NETWORK MEMBERS
Ignacio Acosta
Artist, Uppsala University
Ignacio Acosta is an artist and researcher working in territories under pressure from extractive industries. His multi-layered collaborative practice and spatial installations seek to connect audiences with these complex but critical concerns. He works in places made vulnerable through the exploitation of ecologies by colonial intervention and intensive capitalisation. Acosta is devoted to the understanding of sites and landscapes that, although often neglected, are of global significance. His projects focus upon resistance to mining on valuable natural environments and, through technologies of seeing, he develops work towards the generation of meaningful visual and spatial narratives. The layers that comprise his research process contribute to larger, vibrant collaborations with activists, artists, scientists, writers and Indigenous peoples. He leads the FORMAS funded project Indigenous perspectives on forest fires, drought and climate change: Sápmi based at Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism (CEMFOR), Uppsala University; and is part of Traces of Nitrate, a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded collaborative visual research developed with the Art and Design historian Louise Purbrick and the photographer Xavier Ribas, based at the University of Brighton and the Royal College of Arts.
Ursula Biemann
Artist
Ursula Biemann is a Swiss artist and theorist, whose practice centres on fieldwork, often in Indigenous territories, and the creation of networks between different fields of knowledge. Her artistic practice reflects on the political ecologies of forests, oil and water, creating through her videos, books and installations critical perspectives on the dynamics of extraction and also proposing alternative, ecocentric modes of ecological and epistemological relatedness. Biemann recently had solo exhibitions at MAMAC in Nice and at the Art Museum at UNAL in Bogota. She published the online monograph “Becoming Earth” on ten years of her ecological video works and writing and the book “Forest Mind - On the Interconnection of All Life” with Spector Books.
Giuliana Borea
Newcastle University;
Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
Giuliana Borea is an Assistant Professor in Latin American Studies at Newcastle University, and an Affiliated Professor of Anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She is a social anthropologist informed by an interdisciplinary perspective into the arts and culture and has built her career at the intersection of academic work, cultural policy making, and curatorship. Her research concerns the political economy of contemporary art worlds and their transnational networks; museum politics and practices; issues of class and race, place-making and sensory knowledge with a focus on Latin America, particularly Peru. Her current project explores the local and global circulation of Amazonian Art and produces new curatorial narratives in collaboration with indigenous artists. She has been Peru’s Director of Museums and Cultural Heritage and coordinator of museums such as of the Lima Contemporary Art Museum. Her curatorial practice includes exhibitions of indigenous contemporary art. She has been granted the Marie Curie Fellowship with her Amazonart project, the ILAS Fellowship in the University of London (SAS), the Wenner Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, the NYU Thinker Fieldwork Grant, the Carolina Foundation Fellowship, among others. She sits at the European Association of Social Anthropologists Art and Anthropology Network Committee (EASA, ANTART). She is the editor of Arte y Antropología: Estudios, Encuentros y Nuevos Horizontes (2017, editor) and the author of Configuring the New Lima Art Scene: An Anthropological Analysis of Latin American Contemporary Art (Routledge, 2021). She is currently writing her new book on Amazonian indigenous contemporary art.
Photo credits: Ruben Diaz
Carolina Caycedo
Artist
Carolina Caycedo (1978) is a multidisciplinary artist known for her performances, video, artist’s books, sculptures, and installations that examine environmental and social issues. Her work contributes to the construction of environmental historical memory, as a fundamental element for non-repetition of violence against human and non-human entities. She has developed publicly engaged projects in major cities across the globe, and held residencies at the DAAD in Berlin, and The Huntington Libraries, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, among others. She has participated in numerous international biennales including the Sydney, Chicago Architecture, Sao Paulo, Istanbul, Berlin, Havana, and Whitney Biennials. She has received funding from Creative Capital, Prince Claus Fund, and others. Caycedo’s recent solo museum exhibitions include Projects: Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas at MOMA (2022-2023); Land of Friends at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle (2022-2023); From the Bottom of the River at the MCA Chicago (2020-2021); Cosmotarrayas at ICA Boston (2020); Wanaawna, Rio Hondo, and Other Spirits at the Orange County Museum of Art (2019-2020), and Care Report at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Polonia (2019-2020). Caycedo is currently a nominee for the Artes Mundi 10 prize in Wales. She was a 2021-2022 inaugural U.S. Latinx Artist Fellow and a 2020-2022 inaugural Borderlands Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University (ASU) and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.
