Echoing Vinciane Despret’s book title What would animals say if we asked the right questions? (2016), this essay explores what rocks and inorganic matter might express, particularly within the extractivist context in South America.1 To delve into this subject, we must consider inorganic situated material existences, as conceptualized by Emanuele Coccia’s “point of life”.2 Coccia notes that all knowledge is “nothing but a point of life [vie] (and not just a point of view [vue])”, stressing that asking exclusively to humankind what it means to be in the world provides a very partial image of the cosmos.3 While Coccia focuses on the “living” existences, specifically on plants as mediators, I would like to ask the “non-living” what being in the world means. I focus on Cerro Rico in Potosí, Bolivia, a historically significant mountain that was an epicenter of silver mining and wealth during the Spanish colonial period, having played a pivotal role in the development of modern capitalism.4 Through a dialogue with cinematic works like The Cross and the Silver (2010) by Harun Farocki, Bocamina (2018) by Miguel Hilari, and Look Closely at the Mountains (2018) by Ana Vaz, I suggest the need to combine prevailing aerial depictions of extractivist practices and sites with an underground thinking and inhuman intimacy, enabling an engagement with geological rhythms beyond extractivism and progress paradigms.
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The inhuman as mediator, film as mediation
The Cross and the Silver (17’30) is a film commissioned by the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and produced for the 2010 Principio Potosí ¿Cómo podemos cantar el canto del Señor en tierra ajena? exhibition [Principio Potosí. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?].5 It is composed of two videos contained in a single screen divided vertically into two equal parts, one of them dealing with the eighteenth-century painting Descripción del Cerro Rico e Imperial Villa de Potosí [Description of the Cerro Rico and the Imperial City of Potosí] (oil on canvas, 262 × 181 cm) by Gaspar Miguel de Berrío, currently exhibited in the Charcas Colonial Museum of the San Francisco Xavier University in Sucre, Bolivia. The other part shows the city of Potosí using footage shot by Farocki in the same place with his small team in 2010. The film was screened on the back wall where the original painting was exhibited.
Bocamina (22’02), in turn, is a film commissioned by the National Mint of Bolivia. Miguel Hilari was attending a workshop with other filmmakers who were invited by the newly appointed director of the institution to make a film about the museum or the city. Hilari chose to make a film that engaged in a dialogue with images from the museum, namely Berrío’s painting, and other canvas, and black and white photographs of miners. The filmmaker brought these images to a school located in a mining district of the city of Potosí and filmed the students’ reactions and comments to the images.
Figure 1. Descripción del Cerro Rico e Imperial Villa de Potosí, Gaspar Miguel de Berrío (1758), Still from Bocamina (Miguel Hilari, 2018)
The image above (Figure 1) shows the painting by Gaspar Miguel de Berrío, filmed by both Farocki and Hilari, although with significant differences, as we will see. In the style of cartography, the canvas portrays a bird’s-eye view of the city of Potosí, Cerro Rico and Cerro Chico, while the Andes recede in the background. The painting matches a traditional understanding and depiction of landscape, in which the point of view is that of an invisible and incorporeal subject that observes, from a distance, an objective world that must be controlled, classified, evaluated and capitalized. Entitling the painting “Description” reveals its underlying documental longing and presumes it to be a truthful representation of the city and mountains. Albeit seeking to pass itself off as universal, the painting creates a particular image of the world and a specific stance. Suffice to say, the workers appear smaller than the non-workers. Moreover, the painting barely addresses the violence of colonization, to which Farocki draws attention in his film.
Farocki never shows the entire painting in The Cross and the Silver, instead he isolates some parts of it through zooming. We could say that this happens because the painting is on the back wall where the film is being screened. Nevertheless, we can understand these options as Farocki’s gesture of dissociating himself from a total and totalitarian perspective that characterizes not only Berrío’s canvas, but also maps and cartographies. The German filmmaker opts for a fragmentary perspective, addressing subjects such as the indigenous Diego Huallpa’s discovery of silver, the organization and exploitation of labor and its structures, what images show and hide, matters of religion, and other topics. Similarly to other works by Farocki, The Cross and the Silver offers an overall critical perspective on colonialism and capitalism. At the beginning of the film, we see the top of Cerro Rico, while the voiceover states: “On top of the mountain, the cross. Inside the mountain, the silver. Spanish conquerors brought the cross and collected the silver. After that, they almost completely exterminated the indigenous population.” The film, however, is not without its colonial contradictions, which is worth developing in the future. For example, the voiceover speaks a Castilian variant of Spanish, choosing the variant language of the colonizer instead of the Bolivian or other South American Spanish variants. The film ends with the following statement, to which I am coming back at the end of this essay:
Today archaeology can determine, through the remains of those who perished a long time ago, if they were fed enough or if they were in need, after hundreds of years. In the same way, new procedures are needed for the investigation of paintings.
