Ignacio Acosta

Inverting the Monolith is a multi-channel video installation that focuses on mining exploration in close proximity to Chile’s Parque Andino Juncal. It amplifies the voices of local activists from the Guardianxs del Akunkawa network, who are dedicated to exposing the impacts of these explorations on local glaciers and hydric systems.

Under the military dictatorship of Pinochet (1973-1990), a mining law was passed which separated land ownership from the mineral resources beneath the Earth’s surface. The "Codigo Minero" thus enables concession owners to mine or ‘explore’, while bypassing the wishes of the surface property owners. The sites of these ecological violations are marked with mining monoliths or survey monuments—pyramidal structures made of concrete and stone that define the territory.

Parque Andino Juncal is a privately-owned protected area in Chile’s central zone, located in the Andean Mountains, where altitudes reach 5,000 metres above sea level. Embedded within this staggering landscape is a vital hydric network of glaciers, rivers, streams, Andean vegas, and underground springs. Unique in South America, the area has been recognised as a site of international importance by the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands and is regarded as an endangered ecosystem.

Inverting the Monolith draws attention to the chasms that this kind of exploration—such as that perpetrated by the U.S.-financed mining exploration company Nutrex—leaves behind, and its adverse effects on the glacial ecology of the park, such as the creation of dams that pose a major threat to the water network. It excavates and highlights the unseen: both the covert mining activities that violate local land laws, and the surveillance work conducted by activists aiming to expose these illegal pursuits using drones and camera traps.

Images from the camera traps are intermingled with material recorded by activists, such as phone footage, which together creates a visual dialogue and multimedia narrative chronicling the progress of mining exploration in the area. The monitoring and documentation of fauna forms part of a wider strategy to contest the mining threat and show the value of conservation within this high-value ecosystem.

Developed in collaboration with video editor Lara Garcia Reyne, environmentalist Tomás Dinges, and sound designers Gregorio Fontén and Udit Duseja. It includes contributions from local activists Martín Sapaj-Aguilera, Guillermo Sapaj-Aguilera, Denisse Contreras, Felipe Ignacio Maldonado, Rodrigo Aguilera.

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Supported by
Museum Sinclair-Haus in Bad-Homburg, Germany for the exhibition Ewiges Eis, 2022.
Solid Water, Frozen Time, Future Justice, a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) collaborative project with Louise Purbrick and Xavier Ribas.

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Links
Inverting the Monolith video teaser

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Exhibitions
Inverting the Monolith, Musée des beaux-arts, 2023
Ewiges Eis, Museun Sinclair Haus, 2022

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Partners
Parque Andino Juncal
Alianza Gato Andino
Guardinxs del Akunkawa

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Through the discovery of a Celtic sacrificial site at Mormont Hill—a limestone and marl quarry located in the Swiss canton of Vaud—the two-channel video installation with surround sound design Archaeology of Sacrifice unveils how the notion of sacrifice has transitioned from ancient sacred rituals to its contemporary meaning within extractive capitalism. Evidence suggests the Celts inhabiting the site during the second century BCE were experiencing a moment of crisis, perhaps linked to Germanic invasion. Thus, they buried offerings in the form of several human and animal bodies, tools and bronze vessels to the Earth in exchange for guidance through the catastrophe.

Today, sacrifice is mediated by market exchange—the well-being of humans, nonhumans and the environment has been betrayed in favour of economic growth. Sacrifice zones are proliferating in areas deemed most extractable, most exploitable: usually regions under pressure from neoliberal policies. Here, humanity and nature are believed to be expendable and replaceable.

Mormont Hill’s excavated objects help archaeologists fiction a past, though the Celts almost certainly did not intend for these remains to be uncovered. In archaeology, formulating past beliefs involves delicately navigating between fiction and reality, where the lines are always blurred; the reconstruction will always be a representation. The project builds on this grey area in our own moment of current crisis, pushing for a more earthly understanding of prospective cohabitation while offering a reflective space for an unknown future.