T. J. Demos
University of California, Santa Cruz
T. J. Demos is the Patricia and Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in Art History in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. Demos is the author of several books, including Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology(Sternberg Press, 2016); The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013) – winner of the College Art Association’s 2014 Frank Jewett Mather Award – and Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2013). He recently co-edited The Routledge Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021), was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020), and directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project Beyond the End of the World (2019-21). Demos was Chair and Chief Curator of the Climate Collective, providing public programming related to the 2021 Climate Emergency > Emergence program at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Maat) in Lisbon. His new book, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come, is now out from Sternberg Press.
Renate Dohmen
Open University
Renate Dohmen is Senior Lecturer in Art history at the Open University, UK. She explores questions of indigeneity in relation to the visual arts and questions of decoloniality, focusing most recently on the work of Kent Monkman. Her monograph Encounters beyond the Gallery (2016) offers an experimental format and engages the art worlds and works of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tamil women and the Shipibo-Conibo of Eastern Peru in imaginative encounters which challenge the terms of exclusion of indigenous art from the global art world and give voice to a plurality of perspectives. She has received research grants from the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, has been awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship for her work on British colonialism, and serves on the advisory board of Third Text. Her work is motivated by the question of how to write, think and move with art in a diffractive mode that exceeds representation, and is inspired by the notion of ch’ixi as framed by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, the concept of transdifference and the Deleuze-Guattarean rhizomatic ‘and’. She seeks to de-frame the spectatorial dynamics of modernity/coloniality and to story visual objects and works of art in ways that draw out acts of visual sovereignty and speak to a post-abyssal imagination of an emergent in-between. She understands her work as intervention in the academic field and as contribution to the collective effort of assembling a post-abyssal archive as de Sousa Santos has called for, which disrupts the return of the same, claims a suppressed past for the future and foregrounds interacting with possibilities over creating new certainties.
Ticio Escobar
Director of the Center for Visual Arts /
Museo del Barro
(Asuncion, Paraguay, 1947) Curator, professor, art critic and cultural promoter. He has served as President of the International Association of Art Critics-Paraguay, President of the Association for the Support of Indigenous Communities of Paraguay, Director of Culture of Asuncion, and Minister of Culture of Paraguay. He is the author of Paraguay's National Culture Law and co-author of the National Heritage Law. He has carried out numerous national and international curatorships. He has written some fifteen individual books on art and cultural theory. He has received decorations awarded by Argentina, Brazil, and France, honorary doctorates from the National University of Arts, the University of Misiones, the National University of Rosario, Argentina, and the National University of Asuncion, Paraguay, as well as several distinctions and international awards. He currently serves as Director of the Centro de Artes Visuales / Museo del Barro.
Katya García-Antón
Office for Contemporary Art Norway
Katya García-Antón is an English-Spanish curator. Having trained in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, she combines academic excellence with a knowledge of an immense range of artistic disciplines. She has been affiliated with several major international art institutions, including the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museu d’Arte Moderno de São Paulo, Brazil; the Institute of Contemporary Art, London and IKON, Birmingham. She curated the Spanish contribution to the São Paulo Biennial in 2004 and was responsible for a section of the Prague Biennial in 2005. García-Antón has organised and curated over fifty exhibitions of art, design and architecture, featuring both well-established and young, emerging artists. She has served on the editorial board of Third Text magazine, and has been an art critic for the BBC World Service and for various international art magazines, as well as contributing to numerous catalogues and monographs. Among her wide-ranging curatorial activities, we might mention her contribution to the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011 (Dora Garcia’s The Inadequate) and Gestures in Time (co-curated with Lara Khaldi) and the flagship exhibition of the very first edition of the Qalandiya International Biennial in Palestine in 2012. Amongst other things, her work is characterised by an interest in investigating exhibition forms and art contexts outside the mainstream. García-Antón’s critical, political and subtle approach to contemporary art, her ability to work outside the established institutional framework and to reflect on perspectives that reach beyond the Western world is in line with OCA’s mandate and aspirations.
