Exhibition
Trafficking the Earth
Xavier Ribas, Louise Purbrick, Ignacio Acosta
Bienal de Fotografia do Porto, Portugal
14.05.2021 – 26.06.2021
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The exhibition is organized together with the Bienal de Fotografia do Porto.
Trafficking the Earth is a collaboration between photographers Xavier Ribas and Ignacio Acosta and art historian Louise Purbrick. As the authors explain in the introductory text, this research documents “the movement of mineral wealth of Chile into global markets and European landscapes. Nitrate and copper is their focus. The transformation of these natural resources into industrial materials draw desert and city, slag heap and country house, ruin and regeneration, landscape and archive, Chile and Britain, into the same circuit of capital”.
Each of the authors addresses the issue from a particular perspective that make up a fragment of a common story. Xavier Ribas examines the legacy of British investment in Chile’s nitrate mines of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and its implication in global trafficking. Through an exploration of places, objects and images, Ribas considers the dynamic effects of Nitrate by examining the original scenes of the detonations and the traces of a history of violence and exploitation. On his part, Ignacio Acosta studies the global movement of copper, once extracted from the earth and absorbed by a capitalist economy. His photographs are an investigation into a global copper mining policy, making visible hidden connections between environmental pollution and capital accumulation. The historian Louise Purbrick reflects on the matter itself through her essay. Her texts attempt to capture mining waste with words, and thus make a recognition of the material loss of Chilean landscapes: Nitrate and copper became –and are becoming– mere values of commercial exchange.
The project was previously presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Santiago de Chile (2017) and at the Center for Art and Nature, in Huesca (2019). For the current presentation, which is part of the Porto 2021 Photography Biennial, the installation consists of a mural of 200 documents, images and texts, which collect “anachronisms, displacements, insights …”, in which the authors they reject the single image to favour multiple relationships, such as those that occur throughout the chain of extraction, handling, distribution and sale of minerals. The installation is completed with the presentation text and two maps that help to make these interconnections visible. The first, The Invisible Corporate Network, shows the different agents that operate in the London Metal Exchange while the second, Nitrate Companies listed in the London Stock Exchange, offers the records of the companies that traded with Nitrate in the British capital in the year 1908.
The book Trafficking The Earth, published coinciding with the exhibition in Santiago de Chile and presented in the framework of the Symposium “Causality, Materiality and Mining”, organized as a complement to the exhibition, can be also consulted at the exhibition. Both monographs of the work of Xavier Ribas and Ignacio Acosta complete the exhibition.
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Link to exhibition
Trafficking the Earth: Documents on Nitrate, Copper and Capitalism
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