceive the landscape. The rock ceases to be merely rock: for a few hours, it becomes a page. But a page that cannot retain the text, because it is subject to time, distance and daylight. The poem concludes with an image that straddles a boundary: to see and not to see, to look and to weep. At this point, the work returns to one of the central questions in Zurita’s poetry: what can an image do in the face of that which it cannot fully represent? Light allows us to see the poem and heralds its disappearance. At dawn, the writing ceases to be visible and only its memory remains. Verás is, therefore, a work about appearance and disappearance, about the word and the landscape, but also about poetry’s capacity to physically occupy the world.