David Garneau (Métis)
Artist, University of Regina
David Garneau (Métis) is Head of Visual Arts at the University of Regina. He is a painter, curator and critical art writer who engages creative expressions of Indigenous contemporary ways of being. Garneau curated Kahwatsiretátie: The Contemporary Native Art Biennial (Montreal, 2020) with assistance from Faye Mullen and rudi aker; co-curated, with Kathleen Ash Milby, Transformer: Native Art in Light and Sound, National Museum of the American Indian, New York (2017); and With Secrecy and Despatch, with Tess Allas, an international exhibition about massacres of Indigenous people, and memorialization, for the Campbelltown Art Centre, Sydney, Australia (2016); and Moving Forward, Never Forgetting, with Michelle LaVallee, an exhibition concerning the legacies of Indian Residential Schools, other forms of aggressive assimilation, and (re)conciliation, at the Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina (2015). Recent essays include: “From Indian to Indigenous: Temporary Pavilion to Sovereign Display Territories,” In Search of Expo 67. 2020; and “Electric Beads: On Indigenous Digital Formalism,” Visual Anthropology Review. 2018. Garneau has given keynotes in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and throughout Canada on issues such as: mis/appropriation; re/conciliation; public art; museum displays; and Indigenous contemporary art. His performance, Dear John, featuring the spirit of Louis Riel meeting with John A. Macdonald statues, was presented in Regina, Kingston, and Ottawa. David recently installed a large public art work, the Tawatina Bridge paintings, in Edmonton. His paintings are in numerous public and private collections. He was awarded the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts: Outstanding Achievement.
Royal Halloway, University of London
Helen Gilbert
Helen Gilbert is a scholar and researcher of postcolonial and Indigenous performing arts, with a particular interest in arts-based activism on environmental issues. She has taught at universities in Australia, Britain, Japan and Germany and worked with Indigenous performance-makers from various parts of the world to bring their work to festivals and exhibitions in Europe. Her research explores issues such as race and representation, nationalism, democracy, cultural diplomacy and the politics and aesthetics of cross-cultural engagement. Her recent publications include the co-edited volumes Marrugeku: Telling That Story (2021), In the Balance: Indigeneity, Performance, Globalization (2018) and Commodity and Spectacle in the Indigenous Americas (2014). In 2016, she was awarded a Humboldt Prize for outstanding contributions to international theatre scholarship. Helen is a passionate advocate of inter-disciplinary research and has led large-scale international projects involving a range of scholars, educators, creative artists, students and cultural sector organisations. In 2013, she curated EcoCentrix: Indigenous Arts, Sustainable Acts (2013), a major London exhibition bringing together images, films, objects, sounds, performances and live art installations from various parts of the world. She currently works at Royal Holloway University in London, where she is developing a new project on contemporary eco-activism, with a specific focus on water-related issues as taken up in embodied arts and protests.
