In this ongoing series I explore areas of Bolivia, Chile, and Mexico, where mining and other industries have extracted human and natural resources for centuries. The work is inspired by the writings of Eduardo Galeano. Conceptually, I try to interpret the author’s poignant descriptions of a Latin American landscape stripped of its natural resources; scenes of mountains carved into hollow shells, or vast forests cut into empty plains.
The project is shot shot using a wide variety of analog and digital formats, and well as a mixture of color and black and white images, looking to give each format a distinct point of view, like a character in a novel. Support from institutional and private archives visited in each location is also important to the structure of this project.
Wear your headphones and listen to a soundscape produced exclusively for this project by Espacio No Domesticable (END), with poetry in Spanish by René Zinho.
One of several mountains of mining scoria left by Compañía El Boleo S.A., in a poor neighborhood of the Mexican town of Santa Rosalía, on the coast of the Baja California peninsula.
In 1868 copper deposits were discovered in the Santa Rosalía region, and in 1885 the mining company was established with a 50-year concession granted by President Porfirio Díaz.
The company ended operations in 1954, leaving behind reverberatory furnaces and metallurgical converters, old locomotives, mining machinery, and equipment, as well as various toxic industrial wastes, which were scattered throughout the city in the open air.