Publication
Trafficking the Earth
Ignacio Acosta, Louise Purbrick and Xavier Ribas
ISBN: 978-0-9932245-3-9
Intuitive Editions, London – Editorial Gronefot, Santiago
Spanish and English
25.5 x 20.2 cm
96 pages, unbound
2017
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Trafficking the Earth publication
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Trafficking the Earth at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo [MAC], Santiago, Chile [08.09.2017 – 12.11.2017] and the symposium Visuality, Materiality and Mining held at MAC on the 08th of September 2017.
This publication is a ‘folded exhibition’ specially produced to distribute free among environmental activists, pressure groups, lawyers and school teachers in mining communities in Chile and the UK.
Capitalism changes everything. It has altered our relationship to the Earth. It has ripped lands apart, torn out their materials and hauled them over the surface of the world as the traffic between nations and within markets.
Extraction and export is the business of capital.
All forms of exchange are acts of appropriation but mining removes material that can never be replaced; taken, transformed and trafficked with no intent to repay.
Trafficking the Earth is a collaboration between photographers Xavier Ribas, Ignacio Acosta and an art historian, Louise Purbrick. Their collective research has documented 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.
Over the last five years Acosta, Purbrick and Ribas have encountered other artists, photographers, curators, translators and activists and worked alongside them sharing a concern with politics of documenting the inequalities of extractive industries.