2.600M.M.C.D.C

A CITY BORN TO DISAPPEAR

Post Atlas explores a unique territory: the city of El Salvador, built in the late 1950s by a mining company in the heart of the Atacama Desert, in northern Chile. It is a planned city, born from industrial logic, designed solely to support the exploitation of a copper deposit. Its existence is conditional, temporary. It is neither a historical city nor a modernist utopia,

it is a spatial apparatus intended to vanish once the mine stops operating. Today, the rumor of its end is spreading. The city still functions, but its disappearance is imminent. The mine is preparing to shut down; this artificial volcano and its daily explosions turn the mine into a clock for the city.
This tension structures the film: it is not about recounting a past ruin, but about observing a space still in use, yet already marked by the awareness of its own end. El Salvador is a city in suspension, already in the process of becoming a memory.

ARCHITECTURE AND ANTICIPATED MEMORY

In El Salvador, everything was designed according to a functionallogic, neighborhoods are hierarchical and standardized. But this industrial rationality is disrupted by certain uses. The inhabitants transform what they are given: they reclaim the streets, alter thresholds, decorate, and repurpose. The film focuses on these subtle gestures that create place within a constrained space. It shows how architecture, even when rigid, can become alive, inhabited and how it carries within it an anticipated memory: that of a space destined to disappear.

The film moves between two forms of territorial representation. On one side, technical plans and industrial maps. On the other, sensitive mapscreated with residents during workshops. These hand-drawn sketches depict another geography subjective, porous, intimate. This shift between the designed city and the lived city, on the edge of its end, becomes the core of the narrative.

THE PLAN, THE STADIUM, AND THE MYTH

In this landscape on the verge of vanishing, one place stands out in its resilience: the El Cobre stadium, home to the local football team, Cobresal. This field is far more than infrastructure, it embodies collective memory, celebration, and belonging. It is where stories intertwine, where the present is celebrated, even if only temporarily. The stadium acts as an emotional anchor in a town without a future, remaining a shared space of identification.
Around this center, other points of life persist: the central square, the social clubs, the altar on the mountain. Each filmed location becomes a stage for use, attachment, and possible fiction. Through these fragments, the town is portrayed not as a static object but as a lived, traversed, and transformed space. These ground-level scenes contrast with the aerial views that depict the town as a hyper-functional object, restoring a sense of sensitivity to how it is inhabited on the ground.

FROM DOCUMENTARY TO FICTION

Post Atlas begins as a documentary. It is based on real immersion, on-location filming, interviews, visual surveys, and archival images retracing the city's birth. But gradually, the narrative shifts: the rumor of the end acts as a narrative engine. The film becomes a form of quiet anticipation, a possible fiction of a world on the brink of disappearance. What interests me here is not the spectacle of ruin, but what still holds. What resists erasure. The film does not merely document a city, it questions what remains of architecture when it no longer serves a function, when it becomes memory. It also explores, through the very texture of its images, how a territory can become a story.