Contribution short abstract:

The paper examines how the Andean communities of the Puna and Atacama Desert reconfigure the use of tyres as waste from transportation, revealing sociocultural, economic, and infrastructural dynamics related to daily life and their inhabited environment.

Contribution long abstract:

Building on the shift from animal to motorised transport systems, the development of road infrastructure projects, and the emergence of a transportation market between the national borders of Chile and Bolivia, this paper invites attention to the omnipresence of tyres and the various dimensions of its existence. These dimensions transcend their initial “essence” or function related to transportation and mobility, revealing their “other” lives that arise from their form, meaning, and function.

By focusing on a material object such as the tyre, it is possible to uncover the underlying dynamics that shape the sociocultural life that defines life in the Atacama Desert and Mountain Range. Through its centrality in everyday life, we can observe transformations in productive modes, economies, infrastructures, as well as local-global and physical-symbolic interconnections, manifested in the construction of new functions and meanings in accordance with the complexities of life in the region. The objective of this paper is to analyse the appropriation of tyres as transportation waste by the Andean communities surrounding the international roads between Chile and Bolivia, as well as the various dimensions in which their new uses unfold.