Ignacio Acosta

Sudley House houses one of Liverpool’s finest painting collections, which includes major Pre-Raphaelite works. It was assembled by George Holt (1825-1896) through the trade of copper ore and other raw materials that helped boost Britain’s industrial expansion during the 19th century.

Merely looking at the collection gives no indication of how it was acquired or from which capitalist networks it originated, the broader economic and labour conditions in which copper was extracted, smelted and distributed, nor the impact the industry had on the social ecologies of resource exploitation and the powers that controlled them.

The London Metal Exchange (LME) opened in 1877 using a standard three-month contract, reflecting the time necessary to transport copper from Chile and tin from Malaya to Britain. Today, the LME is the world's most important trading metals market, a meeting place of buyers and sellers of metal futures – a market exchange instrument designed to secure the future price of copper in the face of market volatility, which is used mainly as an investment mechanism. The speculative nature of the business can mean that metals are exchanged up to forty times before they are delivered to the final consumer.

Using the LME’s seven categories of trading membership, this project builds an archive of information available through the public domain. Images for each company were collected from Google Earth and Google Street View. The images focused mainly on two aspects of human activity: 1) Labour – the workforce engaged in labour activities, such as cleaning or building; and 2) Mobility – people on the move, either cycling, driving or walking.

Download list of companies

Antofagasta Plc. began construction of Los Pelambres in 1997 and operations started in 2000. In the Andes, ore is extracted through a system of perforation. It is crushed, milled and transported to a concentration plant located at 1,600 meters above sea level where the materials are separated. In the concentration plant, an alkaline flotation system is used to selectively separate the copper concentrate from the worthless material, or gangue. The unwanted material is deposited in El Mauro tailings.

Following a report by the Foundation Frances Libertés published by United Nations in 2012, a wall of 1,000 meters of compressed sand was build to hold over 2,060 millions tons of toxic waste material, and stands at 470 meters above the town of Caimanes. According to the report, the tailings is located in an earthquake-prone zone, and, if it were to collapse, the 1,600 inhabitants of Caimanes would have only five minutes to escape before being buried.

As result of the construction, 23 families were displaced from their land. As the report details, the building of the tailings involved the redirection of the natural course of the local water source and the contamination of underwater resources with heavy metals, resulting in a loss of agricultural activity, which, prior to the installation of the mine, was central to the region's economy. As a result of the construction of El Mauro, there has been considerable damage done to the region's heritage, including the destruction of 140 archaeological sites, the flooding of indigenous burial grounds, and the destruction of the last forest of ‘Canelos’ in Northern Chile.

After copper is ground in the Andes, it is transformed into copper concentrate. This black powder is transported to Punta de Chungo, a port on the Pacific, through a 120 km long pipeline. For this transportation, the company uses large quantities of water and gravity to create flows. At the Pacific port, the concentrate is dried and shipped mainly to Asian markets. The excess water contains high doses of toxins, particularly molybdenum and sulphate, both considered highly damaging to the environment and human health. Therefore, it cannot be used in the food chain or deposited in the sea. To dispose of these toxic water residues, a water-intensive monoculture of Eucalyptus specimens from Australia has been planted.

Until the 1970s, Iquique was a small port town characterised by low level urbanisation. After the 1980s, however, there was a dramatic acceleration in the urban sprawl beyond the city limits due to the impact of neo-liberal policies imposed by General Augusto Pinochet.

Due of these policies, new free trade agreements with the Latin American region and the opening of three large copper bodies by transnational corporations, the city became a magnet for investment, and as such, its social fabric was heavily impacted. The flow of capital brought new geographies of inequality to this inhospitable desert territory. While slums spread chaotically throughout the Atacama, serving as an unplanned solution to a huge displaced population, gated communities and high-rise buildings close to the Pacific secured ‘sea views’ and flourished as symbols of status.

These urban developments are tied to the ‘boom and bust’ of base metals, such as copper. In the 2000s, during the commodities boom, when prices rose by demand from emerging markets, particularly China, urban growth in Iquique accelerated rapidly. Most recently, with the slowdown of copper consumption from emerging markets, the city has experienced a dramatic fall in demand for housing, which has led to a stagnation of the local economy as a whole.

The copper ore extracted in the remote geographies of Coquimbo, Chile, were shipped mainly to Wales and smelted in the Lower Swansea Valley between 1840 and 1880.

One of the most important industrial capitalists of the time was Charles Lambert (1793–1876), an Anglo-French man who travelled to Chile to work for a British company before developing his own mining enterprises with remarkable success, particularly in his refining and export enterprises, and, most importantly, Las Compañias. The copper ore was extracted from the extraction sites of Brillador, Panucillo, Huamalata and Totoralillo. Some were controlled by Lambert himself, with the copper brought by mule to Las Compañias where it was crushed and smelted at around seventy percent purity. However, Las Compañias did not last long, as the overexploitation of trees surrounding it produced a drop in the supply of fuel for the smelting processes.