In a continuous interplay between fact, fiction and scale, meditative landscapes of typically inaccessible areas are juxtaposed with archival footage, drone views, investigative close-ups and photogrammetry-based 3D modelling. Whilst acknowledging the Anthropocene is built on an erasure of its racial origins, Archaeology of Sacrifice reflects on the precariousness of our planet and its unsolicited submission to humanity.

Text by Ellen Lapper and Ignacio Acosta

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Archaeology of Sacrifice was created in collaboration with film editor Lara Garcia Reyne, artists Valle Medina and Benjamin Reynolds (Pa.LaC.E), writer Carlos Fonseca, sound designer and composer Udit Duseja, and colourist Paul Wills. The film includes archival footage from the documentary Crépuscule des Celtes (2007) by Stéphane Goël, Climage. It was produced as result of the Scholarship 2020 of the ZF Kunststiftung, Friedrichshafen, Germany, filmed during Principal Residency Program, La Becque Résidence d’artistes, La-Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland and with the collaboration of the Musée cantonal d'archéologie et d'histoire/Lausanne, Switzerland. It was presented first by ZF Art Foundation at the Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen, 18.9.–6.12.2020.

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Supported by
ZF Art Foundation Friedrichshafen, Germany, 2020
La Becque Artist Residency, Switzerland, 2019

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Links
Archaeology of Sacrifice video teaser, 2020

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Exhibitions
Sacré Mormont Palais de Rumine, Laussane, Switzerland, 2023-24
ZF Art Foundation Friedrichshafen, Germany, 2020

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Publication
Archaeology of Sacrifice, 2020

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Online discussion
Discussion - Ignacio Acosta: Archaeology of Sacrifice, Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen, Germany, 2020

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Reviews
Burlington Contemporary by Anna Staab, 2020
Artishock by Ellen Lapper, 2020

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Mining Monument is a site-specific installation delving into the complexities of mining exploration and exploitation concessions within Parque Andino Juncal, situated in the Andes Mountains, in the region of Valparaíso. The Glacier Juncal, though seemingly an integral part of the landscape, is framed by the legal framework imposed through the Codigo Minero [Mining Code], a law written during Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-90) that separates land ownership from the mineral resources below ground level. Mining concessions have transformed this protected area into a contested territory, caught in the middle of conservation and exploitation.

The video Bitacora Mineras builds a fictional narrative based on the logbooks where park rangers meticulously documented movements of miners between January and February of 2019. The table display Projecto Caliente presents a collection of archival materials collaboratively assembled with activist Tomás Dinges, displaying documents that evidence the threat of mining exploitation concessions and revealing the violent division of the mountain range. A survey monument at scale completes the installation.

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Mining Monument was produced in collaboration with Parque Andino Juncal for the Bienal de Artes Mediales de Santiago 2019 The limits of the Earth at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC) Parque Forestal, Santiago, Chile. Co-curated by Catalina Valdes and Jean-Paul Felley in cooperation with Arts Catalyst, UK and Museo de la Solidaridad de Salvador Allende (MSSA). Supported by Arts Council England and the British Council.

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Links
Projecto Caliente, 2019
Mining Lookbook, 2019

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Exhibitions
Link to The Limits of the Earth, Bienal de Artes Mediales de Santiago, 2019

Building on ongoing research into extractive activities in Chile and Swedish Sábme, Tales from the Crust presents existing and new work, comprising documents, films, photographs, maps and objects. The programme hones 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.

The exhibition is accompanied by Resistance Labs, a series of discursive events, workshops and broadcasts that 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. 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 the Los Pelambres copper mine.

In the film installation Litte ja Goabddá 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, 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. As part of the exhibition, Nexus, an environmental project exploring global challenges connected to water, food and energy based at Imperial College London, have contributed a series of digital resources mapping sites of extraction.

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Tales from the Crust forms part of Extratable 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.