le peuple qui manque,
Aliocha Imhoff & Kantuta Quirós
Curators and art theorists, Paris
Aliocha Imhoff and Kantuta Quirós are curators, art theorists, filmmakers, based in Paris, founders of the curatorial platform le peuple qui manque, created in 2005 which works between art and research. For several years they have been conducting a research project aimed at a new ecology of knowledge, based on scenographies of contemporary thought (diplomatic fictions, fictitious trials, assemblies and thought experiments on a 1:1 scale) and defending the translation dimension of curatorial work as the condition of possibility of an epistemological debate. This ecology of knowledge embraces, in a non-hierarchical way, indigenous, "scientific", popular knowledge, but also, the forms of knowledge produced by artists. Their latest curatorial projects include the School of Impatiences (Chateau Musée de Dieppe, 2022-2023), Atlas of Bifurcations (Diep Haven 2021); And What Do They Ask? To become something there (Lyon Biennale, 2019); A Debt of Times (Konsthall C, Stockholm, 2018), The Trial of Fiction (Nuit Blanche, 2017); A Migrant Constituent Assembly (Centre Pompidou, 2017) ; A Government of Times (Rebuild Foundation, Chicago, and Halle 14, Leipzig, 2016).They have published Qui parle? à l’ère de l’Anthropocène (P.U.F., 2022), Les potentiels du temps (Manuella Editions, 2016), directed Géoesthétique (Editions B42, 2014) and Histoires afropolitaines de l’art, Revue Multitudes 53-54 (2014). Members of the editorial board of the review Multitudes, they were residents of the Rebuild Foundation (Chicago South Side, 2015) and Ateliers Médicis (2018). Kantuta Quirós was born in La Paz (Bolivia). Doctor in aesthetics, she has been a professor at the University of Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne since 2022. She also teaches at Ensa Mauritius (School of Architecture of Mauritius) and has also held various institutional positions, notably at the Film Department of the Musée National d’Art Moderne / Centre Pompidou. Aliocha Imhoff was born in Paris (France). Doctor in aesthetics, he has been a professor at the University of Paris VIII since 2021, department of visual arts. He has also held various institutional positions, notably at the Centre National des Arts Plastiques.
Photo credits: Marco Di Giuseppe
Artist, Villa Arson
Elena Mazzi
Elena Mazzi (Reggio Emilia, 1984) studied at the University of Siena, IUAV in Venice, and at the Royal Institute of Art (Konsthögskolan) in Stockholm. Starting from the examination of specific territories, in her works she reinterprets the cultural and natural heritage of places, interweaving stories, facts and fantasies handed down by local communities, in order to suggest possible resolutions to the man-nature-culture conflict. Her somewhat anthropological working method favours a holistic approach aimed at repairing the rifts that occur in society. She begins the work with observation and proceeds by combining various areas of knowledge. Her works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions, including: PAV in Turin, BIENALSUR in Buenos Aires, der TANK in Basel, MADRE in Naples, ar/ge kunst in Bozen, Sodertalje Konsthall in Stockholm, Whitechapel Gallery in London, BOZAR in Brussels, Museo del Novecento in Florence, MAGA in Gallarate, GAMeC in Bergamo, MAMbo in Bologna, AlbumArte in Rome, Sonje Art Center in Seoul, Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, the Golinelli Foundation in Bologna, 16th Quadriennale in Rome, GAM in Turin, the 14th Istanbul Biennial, the 17th BJCEM Mediterranean Biennial, COP17 in Durban, the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, Brussels, Stockholm, Johannesburg and Cape Town, and the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation in Venice. She has attended numerous residency programs in Italy and abroad, and she is the winner of several international prizes. Elena Mazzi is presently undergoing a practice based PHD at Villa Arson in Nice.
Tahila Mintz (Yaqui Jewish)
Artist
Tahila C. Mintz is an Indigenous Yaqui and Jewish multidisciplinary artist who engages in paradigm shifting towards ancestral systems of matriarchy and gender equilibrium, and the work of re-membering the strands of knowledge that have been unraveled by colonial interventions. She is a Water Protector and Land Guardian who collaborates with Indigenous communities around the world, particularly Indigenous women, to restore access to ancestral knowledge and promote understanding between communities. Her feature length film in progress, Woman of the Water, focuses on the treatment of water, women, and Indigenous peoples. Mintz’s work has been exhibited at Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present and in a solo exhibition, Disrupted Water Ways: A Call to Action at Unrequited Leisure, Nashville, TN, the MAC, Project Row House, Photoville, and Contact Photography Festival. She was awarded the 2023 artist residency at Light Work, the Magnum Foundation World Monument Fund, the Sharjah Art Foundation Residence 2022, and National Geographic Recovery Grant 2021. She is a Make Art With Purpose fellow, Puffin Foundation fellow, Kathryn Davis Peace fellow, and National Geographic Fellow. She was a panelist for the 2023 Tennessee Triennial on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. She spoke at the United Nations for the 2020 World Interfaith Harmony Week and was a 2010 Pecha Kucha presenter. Mintz has worked as a cultural technologist creating culturally responsive Virtual Reality or interactive online experiences to translate in-person experiences to the virtual realm for Indigenous community healing. Her chapter, Integrating Immersive Technology Tools and New Media for Indigenous Culture and Wellness will be published in the upcoming book, Resilient Health: Leveraging Technology and Social Innovations to Transform Healthcare for COVID-19 Recovery and Beyond. She is the Founding Executive Director of OJI:SDA’ Sustainable Indigenous Futures.
