Aquí me hallo/Gualicho

Aquí me hallo explores the Uruguayan native forest as a living archive, where memory, belonging, and ways of inhabiting persist amid industrial forestry, fragmentation, and invisibilization.

In recent decades, the Uruguayan territory has been transformed by the expansion of industrial forestry, giving rise to landscapes dominated by monocultures. Beyond its productive dimension, this process has reshaped the ways in which space is perceived, traversed, and inhabited.

Yet the native forest persists as a living archive: an ecosystem that sustains biodiversity, but also memories, knowledge, and ways of relating to the land. Its transformation does not occur only through disappearance, but through subtler processes such as fragmentation, displacement, and invisibilization. The forest is still there, but increasingly pushed to the margins, losing its place in everyday experience. It is not merely a collection of species, but a relational way of life: a web that holds connections, memories, and ways of inhabiting the world that cannot be reduced to the productive.

Aquí me hallo/Gualicho stands at that threshold. Rather than describing the landscape, the project works with what remains, even when it is no longer evident: the material and affective layers that sustain our relationship with the territory. Drawing on the notion of body-territory, these transformations are approached as processes that simultaneously affect the environment and the ways of feeling, remembering, and belonging.

Within this context, I invoke Gualicho, a figure linked to the belief systems of Indigenous peoples of the southern part of the continent, whose meaning was gradually displaced and reduced over time to a negative connotation. Here, it is reclaimed as a presence that moves through the territory and protects what insists on remaining: that which does not entirely disappear, even when it is no longer visible or named.

“Aquí me hallo” does not mean “here I am,” but rather “this is where I am / this is where I belong, this is my essence, and here the spirits of my people still drift””: an affirmation of being in a territory under transformation, where the traces of what has been still persist—almost imperceptibly.