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Supported by
Arts Council England, Pluriversal Radio and the CREAM (University of Westminster)

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Links
Zone of Sacrifice: Interview to archeoastronomer Patricio Bustamante, Santiago, 2019
Europa: Nueva Geografía Especulación Minera, Brussels, 2019

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Exhibition
Tales from the Crust, Arts Catalyst, London, 2019

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Reviews
Ignacio Acosta’s Tales from the Crust by Tom Jeffreys, e-flux Criticism, 2019
Ignacio Acosta’s Tales from the Crust by Diego Chocano, Burlinton Contemporaries, 2019
Tales from the Crust: Portraits of extractive violence and resistance, We make money not art, 2019

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Copper is a miraculous and paradoxical metal that is characterized by high electrical and thermal conductivity. It is hidden in plastic, carried as loose change and found behind walls, inside air conditioners, cars, computers, electronics, ‘green energy’ generators, airplanes, mobile phones: copper is everywhere but rarely seen. Copper plays a key role in communication and information technologies; yet little attention has been paid to resource scarcity, over consumption and environmental disruption caused by the extractive industries.

'Copper Geographies' explores the global flow of mined copper. It presents a series of fieldwork explorations of geographically disparate landscapes historically connected by copper. It maps sites of transformation along the production network and commodity chain, documenting the mutation and transformation of copper from raw material to capital; through ore, smelted commodity, stock market exchanged value, assembled material and waste. It discloses the uneven spatial conditions in which the material circulates by connecting the ecologies of resource exploitation in the Atacama Desert with the global centres of consumption and trade in Britain, and by making visible its return, hidden in manufactured goods, to the territories it originated from.

'Copper Geographies' is composed of eight series, which are organised along three axes: 'Global mobility of copper'; 'Post-industrial landscapes'; and 'Contemporary mining industry and its relation to London'. The project presents documentary research in the form of maps, photographs and analytical texts and offers a critical spatial imaginary for re-thinking the geographies of copper.

'Copper Geographies' is part of 'Traces of Nitrate: Mining history and photography between Britain and Chile', a research project developed in collaboration with Art and Design historian Louise Purbrick, photographer Xavier Ribas, based at the University of Brighton and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Litte ja Goabddá is a video installation with surround sound that explores the use of drone technologies as a tool of minority indigenous resistance to the proposed Gállak mining operations in Jåhkåmåhkke [Jokkmokk], Norrbotten County, Sweden. The project was developed in close collaboration with activists and Sámi families living and working in the area, combining extensive fieldwork and visual documentation.

The Sámi are an indigenous minority whose traditional ancestral land of Sápmi crosses the modern nation states of Finland, Norway, Sweden and Russia. The systematic subdivision, expropriation and industrialisation of Sápmi has resulted in the dispossession of historical indigenous lands, and in the fragmentation of Sámi cultural belonging and identities.

Gállak North is one of the largest unexploited iron ore deposits in Europe. The UK-based Beowulf Mining PLC, through its Swedish subsidiary Jokkmokk Iron Mines AB, has submitted an application for a twenty-five-year exploitation concession to establish a mine at the site. Their application is currently under review by the Swedish Government. If a mining permit were granted it would have a massive impact on the area’s fragile ecology, and would cause further disruption to the reindeer migration paths. If the mine goes ahead, Sámi cultural life in the area would experience irreversible decline and with it the loss of valuable indigenous knowledge.

Drone technologies have, for the most part, been associated with ideas of vertical control, surveillance and warfare, and have been perceived as a technology that extends corporate and military power. At the same time, because of the drone’s capacity to generate accurate image-based mapping and analytics, drones are also used by the mining industry to increase efficiency and profitability. By artistically appropriating this technology, I attempt to offer new ways of seeing how the geographies of ecological social movements are connected across time and place.

