Ignacio Acosta completed a practice-based PhD titled The Copper Geographies of Chile and Britain: A Photographic Study of Mining. Acosta’s photographic investigation is a study of the uneven geographical development of Chilean copper mining industry and the circulation of copper in Britain.
The research examines three key historical moments in a pattern of ‘de-nationalisation’, a term identified by Sassen (2003), of the copper resources of Chile: (1) 1840–1880; (2) 1904–1969; and (3) 1981–today, in which resources have been transferred from public to private management.
In this research, Acosta uses a combination of photographic and historical methodologies to explore the impact of those processes on the extractive ecologies of Chile and to connect them to the global geographies of London, Liverpool and Swansea. This thesis considers how photography can be used to propose a re-mapping of the relationship between the global and the local, the national and the transnational, making visible the hidden geopolitical forces that shape the mobile and unequal geographies of copper.
This doctoral investigation explores the global circulation of copper and its agency to produce geographical and political change. With the aim of revealing their close connections and networks, it examines the notion of ‘unequal geography’ established by Baran (1957) and the newer ‘mobility paradigm’ proposed by Sheller and Urry (2006). Acosta follows the flow of copper, in Held’s words, ‘across space and time’ (1999), creating a constellation of photographs and texts about the transformation and mutation of copper as it traverses the world, exploring traces of extraction, smelting, manufacture, transport and trade processes across geographies. In doing so, he opens ways of thinking about how landscape carries traces of those processes, bringing to the fore the significance of photographic intervention in highlighting them.
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