Visual research into extractivism

Graduation project  from Royal Academy of Arts Den Haag
2021 - ongoing






As a kid I built castles with soil. Equipped with bright yellow rain boots on still too tiny feet I crossed sand piles, exploring the elements underneath me. Every now and then I would tear an earthworm apart. Roaming on the land was my favourite adventure.

In my home, southwest Germany, the most valuable resource lies underground. The natural deposits, mostly stones and sand, show suitable qualities for concrete production. This attracts mining companies that see value in the soil that I was turning into castles: Concrete is a high economic demand. Extractivism – the extraction of these resources - is divisive because it lies at the crossroads of economic development and environmental protection. The needs of our society dictate the destruction of our landscapes: Extractivism becomes a necessity.

The altered landscapes shape missing pieces of the earth. It feels like the soul of my homeland becomes a surface – on display in quarries that grow larger due to everlasting demand. As I stand in the silent quarry at night, looking at the stars, I am conflicted: I see the soil wounded, but I understand the economic necessity.

Using my father as a mode of human scale within a vast and potentially abstract site of mining, I look not only at a massive economic process and its transformations upon the human and their environment, but also at a generational conflict. His generation benefited from the economy - mine faces eco-anxiety.

Visual research into an economy that’s inevitable, that transforms my homeland and of which I have doubts.

Works

Mother as Grave 

Essay by Dario di Paolantonio

[Excerpt]

From dwelling in caves, humans have gone a long way to sustain themselves, finding solutions to accommodate their disparate needs. As populations grew in numbers, societies developed, and with them new necessities rose: more houses, more food, more infrastructures. Humans multiplied across the globe, and cities grew in size and quantity. For this, the increase of efficiency in digging up and managing resources was the main goal for prehistorical engineers. Technological advancement aided the fulfilment of such demands, and in a blink of an eye – from a geological perspective – the Earth became riddled with lumber mills, ore mines, stone quarries, oil drills, gas wells and any other large apparatus for the extraction, production and refinement of materials deemed necessary for the proper sustainment of a globally interconnected village. But from being the core of a liberatory project to ameliorate our species’ condition, it seems that technology, and its evolution over the ages, carried the unintended consequence of intensifying environmental degradation and human immiseration. We can find a similar thought in the writings of Martin Heidegger, a philosopher living in the early twentieth century in Germany. [...]

Cyanotype on slate

The creation of slate in southwest Germany is a result of the region’s geological history between 201 and 145
million years ago. During the Jurassic period, southwest Germany was covered by a shallow sea, where layers
of sediment and organic matter accumulated on the seafloor. Over time, these layers were buried deeper, and
the intense heat and pressure caused them to undergo metamorphism, transforming into metamorphic rocks,
including slate. The specific conditions of this process resulted in the formation of slate with unique properties, making it a valuable resource that has been quarried and used for centuries. Nowdays the slates are mined to make cement. For me it carries my homelands history and memory, it feels like the soul of the earth becomes visible in quarries.

The photographs printed on the slates capture the industrial landscapes of mining sites, showcasing massive machines like crushers that grind slates and other stones, along with intricate conveyor belt systems. This underlines the conceptual link - these stones would have become victims of the machines.

Father as scale

My father as a human scale. 

Exhibition views

Father as scale can be adapted to different exhibition set-ups and has been part of many exhibition projects.