Litte ja Goabddá explores how the drone view and the drum manifest and reconcile the technological and the spiritual in counter-protests against settler colonial deforestation and extractive industries. During several research trips, he met with activists and Sámi families living and working in the area threatened by mining activities. From the beginning of the project, he became interested in finding ways to collaborate with these communities. His initial idea was to bring drones to Gállak so as to monitor Beowulf Mining. On his first visit, he met with the activists Mose Agestam and Henrik Blind who were already using drones as a tool to make visible from above what is happening at ground level. Communicating across social media platforms, their drone films make evident the disruption of Sápmi land, mapping not only its scale but also the commodification and financialisation of the land as private property and a source of capital.

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Sámi shaman with a drum. Drawing by Knud Leem,1767 / Winter reindeer separation, Jåhkågasska Samebí, Swedish Sápmi, 2018

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Litte ja Goabddá was commissioned for the Drone Vision: Warfare, Surveillance, Protest project and was first exhibited at the Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg (May-Sept 2018), then at the Ájtte Museum, Jåhkåmåhkke, Sweden (March-May 2019). The video, photographs and interviews produced during the research process have been donated to the Ájtte Museum archive in an effort to return the work back to the community it originates from. During 2019 it was further shown at the Zeppelin Museum, Friedrichshafen, Germany, on the occasion of the Game of Drones exhibition (Jun-Nov 2019); then at Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Santiago, Chile (Aug 2019-Feb 2020) in a solo exhibition that activated discussion with local Indigenous Mapuche representative Pascual Levi Curriao; at Tales from the Crust, a solo exhibition at Arts Catalysts, London (Sep-Nov 2019) that was accompanied by Assembly: Extractable Matters, a two-day gathering at the University of Westminster that collectively explored the politics of extraction across the globe which brought together artists, academics, activists and human rights experts; and Västerbottens Museum, Umeå, Sweden as part of the Människans natur group exhibition (Feb-June 2020). It has been presented at several international conferences and symposia, including the Native American Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) Conference held at The University of Waikato in New Zealand/Aotearoa in June 2019 alongside a new video piece titled Forest Fires, that was developed in collaboration with Liz-Marie Nilsen and supported by Indigenous Climate Change Studies, a research project based at Uppsala University, led by Dr May-Britt Öhman and funded by Formas.

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Links
Litte ja Goabddá video teaser, 2018

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Exhibitions
GUT_BRAIN 1: Destructive Desires and Other Destinies of Excess, Blackwood Gallery, Canada, 2023
Drones y Tambores, Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Santiago (MSSA), Chile, 2020
Tales from the Crust, Arts Catalyst, London, UK 2019
Människans Natur, Västerbottens Museum, 2020
Game of Drones: Of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Zeppelin Museum, Friedrichshafen, Germany, 2019
Litte ja Goabddá, Ájtte Museum, Jokkmokk, Sweden, 2019
Drone Vision, Hasselblad Foundation, Sweden, 2018

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Publications
Drone Vision, Art&Theory Publishing, Sweden, 2022
A Green Shift? Mining and Resistance in Fennoscandia, Yes to Life No to Mining, UK, 2022
Drones y Tambores exhibition catalogue, MSSA, Chile, 2020

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The Cliff’s Gaze draws upon a series of historical narratives witnessed from and beyond the cliff: The adventures of scot sailor Alexander Selkirk who was marooned between 1704-1709; the fictional character of Crusoe and his handsome aboriginal subordinate Friday; the tales of seventeenth century pirates and eighteenth century buccaneers; the sinking of German cruiser SMS Dresden on 14 March 1915 by British forces; and the three tsunamis that have devastated the island.

The Cliff’s Gaze is a quest for finding other visual representations of the cliff through archival research, such as drawings from nineteenth century botanists and travel postcards. These images will be juxtaposed with an eclectic collection of photographs of sites and objects taken with large format cameras in Britain, including: Llandoger Trow pub, Bristol where Defore supposedly met Selkik; the National Museums of Scotland where Selkik objects are displayed; and Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh where endemic plants of the island are kept.

I ultimately seek to visit the island to find the cliff and create a create a unique photographic body of work.