Trafficking the Earth:

Photography, Communities, and Extractivism
 

‘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.’ Departing from the photography project Trafficking the Earth, the arts research collective Traces of Nitrate formed by the artists Xavier Ribas and Ignacio Acosta and the art historian Louise Purbrick, and Armando Caroa from the London Mining Network will talk about the relation between photography, communities, and extractivism in Chile.

 

Trafficking the Earth is the second chapter of the long-term project that Traces of Nitrate embarked on over ten years ago. It is a collection of documents that expose the movement of mineral wealth from Chile into global markets and European landscapes, mainly nitrate and copper. The transformation of these natural resources into industrial materials draws desert and city, slag heap and country house, ruin and regeneration, landscape and archive, Chile and Britain, into the same circuit of capital. 

 

The exhibition of the publication of the same title will be exhibited outside the cinema in Birkbeck, School of Arts.