How are brutality and coloniality made material?
Vanessa Agard-Jones
This essay takes its start from Brazilian artist Silvia Noronha’s work The Future of Stones, created in 2017 after the Bento Rodrigues dam disaster, in which the retaining walls of a dam owned by mining companies suddenly burst, releasing an avalanche of mud composed of toxic waste of high environmental impact over several towns in the district of Mariana, in Minas Gerais, Brazil. In her work, the artist collected samples of contaminated soil and river water from the devastated region, and exposed them to pressure and temperature processes in order to generate “artificial rocks” as testimony to the event. Taking this work into account, I wonder: how can we know and problematize the territory through the use of art in dialogue with inert agents? What types of world configurations do they present? What is the logic of existence that permeates them and in what way are they linked to human logic? Is it possible for mineral entities to become materializations of territorial extractivism? In what ways do anthropogenic agents turn geological matter into semiotic, political, and esthetic artifacts? What strategies make it possible to design plausible future scenarios through critical artworks that denounce current neoliberal practices? What methodological matrices are put into play so that matter conveys territoriality?
In what follows, I reflect and speculate on possible answers to these questions and deconstruct the work based on its materiality, its agential hybridity, its artificial human composition and the technological processes involved in becoming an artifact. This essay serves as a case study of what I call sessile poetics, to refer to those artistic productions rooted in the territory and intrinsically influenced by it, artistic productions composed of living agents and/or mineral entities that problematize the place where they belong or inhabit in their materiality.
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In The Future of Stones, the soil becomes an artifact. This term intrinsically involves the human being as a process manager when they transform the collected contaminated matter into esthetic medial objects. The human gesture is aggregated on two levels: firstly, through the presence of mining waste on the soil of the affected region, and secondly, through the artist’s petrification of the territory into displayable objects. These two correlative temporal instances of human responsibility (factual and poetic) attach new signifiers to the material used, turning it into a text and a site of narrativity1 from which discursivities are created. The first-world mining companies that were responsible for exploiting the damaged area were the ones that indirectly co-created2 Noronha’s work by producing the materials that made it possible. These rock-artifacts can be interpreted as conjunctions of differentiated materials where there is a prevailing predator-prey model, in which the geophysical matter of the region’s soil is interfered with and devoured by the mud flood made up of toxic heavy metals and industrial chemicals derived from mining exploitation. In the words of Lisa Blackmore and Liliana Gómez, the viscous anthropogenic mixture “was a cocktail of toxic terracotta sludge—an anthropogenic mixture of diverse forces and histories, affects and philosophies […] [which is] inseparable from the colonization of Latin America”.3 The mineral mass of toxic waste that spread over Bento Rodrigues contained not only heavy metals, but also negligence, irresponsibility, neoliberalism, and colonialism. These narratives intrinsic to the territory are transferred and perpetuated in the artwork as an archive and memory of extractivist processes that have historically taken place in the region. The territory is (re)presented with its own materiality, which is eternalized and decontextualized to become vitrified and turned into an artistic object. There is a correlation in terms of the deterritorialization that the work methodologically entails, which is in absolute coherence with what it represents.
There is, on the one hand, a displacement of mineral matter to the museum, and on the other hand, a displacement of the human and non-human population to other inhabitable territories or to the sphere of death. The collected fragment of soil becomes a symbol of the whole, through the use of synecdoche, as the transposition of the devastated territory and also as the voice of the disaster. In current times “minerals become themselves mobile”4, as a result of human techno-geological processes that imply that they can be part of any topography. Some of the toxic minerals from Bento Rodrigues that were mixed with the region’s soil were already by-products of other extractivist processes developed in this territory, thus the resulting mineral mixture is the outcome of an asynchronous mobility. Jussi Parikka claims that “[…] geology is not only about the soil, the crust, the layers that give our feet a ground on which to stumble: geology is also a theme connected to the climate change as well as the political economy of industrial and postindustrial production”.5 Noronha’s manufactured rocks can be conceived of as symptoms of the Capitalocene that come into existence through the capitalist methods used to create environments.6 These rocks become systemic and symbolic bodies that encompass and express the neoliberal political structures that sustain brutality and hierarchize geographies. From this point of view, The Future of Stones dismantles the passive condition of minerals, as they open up to its surrounding space and manifest its problems to become an entity with a voice. These new rocks are no longer lying there, but rather they act as agents and activators of human memory.
