Solid Water, Frozen Time, Future Justice (hereafter Frozen Future) is a collaborative visual research project bt the Traces of Nitrate project (Xavier Ribas, Louise Purbrick and Ignacio Acosta) that will document the effects of copper and lithium mining on glacier systems of the Chilean Andes. Extractive industries are encroaching upon these glaciers, and at times of water scarcity, diverting their ice for industrial purposes. The future of glaciers is contested. A water conflict between global mining and local livelihoods is already acute with water rights in Chile stacked in favour of mining interests that may increasingly, perhaps exclusively, depend on solid water supplies. Whilst mining is a global industry, Britain has a particular place in its networks of extraction; London is home to the head offices of the wealthiest corporations which trade in its stock markets. A future of accelerating extractivism is assumed to be inevitable and, most recently, asserted as essential to global economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. But glacier systems are not simply subject to corporate agency: environmentalists, activists, indigenous and local communities imagine another future of environmental justice. Frozen Future will document how extractivism at glacial sites is contested in the present and projected into the future, prioritising the visibility and the voices of those most affected by mining operations. The research re-thinks the capacity of photography as a means of recording past events and re-directs the camera towards the future.
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The scholarship comprises a comprehensive support program: the artists receive financial support, and are provided with the studio as well as an apartment. Subsequently, the works of the nine-month scholarship are presented to the public in an exhibition at the Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen for which the ZF Art Foundation will publish an extensive catalog. Moreover, the press and public relations work will be provided to complement the stipendiaries’ activities.
Major importance is accorded to intense cooperation and direct exchange with the artists. Personal contact and involvement with their work are maintained even after completion of the scholarship. At the annual stipendiary meetings, exchange among artists is promoted, and questions pertinent to art and its promotion are discussed.
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Tales from the Crust formed part of Extractable Matters, Arts Catalyst’s thematic strand exploring extractive capitalism and the politics that underlie its spatial infrastructure and logistics. The programme reflected 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, Extractable Matters provided a polyfunctional context for discussions inquiring how extractive infrastructures – as well as borders, conflicts and trades attached to them – impose uneven maps of power.
Tales from the Crust was supported by funding from Arts Council England, Pluriversal Radio and the CREAM (University of Westminster).
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Drone Vision: Warfare, Surveillance, Protest addresses questions of visibility and verticality are intrinsic to drone technology and its meanings for artistic and political praxis.
The exhibition is based on the two-year research project Drone Vision. Surveillance, Warfare, Protest – a collaborative initiative of Valand Academy, Gothenburg University and the Hasselblad Foundation. Led by Dr. Sarah Tuck the research project explores the affective meanings of drone technologies on photography and human rights.
For the exhibition at the Hasselblad Center the commissioned artists Ignacio Acosta, Mhairi Sutherland and Behjat Omer Abdulla have produced new works that respond to the visual and material consequences of drone technologies in the context of Sweden.
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El Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (MSSA) receives support for exhibition.
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The Traces of Nitrate project created a large body of research: a substantial photographic record and critical historical analysis of the sites of nitrate and copper mining in the northern territories of Chile and spaces of the exchange of mined commodities in London and Liverpool. The project team produced, organized or contributed to 33 conferences, lectures and events, 15 exhibitions, 15 publications (including one monograph), and has received 11 reviews (see: http://tracesofnitrate.org) The follow-on phase of the Traces of Nitrate project will draw upon both its photographic documentation and historical analysis of mining to engage new audiences through exhibitions and related public events dispersed across two continents. The dissemination of research relating to the significance of nitrate, a dynamic substance that once used as fertilizer or explosive can speed or shatter life, will be extended and, most importantly, situated within emergent and urgent contemporary debates about the extraction and depletion of non-renewable resources. The political ecology of mining, the legacies of polluted and de-industrialised landscapes and the role of photographic practice in the representation of these issues are key concerns of the follow-on phase. The image and analysis of industrial ruins of nitrate mining in the Atacama Desert and the contamination of Chilean landscape with the detritus of copper mining will be mobilised to instigate discussion of hierarchies of human agency and material resources as well as the dependencies of people and planet.
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