Traces of Nitrate

Capitalism changes everything. It has altered our relationship to the Earth. It has ripped lands apart, torn out their materials and hauled them over the surface of the world. Extraction and export are the business of capital. All forms of exchange are acts of appropriation but mining removes materials that can never be replaced. They are taken, transformed and trafficked with no intent to repay.
Traces of Nitrate is an arts research collective devoted to documenting the extraction of minerals from Chile and their material transformations as they enter the capitalist system through financial markets of the City of London, UK.
Xavier Ribas, Louise Purbrick and Ignacio Acosta worked together for over ten years. Our first project, Traces of Nitrate: Mining History and Photography Between Britain and Chile, from which they now take as the name of their collective, Traces of Nitrate, tracked between archives and landscapes in London, Liverpool, Swansea and the Atacama Desert to explore relationships between historical and contemporary forms of copper and nitrate mining. Traces of Nitrate produced a series individual works, images and exhibitions, articles and books, that are all located on this website. They have also created a collective work, Trafficking the Earth, that distils our documentation into a dispositive that exposes the historical constellations of loss and accumulation, depletion and displacement, violence and its disguise, begun by the extraction and export of nitrate and copper.
Traces of Nitrate is an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project.