But how do they do it? How does their presence, through art, call upon us to discuss and problematize the territory they inhabited and belonged to? How do we capture its expressive/discursive capacity? Roger Caillois encourages us to recognize the transformative role of rocks and what they are capable of accomplishingin terms of their potential to affect the environment and the agents that constitute it.7 This expression, very much in tune with the condition of vitality suggested by Jane Bennett, enables rupture of the inert imagery of minerals and turns them into voices of the territory.8 This responsibility is intrinsically given by the piece’s artistic framework, which serves as an enabler for the rock-artifacts to be constituted as acting subjects on a symbolic level.
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As a methodology, the artist applies what Baptiste Morizot calls the arts of political attention: her practice revisits and problematizes the fragility of ecosystems based on geopolitical aspects and creates new sensitive relationships with the environment.9 She reinvents new possible agents that could be generated spontaneously beyond the artistic sphere if extractive or abusive practices were to continue and, in doing so, she creates other new territories that are but new ways of inhabiting and engaging with the environment.10 The artist invites us to shift our perspective while exposing the physicality of the planetary crisis. She works with the concept of speculative geology as a strategy to create post-human scenarios by considering the resulting mineral conglomerates as fossils that preserve the present for future times. The action proposed by the artist takes a reverse direction: instead of deciphering the history of previous times by means of archaeological methods applied to a given geological or archaeological piece, she herself creates plausible, hopeless artifacts/scenarios for the times to come. These fossil projections, as the artist calls them, are not intended to explain processes or to provide a dating of stratifications, but rather to demonstrate temporal deviations, variable rates of change and abrupt events.11
In the artwork, technology functions as a replacement for time by making it possible to assimilate stratification rates. In this sense, technology is constituted as an actor in itself, as well as a facilitator or perpetuator of these physical interconnections. The artist uses a high-temperature ceramic furnace to turn the collected material into a solid that will not be dissolved away. The heat and pressure applied by this device are replacing the natural history as well as the progressive environmental catastrophes that occur over extended time scales and/or that are “imperceptible” on a human scale. The slow violence12 that usually characterizes these processes of change, especially in territories of the Global South, is accelerated, allowing for immediate visualization.13 In this sense, technology is also present in the artwork as an anthropogenic force: on the one hand, as a catalyst of processes historically conceived on a different scale and responsible for the extractivist methodologies that devastate territories, and on the other hand, but at the same time, as a poetic critical agent that visualizes territorial problems in the present by activating performances of the materials involved. These opposing conceptions are what enable us to think of plural technologies or overlapping technodiversities that de-center the fictitious universalization and univocal character of technology.14 This alternative technodiversity is used to criticize hegemonic, first-worldist, Western-centric technology, and is the tool to enable a Latin American perspective that follows the exploited-exploiter dualism which can be perceived both in the conceptual artistic conception, as well as in the territorial conception manifested in the work.
Robert Smithson, one of the main contributors to the Land Art movement, argued that “[…] instead of seeing technology as extensions of Man, technology […] [can be conceived as an] aggregated and “made of the raw materials of the earth.”15 The condition of being mineralized implies carrying/dragging the mineral memory and therefore its methodologies. Technology is geological and therefore knows how to generate the stratifications present in the artifact-rocks. This becoming techno-mineral is what defines and articulates the discourse in Noronha’s work. The piece also inverts the methodological and conceptual logic of the Land Art movement Smithson belongs to: instead of subjecting the geophysical space to extractivist practices in order to reflect on the territory, fragments of the territory already permeated by extractivism are collected and estheticized to become objects of reflection or new codified territories. The micro scale of The Future of Stonesas opposed to the macro scale of the movement mentioned above, allows for a greater conceptual coherence by not altering the territories involved.
