I’m in Chile, walking through Santiago’s General Cemetery. Three days in, it’s Monday, quiet. Light pushing everything, stones over-exposed. I was cold when I got here but now I’m carrying my hoodie in my arms and rationing water because I’m not sure how to get back out. Two eyes with no brain behind them. It’s not culture shock but it’s something, like seeing your own face mirrored. I’ve only ever known cemeteries to exist below me. Bodies pressed down under huge skies. Headstones up to thighs, hips, or knocked out flat in a storm and just never picked back up. But this place is a city. I find streets of mausoleums like houses. Family names engraved hard over front doors. Rows of tombs like personal churches. Overgrown and silent except for trees loud with bright green birds. I’m not feeling myself, and I don’t have knickers for tomorrow. British Airways didn’t bring a single suitcase on the 14 hour flight, and it’s like — I’m here for the first time, speaking a borrowed language in borrowed clothes, and there’s no hairdryer in the flat so I don’t have a fringe either. Even my name is different in Chile. A new friend says when my suitcase arrives, so will I. But she’s saying that to someone called Gabi and I’m not sure the real me exists in a box of clothes. I just carry on around the city of the dead waiting for my face to come back out from behind the mirror. I am looking for my great granddad. He’s in the mausoleum of the de la Puente family, and that’s part of the weird feeling too, because I’m understanding quickly they must have had money. Going systematically from tomb to tomb like a door to door salesman, I’m reading surnames and it’s throwing me how money gives you the privilege to manifest taste in the form of a building you get to live in when you die. The rich can access architecture and design, right down to the font their names will be remembered in. I don’t own a building even in life. I have no idea where it all went, or why, and decide money must be an emotion. Between the temples and castles and spring blossoms, I come across a red string tied to one family’s front gate. It’s the kind of flat plastic string you might wrap around a birthday present and score with scissors to make a spiral for decoration. But here, the red line shoots straight up past a gold cross and it’s carries on up onto the roof of the mausoleum. I follow the string and find it weighed down by three logs on the ground to the side. No one can get in, or out. I think it looks like a spell. The cemetery gets higher from there. I come up against huge walls stacked with pigeon holes. Rectangles with plaques and vases, sometimes flowers, and it’s as though I could reach forward and pull open a drawer to reveal a sleeping bird, or a bag of ashes. The walls go so high there are stairs and walkways and railings to get onto second stories. I have never seen stairs in a cemetery before. I don’t know why that is so significant to me. Something about the grounds of a cemetery not actually being finite after all because we have the sky as well. I google it later and these types of graves are called columbaria from the Latin for dove, so pigeon holes is right. I was carrying a film camera with me around that day, and it’s a half-frame camera which means the photos are portrait, fitting two in for every one landscape photo you’d usually get. When I got the photos developed later that month, an old woman with curly hair and pearls gave me digital scans in landscape which means the photos came in pairs. The first one I open: the bed in the apartment I’m renting right next to the columbaria of a thousand sleeping birds. In the distance, I see what looks like a high-rise in the middle of the cemetery. My water is nearly out and I still haven’t found my great granddad, but I go further in. The door of the high-rise is locked with chains, so I take a photo with the lens right up against the glass where my eyes have just been. Inside, the place is glowing with air and light and I can see a walkway going round and round all the way up to the top, lining the inside of the tower with a spiral. It’s so bright because the centre of the building is hollow, and I think that might be why it is so beautiful to me. No building this tall is ever this full of natural light because there are always floors blocking it. On the walls, I can see more pigeon holes. The tower is another grave. I find a ledge, sit down, and finish what’s left of my water. I won’t know anything about that tower for a month, too busy thinking about the world inside me instead of the country I’m in. The suitcase will eventually arrive but I still won’t feel like I’m really here, listening to myself perform a different personality within the limits of the Chilean I know. I decide that the real me will arrive once I’m fluent, and while I wait, I drink chirimoya juice, laugh with taxi drivers, walk around Santiago central and step in dog shit twice. But the cemetery follows me. The centre of the capital city is built in straight lines and made up of blocks. Inside those blocks, it’s like god has hollowed out the concrete with a corkscrew because I find more of those spirals everywhere. No graves this time, just continuous helical ramps that lead to shops for haircuts, tattoos, vinyls, football shirts, skateboards and Pokémon cards. When I look across the central void, I can see all the shops in one go. There’s a night when I’m walking around an arcade and I realise I’m inside another spiral. I even find the ramp inside a spiral bank. My friends explain the spirals are caracoles, which means snails. After we go to see an exhibition, they take me to the dos caracoles where two snail shells are built right next to each other and connected so that you can walk between them in an infinity loop. I know I should write about the art I saw in Chile but the architecture left more of an impression, and now I’m home and trying to wipe dirt off my face only to realise it’s dark circles, I finally have a second to process why it’s the snails I’m still thinking about. The first caracol in Chile wasn’t a shopping centre, it was that big tower in the cemetery. Seven floors, 1600 people buried in its walls, it was built in 1942 by architect Francisco Brunioli Cañas on behalf of The Society of Mutual Aid, a charity that supported Italians in Chile. A bit of a space-saving exercise in a busy cemetery with few regulations, the Italian monument came almost twenty years before the much more famous spiral in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim in New York, but the two served as inspirations for architects working in Chile come the 70s. In 74, notably the same year the dictatorship began, inflation was high, banks couldn’t lend much long-term, and it meant architects had to work with limited space. By selling the lots along the snail’s ramps ahead of time, the team of Osvaldo Fuenzalida, Melvin Villarroel and Eugenio Guzmán were able to open the first commercial caracol in Santiago, before any shopping malls were built. And there was an idea that if the path that led inside never ended — was never broken up by stairs, doors, or lifts — the lots all the way up at the top were just as valuable as the shops when you first walked in. That the beginning and end were closer than you think. I have this feeling now like, oh, of course I slipped right into this spiral architecture. That easy, endless comfort where I could keep moving on. I was in Chile as a traveller, never settling. I was there as a student of the language, never getting to the end of the dictionary. And then, I was there as a private detective looking for a happy ending. My family moved to England and forgot Spanish and I never knew if I still had family. I do. I found them, not in graves but alive and pouring me drinks and — when we held hands, I felt myself arrive in my body like I never had before. And that was happy, yes, but it wasn’t an ending. I take that with me now into a new future. So I think I learnt that I will always be arriving. Growing and finding things and climbing and getting further away from where I started. Writing the texts on this website one after another as I pull myself into the future. I left with a tattoo and a haircut and Pokemon cards after all of those snails. And I half wonder if the Italians who built that great snail for the dead were thinking about futurism at all — the way the artists pulled the whole city into tight spiral shapes, dynamic, ready to spring back out. Because in building a spring that can’t move anywhere, it makes the one in the cemetery the perfect grave. It makes me think the only real arrival can be death. 🐌 if you’re here at the end of the text please comment a SNAIL emoji 🐌 🐚 on our instagram so I know you were here 🐌 film photos on this page were taken with the pentax 17 with a mix of kodak ultramax 400 + the darker photos are portra 400 professional, developed in Santiago at Photolab 🐌 i’ll be posting interviews with chilean artists over on Art Dates 🐌 and I would not have been in the country if it were not for a project grant from Arts Council England for a book I am writing. Find out more about the grants here 🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌🐌