About – Ignacio Acosta

Ignacio Acosta is an artist and researcher working with photography and video in territories under pressure from extractive industries. His multi-layered collaborative practice and spatial installations seek to connect audiences with these complex yet critical concerns.

Acosta works in places made vulnerable through ecological exploitation, colonial intervention and intensive capitalisation. He is devoted to the understanding of sites and landscapes that, although often neglected, are of global significance. Developed mainly between his native Chile and Swedish Sápmi, his projects focus on resistance to territorial fragmentation produced by extractive industries and the so-called “green transition”. He deploys a long-term artistic/documentary approach using site-specific methodologies developed with local communities. Through the generation of meaningful visual and spatial narratives, he offers new ways of reexamining global ecology through local and Indigenous knowledges.

Employing thorough investigative practices and innovative technologies of seeing, his methodology is akin to a forensic investigator in its desire to uncover and expose highly ambivalent power dynamics. His appropriation of drone technologies—best known for their role in military surveillance—as tools of resistance within the struggle for decolonisation offers new ways of seeing ecology and counter-action on a planetary scale. While strategic juxtapositions—both ideological and aesthetic—are a key feature of his visually-complex work, it is his research practice that underpins it all. Spanning multiple years, geographies, and disciplinary landscapes, his interconnected investigations involve extensive fieldwork, investigative analysis, audio-visual documentation, and critical writing on sites and materials of symbolic significance. All these threads contribute to larger, vibrant collaborations with activists, artists, scientists, writers and Indigenous Peoples that creatively negotiate the conflicts buried deep within our living world and respond to the urgent need for artistic approaches that critically address landscapes depleted by mining.

His research is communicated through exhibitions, public events, publications and online platforms. At a time of uncertain futures, his presentations remain open-ended and are available to be used as a resource for education, activism and visual culture. Between 2012 and 2016, Acosta undertook a practice-based PhD at the University of Brighton, UK, as part of Traces of Nitrate: Mining History and Photography between Britain and Chile, an AHRC funded research project developed in collaboration with Art and Design Historian Louise Purbrick and photographer Xavier Ribas, leading to the formation of the Traces of Nitrate collective. Stemming from his PhD, Copper Geographies was published in 2018 by Editorial RM. Acosta is currently a Research Associate at the Royal College of Arts (RCA), London as part of the AHRC funded project Solid Water, Frozen Time, Future Justice: Photography and Mining in the Andean Glaciers (2021-2024) by Traces of Nitrate. Their project documents the effects of copper and lithium mining on glacier systems of the Chilean Andes.

He is also a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism (CEMFOR) Uppsala University, Sweden where le leads a 4-year visual research project Indigenous perspectives on forest fires, drought and climate change: Sápmi (2022-2026), a FORMAS (Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development) funded visual research project developed with Sámi scholar and Professor in Environmental history May-Britt Öhman, Sámi journalist Liz-Marie Nilsen and Sámi teacher, author and reindeer herder Gun Aira. The project brings forward Indigenous/Sámi knowledges on forest fires, drought and climate change.

Current projects
Indigenous Perspectives on Fores Fires, drought and climate: Sápmi, CEMFOR, Uppsala Univeristy, Sweden
Frozen Future, Royal College of Art, UK

Recent exhibitions
Image Ecology C/O Berlin, Germany (2023-24); Sacré Mormont, Palais de la Rumine, Lausanne, Switzerland (2023-24); Mining Photography, Gewerbe museum Witerthur, Switzerland (2023-24); Mein ABC ist elementar, Sitterwerk Foundation, Switzerland (2023); Into the Deep: Mines of the Future, Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen, Germany (2023); All That Is Solid Melts Into Water, Kunsthalle Oslo, Norway (2023); Ewiges Eis (Eternal Ice), Museum Sinclair Haus, Bad-Homburg, Germany (2022-23); Paisaje | Experiencia | Producción: Fotografía y Territorios Productivos en Chile (2000-2020), MAC, Santiago, Chile (2023); Mining Photography, Kunst Haus Wien, Austria (2023); Inverting the Monolith, Musée des beaux-arts Le Locle (MBAL), Switzerland (2022); Mining Photography Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Germany (2022); Intersectional Geographies, Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, UK (2022); Reassemblage, Tenerife Photography Bienale, Spain (2021); Trafficking the Earth, Bienal de Fotografia do Porto, Portugal (2021); Archaeology of Sacrifice, Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen, Germany (2020); Human Nature, Västerbottens Museum, Sweden (2020); Tales from the Crust, Arts Catalyst, London, England (2019); Drones y Tambores, Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Santiago, Chile (2019); Litte ja Goabddá; Ájtte Museum, Jokkmokk, Sweden (2019); Tierra, CDAN / Centro de Arte y Naturaleza, Huesca, Spain (2019); Game of Drones, Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen, Germany (2019); Drone Vision, Hasselblad Centre, Göteborg, Sweden (2018); Mapping Domeyko, Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art, Poland (2018); Copper Geographies, National Waterfront Museum, Swansea, UK (2017); Traffiking the Earth, MAC, Museo Arte Contemporáneo, Chile (2017).

Collections
Ájtte Museum, Jokkmokk, Sweden; Cantonal Museum of Archaeology and History, Switzerland; Hasselblad Foundation, Sweden; Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art, Poland; National Waaterfront Museum, Swansea, UK; Victoria and Albert Museum, UK

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Professional associations
Traces of Nitrate
Temporal School of Experimental Geography (TSOG)
The Global Indigenous Arts Network (GIAN), Barcelona, Spain

Contact
mail [at] ignacioacosta.com