Nostalgia for the Light

"I wish the telescopes didn't just look into the sky, but could also see through the earth, so that we could find them. [...] We would sweep the desert with a telescope downwards and give thanks to the stars for helping us finding them. I'm just dreaming." I saw the documentary Nostalgia of Light, about the Atacama Desert in Chile, a place where the sky is so clear that you can see the stars as bright light bulbs, which is why the largest telescopes in the world were built. Almost at the same time as the observatories were being built, one of the bloodiest dictatorships in South American history was taking place. There were many disappeared people buried in the same place where the lenses search for the origin of the universe, just as there are those who search for clues of loved ones who left during the Augusto Pinochet regime.