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shipping will resume September 21 - Charcoal Workshops summer series
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Coirón is a long-form documentary project, photographed over six years in the Chilean region of Magallanes, following aging gauchos known as puesteros, who live and work alone for months at a time across vast private ranches. Their lives, often silent, are shaped by distance, physical labour, and long periods of solitude, on land they do not own and with little security once their body begins to fail. This new body of photographic work follows their daily labour and stillness, offering a collective reflection on rural life in contemporary Chile, where meaning emerges through repetition, gesture, and the slow accumulation of time.
The wider region is undergoing rapid social, cultural, and economic change, and fewer young people feel the desire to pursue a life on the land, breaking a generational cycle of farm life. Caught in the middle, many puesteros move between embracing change and resisting it. Their interweaving stories form an intimate, complex portrait of a way of life on the brink of disappearing, and invites the viewer to pause within a world moving too quickly to keep up.
The book also includes a poem by Iván Rojel Figueroa and an essay by Alberto Harambour, Associate Professor at the Universidad Austral de Chile.
Over there where I speak of
the air is made of knives
and the sun with its meagre gleam
succumbs in its vain attempt
it is hard to earn one’s keep
long hours and fatigue
hard labor keeps you warm
the purest of strengths
for the people are tougher
than the wind that lashes them…
—Iván Rojel Figueroa
Pie Aerts commented ' As long as I can remember, I’ve always feared being alone. Partly in a physical sense, but mostly in a deeper existential sense. Spending time in the presence of these puesteros, while seeing them sit through a life of silence, hardship and endurance, I started to open up to a different perspective on the silence I’ve always feared. As a result, and for the first time in two decades of self-discovery, I’m starting to embrace the idea that some of my fears have perhaps shaped who I am far more than I ever realised.'
'As I looked at Pie Aerts’ photographs, I was struck by the breeze that wafts through them. They are realistic yet something in them remains ungraspable. I have spent time in Patagonia and, in a way, I am still there; Patagonia remains ever-changing' said Alberto Harambour.
