Solo exhibition
Tales from the Crust
Arts Catalyst
London
26 September – 14 December 2019
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Installation view, Tales from the Crust, Arts Catalyst
Arts Catalyst announces a new exhibition and programme investigating the politics of extraction across the planet.
The ecology of extractive practices is a poisonous one. In Chile as in Sámi areas in northern Sweden, mining activities by multinational corporations are both visibly and invisibly shaping the landscape, intoxicating water, soil and air while displacing agricultural and indigenous communities. The excavation, extraction and exploitation of minerals – justified by the promise of immediate accelerated economic growth – means that spaces inhabited by communities become ravaged by desertification, contamination and expropriation, and sites of political and environmental dispute.
Building on ongoing research into extractive activities in Chile and Swedish Sábme, Tales from the Crust presents existing and new work by Chilean artist Ignacio Acosta, comprising documents, films, photographs, maps and objects. The programme will hone in on ways in which local and transnational acts of resistance are making use of technologies (such as drones) in order to monitor the impacts of extractive industries and develop micropolitical strategies. Resistance Labs is a series of discursive events, workshops and broadcasts that will bring to the fore existing forms of solidarity between various anti-mining movements, and address the role that counter-actions can play on a planetary scale. The full programme will be announced soon.
Through an in-depth visual and spatial exploration, the works presented in the exhibition are articulated as a series of overlapping case studies of extractive violence. These include Parque Andino Juncal, an Andean conservation park currently fighting against mining exploration; and Caimanes, an agricultural town heavily affected by water contamination and scarcity by Latin America’s largest toxic dam El Mauro from Los Pelambres copper mine.
Installation view, Tales from the Crust, Arts Catalyst
In the film installation Litte ja Goabddá (Drones and Drums) Ignacio Acosta explores how the Sami indigenous communities are using drones as a way of resisting the mining exploration at Gállak in Jåhkåmåkke (Jokkmokk) in northern Sweden through an indigenous lens. Based on research visits and close collaboration with activists and Sami families living and working in the area threatened by the mines, the project explores the link between drums and drones as navigation and communication tools.
This multifaceted spatial narrative is populated by the overlapping voices of activists, indigenous people and archaeo-astronomers – bringing together a constellation of stances rooted in the distant to recent and present geographies of extraction, exploitation and trauma. Here, filmed interviews, close-ups of resilient landscapes and cartographies of global power expose forms of human and non-human resistance.
Installation view, Tales from the Crust, Arts Catalyst
As part of the exhibition, Nexus, an environmental project exploring global challenges connected to water, food and energy based at Imperial College, have contributed a series of digital resources mapping sites of extraction.
Tales from the Crust forms part of Extractable Matters, Arts Catalyst’s new thematic strand exploring extractive capitalism and the politics that underlie its spatial infrastructure and logistics. Starting with an exhibition in autumn 2019 by artist Ignacio Acosta the programme reflects on ways in which capitalism extracts and exploits both material and immaterial resources, such as minerals, labour, data, affects, cultures and resistance. Through exhibitions, artist residencies and public programmes, over six months Extractable Matters provides a polyfunctional context for discussions inquiring how extractive infrastructures – as well as borders, conflicts and trades attached to them – impose uneven maps of power. Other participants in the programme include FRAUD (artist-researchers Audrey Samson and Francisco Gallardo) and the Alternative School of Economics, a collaboration between artists Ruth Beale and Amy Feneck.
The works presented in Tales from the Crust have emerged from Traces of Nitrate, a research project developed in collaboration with Art and Design historian Louise Purbrick and photographer Xavier Ribas, based at the University of Brighton and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC); and Drone Vision, a research project based at the Hasselblad Foundation / Valand Academy, Gothenburg University led by Dr Sarah Tuck.
Support
Tales from the Crust is supported by funding from Arts Council England, Pluriversal Radio and the CREAM (University of Westminster)
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Link to Tales from the Crust
Link to Assembly Extractable Matters
Artist talk: Extractive Violence Between Europe and Latin America, Ignacio Acosta in conversation with Elena Solis and Godofredo Pereira
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Art Agenda: Ignacio Acosta’s Tales from the Crust by Tom Jeffreys
Burlinton Contemporaries: Ignacio Acosta’s Tales from the Crust by Diego Chocano
We make money not art: Tales from the Crust Portraits of extractive violence and resistance