Atacama Desert, Chile
January 2025
The Atacama Desert is a living witness to acts of ecological imperialism undertaken by the British, who dominated copper mining in the region throughout the 19th Century.
A heritage of exploiting (post) nature, transforming landscapes, transferring human populations, snatching knowledge and acquiring wealth. This was an inequitable exchange that contributed to European prosperity and reduced indigenous lands to commodities.
In the spoil heaps of an abandoned copper mine, in heat and high altitude, we perform a healing ritual to acknowledge the past and invoke protection. We use our hands to move soils and geological ‘waste’, to create a temporary monument for remembering.
As the home of the world’s largest lithium reserves, an uncertain future looms for the Atacama Desert and the people who reside within it. A modern form of green colonisation is once again, driving the extraction of the global south to meet the demands of the global north - a cycle threatening to repeat itself.
