Opening: Thursday July 24th, 7 p.m. Based on the premise that extractivism has been a structural condition in the formation of nation-states in Latin America, matter here appears as a commodity of capital, a remnant of a ruined landscape, and an archive of disputed sovereignty. This exhibition brings together a series of artistic practices that, from various geographies and languages, explore the material and symbolic traces of a productive model rooted in the exploitation of natural resources. The works emerge from specific contexts—territories marked by extraction, the waste left by this economy, and bodies that resist or are pierced by these conflicts. We highlight the intimate relationship between the abstract and arbitrary weft drawn by maps and borders and the very formation of states. Mining, monoculture plantations, railways, and dams do not merely reshape the landscape—they function as technologies of domination. They are tools for organizing time and space, and for rendering local populations invisible. The works gathered in this exhibition revisit some of these mechanisms through a critical, poetic, and political lens. In this process of expansion and control, social narratives also emerge in response to present-day conflicts, as seen in photographs that depict Indigenous identities and social figures through an aesthetic that alludes to colonial-era chronicles—at the very moment when Latin American states were being formed.
Image: Alejandra Delgado, Energía Transformada, 2019.