Let’s have a nice hand for monuments, Part 1
The website Artificial Owl has an interesting page on man-made buildings and other structures that have been abandoned for various reasons. Some are trite and quite justifiably left behind, others have been evacuated for scary reasons, and some aren’t “abandoned” at all. They just feel that way.
One of the most haunting of the last group of sites is a work of art: Mario Irarrázabal’s “Hand of the Desert” (”La mano del desierto”), which is way out in the middle of nowhere in Chile’s mountain-cloistered Atacama Desert.
The 11-metre-tall iron and cement sculpture was unveiled 1,100 metres above sea level in March 1992, which was the same month I uprooted from Canada and moved to Thailand, and Thailand — if you dig a hole straight the Earth — is directly opposite the northern coast of Chile.
Is that stretching too far for a personal connection?
Anyway, the Internet loves pictures of Irarrázabal’s giant hands in Chile, Uruguay, Spain and Italy, but little is offered about the artist, or the fact that his inspiration is largely Catholic. I was raised Catholic too, but —
Okay, I’ll drop that one cold. See the rest.