Jolene K. Rickard (Tuscarora)
Cornell University
Jolene Rickard, born 1956, citizen of the Tuscarora nation, Turtle clan, is an artist, curator and visual historian at Cornell University, specializing in Indigenous peoples issues. Rickard co-curated two of the four permanent exhibitions for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. In 1977, Jolene Rickard attended the London College of Printmaking. She received her BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and in 1991 she graduated with an MA from Buffalo State College. Rickard earned her Ph.D. in American Studies with a Native component from the University at Buffalo (SUNY) in 1996. Rickard is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and American Indian and Indigenous Studies at Cornell University, and serves as the Director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program. She also served as Interim Chair for the Art Department at Cornell between 2009 and 2010.
RELATED PROJECTS
Center for Creative Ecologies [TBC]
Director: T. J. Demos
Department of History of Art and Visual Culture (HAVC), UC Santa Cruz
The Center for Creative Ecologies provides a place to consider the intersection of culture and environment. The aim is to develop useful interdisciplinary research tools to examine how cultural practitioners—filmmakers, new media strategists, photojournalists, architects, writers, activists, and interdisciplinary theorists—critically address and creatively negotiate environmental concerns in the local, regional, and global field. These concerns include anthropogenic climate change and global warming, and relate to factors such as habitat destruction, drought, species extinction, and environmental degradation. Drawing on such wide-ranging fields as visual culture and art history, political ecology and economics, Earth jurisprudence and new materialism philosophy, Indigenous cosmopolitics and climate justice activism, the Center energizes the formation of the emerging environmental arts and humanities. Embedded in the Department of History of Art and Visual Culture (HAVC) at UC Santa Cruz, and funded in part by UCSC’s Arts Division, the Center supports and strengthens its PhD program in Visual Culture. It addresses a wide arena of visual experience, within and beyond artistic practice, including mass media and governmental publicity, where environmental matters are discussed, represented, and negotiated. The Center aims to be an inclusive space of dialogue welcoming diverse participants to consider the ecological conflicts and creative sustainable alternatives that impact us all, to widen our knowledge society, and to assess and contribute to informed policymaking in the widest sense of the term.
Amazonart Project
Director: Giuliana Borea
Marie Curie Fellowship,
University of Essex / Newcastle University
Amazonart is an interdisciplinary and intersectorial project that develops a novel approach to understanding the work, trajectories and activism of indigenous Amazonian contemporary artists as they enter global art circuits, and seeks to produce new curatorial narratives. It does this through a collaborative methodology with Amazonian artists responding to their aim of self-representation. The participatory and interdisciplinary approach of this research seeks to contribute to dialogues between anthropology, art history and curatorial studies, and benefit indigenous artists and museum practices and policies. Amazonart focuses on Peru’s Amazonian contemporary art with particular attention to Uitoto and Shipibo artists, who are playing an important role in the growing visibility of Amazonian art at national and international levels.