The copper was taken by clippers around Cape Horn to Swansea and refined at around ninety-nine percent. Merchants, such as Henry Bath and Sons, the Pacific Steam Navigation Company and Balfour, Williamson and Co. were actively engaged in the transport and trade of copper during the nineteenth century. As a result of the copper industry, the Lower Swansea Valley was heavily contaminated for more than two centuries. It was described as one of the most polluted landscapes in the world until the 1960s and 1970s, when the Lower Swansea Valley Project was established as conservation effort to reclaim the toxic landscape from the pollution caused by the smelting industries.

Today, in Coquimbo, the symbols of marginality, such as discarded vehicles, prefabricated housing structures and improvised workshops, form part of the landscape. Additionally, the site is populated with symbols of British economic imperialism from the nineteenth century, such as bricks and corrugated iron cladding panels. In contrast to the dry and neglected landscape of Coquimbo, in Swansea, a result of the process of decontamination, housing developments, shopping centres, and stadiums have replaced the industrial facilities of the past.

There are two main types of copper deposit: sulphide (suchas as those mined for centuries in Cyprus) and porphyry (such as those are prevalent in Chile). Sulphide deposits are normally of relatively high grade (4 to 20 percent copper), but restricted in volume, whereas the relatively lower grade (0.4 to 1 percent copper) porphyry deposits are extremely voluminous. Both can be mined underground or in open pits and may yield other metals as by-products, such as gold, molybdenum and silver in the case of porphyry deposits.

Chile produces mainly copper concentrate, a powder produced by means of a flotation system (crushing, milling and concentrating the primary material), which typically contains 30 percent of copper. Chile produces 1,400,000 tons of waste daily as a result of copper production. Whilst these toxic residues remain in the landscape where copper is being extracted, the primary material is shipped to industrial centres where it is transformed into blisters, a more concentrated intermediate material.

Copper blisters are stored in warehouses around the world, where they can be exchanged up to forty times before their final delivery. These intangible transactions take place through centres for metal trading, such as the London Metal Exchange, through future contracts, agreements made to buy or sell a fixed amount of metal on a fixed future date at a price agreed today. The ‘blisters’ are melted down and mixed with other sources of copper, including recycled materials, forming ‘anodes’ that are transformed into cathodes and then into rods – the basic component for the production of cables for the energy and telecommunications industries. Smelted copper returns to Chile hidden within manufactured goods, perpetuating a circle of mobility that began with the extraction of the ore.

Due to its unique geological configuration in the Andean subduction zone, Chile contains the world’s largest deposits of copper – 27.5 per cent of global reserves, mainly located in the Atacama Desert.

After the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), the basis for the contemporary Chilean economic system was established with the annexation from Peru and Bolivia of the vast territories of the Atacama, rich in copper and nitrate. Since then, the management of these resources has been mainly in hands of foreign interests. British capital played a key role in the development of the Chilean economy as a whole, and particularly in the management of its copper and nitrate resources in the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, U.S. investors, such as the Guggenheim brothers, took over the extraction of Chilean minerals. In the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries a mix of multinational corporations together with the state-owned mining corporation Codelco have been responsible for roughly one third of global copper production.

The resulting ecology of extraction in the Atacama has come to be at the centre of a series of political and

environmental disputes. Amongst the many conflicts that have arisen are protracted legal battles involving, on the one hand, the big multinational corporations that control 70 per cent of Chilean copper output, and on the other the indigenous agricultural communities struggling with growing desertification, water contamination and land expropriation.

The corporate town of Chuquicamata, which has the same name as the mine, was designed in the New York offices of the Guggenheim bothers in the early decades of the twentieth century, as a model town. More than thirty architects were hired to work out its urban plan.7 The town was established next to the mine, following the pattern of mining settlements in the U.S. such as Butte, Bisbee and Tyrone.

The brothers financed the investment needed to plan and build the urban settlement of Chuquicamata, including public services and a complete welfare, social and housing association system for the workers and their families. Within the confined zone of the town everything was subsidised by the company, including a modern hospital, primary and secondary educational institutions for the children and housing schemes.

The production of copper at Chuquicamata increased over time and it grew to become the world’s biggest open-cast copper mine. The subsidised settlement also grew, to fulfil the housing demands of the workforce. Despite its expansion, however, the town remained isolated, due partly to the tough geographical conditions of the Atacama Desert, and partly to corporate policies that established a new legal regime running parallel to state sovereignty. A bounded territory within a territory was created – an autonomous enclave controlled by foreign interests and governed by an international corporate legal framework.

The town was evacuated in 2007. High levels of pollution, caused by the relentless expansion of the mine, threatened public health. At the time of closure, the 25,000 workers were relocated to the nearby city of Calama where new neighbourhoods were built, following the same corporate strategies of social segmentation and urban fragmentation.