Syndemia is an audiovisual work with a musical script built from three types of material: documentary footage, fiction, and the performance of musical instruments. Through these layers, the work recounts moments from Chile’s 2019 social uprising. The documentary material was filmed by young audiovisual teams who recorded the massive street protests and donated their footage: the crowd, violence in the streets, confrontations with police, and young people injured by ocular trauma all appear.

To weave this chaotic material together, the work turns to a composition created and performed by the Orquesta de Instrumentos Autóctonos y Nuevas Tecnologías (OIANT) of UNTREF University (Buenos Aires). Its sound—produced with instruments from across the American continent, from Alaska to Patagonia—introduces into the narrative a dimension of territorial memory embedded in social conflict, where colonialism and extractivism emerge as underlying conditions of contemporary crises. As a counterpoint, the piece incorporates fictional actions of a child wandering along the Mapocho River, a geographic and symbolic axis: the site of Santiago’s pre-Columbian foundation and, at the same time, a nerve center of protest and police repression. In the epilogue, the documentary voice of Alicia, mother of one of the young people imprisoned during the uprising, breaks through—linking intimate grief with the collective scale of repression.