Credits: Santiago Yahuarcani, The Triumph/Emodofide, 2014
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CEMFOR
Indigenous Perspectives on Forest Fires, Drought, and Climate Change: Sápmi
Project Leader: Ignacio Acosta
University of Uppsala
The overall aim of this inter- and supradisciplinary research project is to analyse, document and bring forward Indigenous/Sámi stewardship of lands with regard to fire management, drought and other aspects of climate change, using a combination of filmed interviews, drones images, 3D maps, photographs, video clips, sounds, writing and workshops, as means of research, communication and dissemination. Led by artist scholar Dr Ignacio Acosta with Sámi journalist Ms Liz-Marie Nilsen, Sámi scholar Dr May-Briitt Öhman, Sámi reindeer herder and Luleå Sámi translator Ms Gun Aira, Sámi and local communities. Placed at Uppsala University, Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism (CEMFOR), in collaboration with Ájtte Museum Jokkmokk; Arts Catalyst, University of Brighton; Hasselblad Foundation; HDK-Valand, Gothenburg University; and Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen.
le peuple qui manque,
Art curatorial platform, Paris
A People Is Missing is an art curatorial platform based in Paris, France. It was created by Kantuta Quirós and Aliocha Imhoff in 2005, and operates at the intersection of contemporary art and research. A people is missing is also producing and distributing artists’ films. Some recents curatorial projects (2010-2021): « What Are They Asking For? To Become Something » (Biennale de Lyon, 2019) ; A Debt of Times(Konsthall C, 2018) ; Arte no es el enemigo / Art Is Not the Enemy (La Colonie, 2018) ; The Trial of Fiction (Nuit Blanche, 2017); A Migrant Constituent Assembly (Centre Pompidou, 2017, symposium-performance) ; A Government of Times (Leipizg Halle 14, symposium-performance, 2016) ; A Government of Times (Rebuild Foundation, Chicago, exposition, 2016), La frontera nos cruzo (Museo de la Inmigracion Buenos Aires, 2015, exposition) ; Live Writing, Prague (2015) ; Post-exotism(New Haven Fort, UK,2015, exposition) ; Cinéma permanent in Leiris & Co (Centre Pompidou Metz, 2015) ; Au-delà de l’effet Magiciens – f(r)ictions diplomatiques#1 (Fondation Gulbenkian, Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, 2015) ; The Accelerationist Trial (Centre Pompidou, 2014) ; Realm of Reverberation – Chen Chieh-Jen, Galerie Olivier Robert, 2014 ; La géografia sirve, primero, para hacer la guerra – Museo de la Memoria, Bogota, 2014 ; Mille ans d’histoire non-linéaire (Centre Pompidou, 2013) ; The Borderscape Room (exposition, Le Quartier, Centre d’Art de Quimper, 2013) ; Fais un effort pour te souvenir. Ou, à défaut, invente. (exposition, Bétonsalon – Centre d’Art et de Recherche, 2013) ; L’artiste en ethnographe (Musée du Quai Branly et Centre Pompidou, 2012) ; Atlas critique (exposition, Parc Saint Léger, 2012) ; La géographie, ça sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre (BAL, 2011) ; Im/mune (exposition co-curatée avec Beatriz Preciado, Ecole d’Art de Bourges et Centre d’Art Contemporain Transpalette, 2011 ) ; Que faire ? art/film/politique (Centre Pompidou, 2010) ; Polyphonix (co-curaté avec Jean-Jacques Lebel, Festival d’Automne, le 104) ; Les écrivains filment (IMEC, 2010), etc.
Traces of Nitrate
Arts research collective: Ignacio Acosta, Louise Purbrick and Xavier Ribas
AHRC funded project, University of Brighton
Traces of Nitrate is an arts research collective devoted to documenting the extraction of minerals from Chile and their material transformations as they enter the capitalist system through financial markets of the City of London, UK. Ignacio Acosta, Louise Purbrick and Xavier Ribas have been working together for ten years. Our first project, Traces of Nitrate: Mining History and Photography Between Britain and Chile, from which we now take as the name of our collective, Traces of Nitrate, tracked between archives and landscapes in London, Liverpool, Swansea and the Atacama Desert to explore relationships between historical and contemporary forms of copper and nitrate mining. Traces of Nitrate produced a series individual works, images and exhibitions, articles and books, that are all located on these webpages. We have also created a collective work, Trafficking the Earth, that distils our documentation into a dispositive that exposes the historical constellations of loss and accumulation, depletion and displacement, violence and its disguise, begun by the extraction and export of nitrate and copper.