Finally, these esthetic devices presenting peri-human entities that configure worlds through artistic resources can be integrated into the concept of Natureculture proposed by Donna Haraway.16 The manufactured rocks are also natural if we dismantle the modern binomial of nature separated from mankind. All the assembled agents that constitute them are part of an ecosystem formed by climatic events over time as well as by human technologies and material residues of exploitation processes in a reciprocal connection. Matter is permeated with signs of different living and abiotic agents as part of its inhabiting of a space. Human manufacturing is also part of the naturalization of these processes:
Things like trash, construction debris, coal ash, dredged sediments, petroleum contamination, green lawns, decomposing bodies, and rock ballast not only alter the formation of soil but themselves form soil bodies, and in this respect are taxonomically indistinguishable from soil.17
Following this, Parikka revisits the paradox of the natural, referring to the fact that “[t]he soil bodies are paradoxically unnatural natural formations, which will assemble the current afterglow of the industrial world and digital culture into the synthetic geological future.18 In a way, the author tries to naturalize our human actions and the processes of industrialization that have an impact on ecosystems by making a shift to human exceptionalism that implies the distinction of human agency from that of animals.
Throughout the essay, I have used the terms “rock-artifacts” and “manufactured rocks” to refer to Noronha’s pieces. While I am aware that such a differentiation reproduces the problematic of modern dualisms, I nevertheless embraced this contradiction because I was interested in manifesting the narratives and problematics that are aggregated when human agencies intervene in geological processes and, even more so, those involved in artistic constitutions. Here, we might claim that Noronha’s work presents the world as an agglomerate of intertwined scales, materials, agents and superimposed times. The discourses present in The Future of Stones are interwoven in a complex warp of political, ecological and economic relations that have been historically present in Latin American imageries and narratives dating back to colonial and postcolonial processes. These relational fabrics are what give each rock its identity and are reflected in the territorial bodies of the Global South.
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Endnotes
- Serenella Iovino & Serpil Oppermann, Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), x.
- I use the term “co-creations” to refer to those artistic productions created by a human artist in conjunction with non-human entities which constitute them, modify them, determine them and contribute to their development. Further information can be found in Ana Laura Cantera’s “Biopoéticas: convergencias artísticas interespecie”, JAR Journal of Artistic Research, no. 27 (2022), https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/949972/949973.
- Lisa Blackmore & Liliana Gómez. Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art. (London: Routledge, 2020), 1.
- Jussi Parikka, A geology of media (London, University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 46.
- Parrika, A geology of media, 5.
- Capitalocene is the term used by Jason Moore as an alternative to Paul Crutzen’s concept of Anthropocene, to name the era dominated by capital, in which capitalism functions as a world-ecology because of its “(…) way of organizing nature (…) and codifying it in the service of economic growth”. To expand on the term, review his book Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015).
- I use Baruch Spinoza’s term “affect”, which refers to any body’s capacity for action and reaction.
- Jane Bennet, Vibrant matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
- Baptiste Morizot, Maneras de estar vivo: La crisis ecológica global y las políticas de lo salvaje (Madrid: Errata Naturae, 2020), 32.
- Plastic agglomerates could be an example of these asynchronous multi-species agents beyond the artistic sphere.
- Jussi Parikka, A geology of media, 42.
- Rob Nixon, Slow Violence, and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2013).
- Rob Nixon uses the term Slow violence in connection with Environmentalism of the Poor to refer to the different kinds of gradual violence produced by environmental pollution and extractivism that usually occur “out” of human sight for the Global North.
- Yuk Hui, Cosmotechnics: For a Renewed Concept of Technology in the Anthropocene (London: Routledge, 2021).
- Robert Smithson, quoted by Jussi Parikka, A geology of media, p. 5.
- Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
- Seth Denizen, “Three Holes: In the Geological Present”, in Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy, ed. Etienne Turpin (London: Open Humanities Press, 2013), 26-46, 40.
- Jussi Parikka, A geology of media, 110.
Ana Laura Cantera