to admit a subtle thread

Image credit: Amanda Piña, The School of Mountains and Waters

Extractivism as a concept exceeds the economic activity of extracting raw ‘natural resources’ from land such as mining, tailoring and monoculture. As a complex development model, it also involves a certain way of relating with and approach towards the territory. Macarena Gomez-Barris in The Extractive Zone (2013) describes the ‘extractive view’ as that which transforms human groups, minerals, water and trees into ‘natural resources’ and “reorganizes territories, populations, and animal and plant life into extractable data for material and immaterial accumulation”. to admit a subtle thread emerges from the need to delve and pause in that moment of transformation, to bring awareness to that action and dislocate the hegemonic and normalized definition of nature as a resource for humans, giving space to other relationships with land and for other stories to take the ground.

This project becomes relevant in the midst of efforts like the ‘green energy transition’, focused mainly on leaving fossil fuel energy behind and reducing carbon emissions. These efforts still rely on other extractions such as lithium for batteries, taken from the brine from salt flakes in territories like the ‘lithium triangle’ (Argentina, Bolivia and Chile) holding 75 percent of the world’s ‘supply’. By 2030, 95 percent of lithium demand will respond to batteries, carrying further the destruction of salt flats and their complex ecosystemic relationships. The Netherlands in this context, is committed to generate 70% of its energy sustainably by 2030, and from this year 2025, Amsterdam will begin to ban the sale of cars with internal combustion engines (gas-powered)(Jerez et al.). On another hand, responding to the global demand, the Chilean government renewed last year SQM company contract to keep extracting lithium from the Salar de Atacama adding other salt flakes in the north of Chile and signed a partnership contract that extends the permission from 2030 onwards.

Lithium is one example of how the well-known ‘green energy transition’ can eclipse the continuation of colonial and extractivist logics, raising the need to pause in cases and discourses like ‘new green technologies’ or ‘carbon bonuses’ that rely in the same ‘resource’ logic persisting in a one-side, linear and single-thread, monoculture relationship with land. This dominant linear approach, makes invisible the origin of the materials, the dependency on certain terrains and ignores relational, historical, affective, spiritual and political threads between beings and their territory. Through this pause, to admit a subtle thread aims to offer space and time to these complex relational weaving and for these ever present but neglected and denied threads.

The show brings together art works of Latin American artists that, in addition to shedding light to extractive practices, communicate about other ways of engaging with earth evidencing a radical relational existence with her and other beings, one that understands land and humans as a consequence of a historical, affective, temporal, territorial and spiritual plot. Rolando Vázquez, in Vistas of Modernity, decolonial aesthesis and the end of the contemporary (2020) ,understands ‘relationality’ not just from a comprehensive approach about beings but also as a political stance and alternative facing to Western pretensions of Truth, totality, and hegemony like the ones imposed by extractivist enterprises. Inspired by this gesture, this project aims to foreground the irreducible multiplicity of knowledges and ways of being with land understanding the political resistance of relationality.

We are interested in bringing complexity, activate, strengthen the community that works for this causes through workshops, performances and conversation spaces in a public program that will be developed during the exhibition.

Image credit: Natalia Montoya Lecaros – Camino a las Nubes / Road to the silver clouds