Hilari, on the other hand, begins his movie by showing the painting in its entirety, which he first learned about in Farocki’s film. This is symptomatic of how the European perspective on South America may impose itself as an intermediary grid of knowledge. There is a fragment of Bocamina where this intermediation becomes explicit (Fragment 1). Looking at a replica of Berrío’s painting, the students ask each other where their homes are or point out the location of the central square and the school. In doing so, an image from the past mediates their present lives. Not all of them can understand that they are looking at an old image, from the time they were “in their mother’s womb”, as one of the children notes. It is as if this painting intermediated the understanding that they have of themselves and their placement, as if they could see themselves through the intermediation of a colonial grid that persists nowadays. Thus, their understanding of the world is mediated by a set of “surviving images” actualized in their present gaze.6 Although differently, both Hilari and Farocki stage a set of encounters between multiple temporal and spatial scales.
The aerial perspective that prevails in Berrío’s painting (and Hilari’s portrait) is not unusual when depicting mines and their dynamics. Images created from high-level perspectives (collected by drones, elevated platforms, or satellites) are often used as strategies to address, make visible, and create awareness of extractivism sites and practices. This applies not only to contemporary artworks, but also to theorizations that are informed by a critical standpoint. Timothy Morton, for instance, states that ecological thought begins with seeing the Earth from space.7 Several contemporary artists create artworks from an aerial perspective. Drawing on Edward Burtynsky’s photographic work and in dialogue with the theorizations by Elizabeth Povinelli, Jens Andermann calls it the “mirador del fin del mundo.”8 An example of the uses of the aerial perspective is the artwork “LAND I. In progress” (2012) by Marcela Magno. Another example would be “Ó Minas Gerais | My Land our Landscape #21”, part of the “Colonial Veins” series (2019) by artist Júlia Pontés. Unlike Berrío’s painting and other satellite representations, and despite their differences, these artworks do not seek to make the world visually accessible, sharp, measurable and controllable, but to create images characterized by ambiguity, thus fostering a problematization of the relations with the more-than-human worlds beyond anthropocentric and extractive perspectives. Notwithstanding the blatant distances between Berrío’s painting and these contemporary visual forms, there is something that traverses them: an aerial perspective.
Figures 2 and 3. Drawing of the City of Potosí (17th Century) on the left and Still from Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (Harun Farocki, 1989)
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The aerial perspective and the unheard witnesses
The first aerial photograph was taken in 1858 by the French photographer and balloonist Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (aka Nadar) from a tethered hot-air balloon. In addition to balloons, cameras were also coupled to rockets, pigeons and kites. In 1898, the Lumière brothers had already made a film from a dirigible balloon.9 Throughout World War I, aerial photographic surveys allowed for the recognition of enemy areas and continued to be perfected over the years. During World War II, cameras were attached to the bomber planes. Farocki addresses aerial photographs of the Auschwitz Camp in the essay “Reality Would Have to Begin”.10 He states that the first image taken by the Allies of the concentration camp at Auschwitz was shot on April 4, 1944, by American planes that had taken off from Italy, heading towards targets in Silesia, the factories for extracting gasoline from coal, and another of synthetic rubber production. While approaching the I.G. Farben complex, Farocki continues, an airman turns on the camera and takes a series of twenty-two aerial photographs. Three of these pictures also captured the “main camp” located in the vicinity of the industrial plants. The images arrived at the center for aerial photography analysis in England, and the analysis of these images allowed for the identification of the industrial complexes, the state of their construction, the degree of their destruction, and other details. After 1945, Allied airplanes flew over Auschwitz and captured the camps in photographs. However, they were never mentioned in any report. The analyst had no instructions to look for the camps, and therefore did not find them, concludes Farocki. Only thirty-three years after the pictures were taken, two agents from the Central Intelligence Agency returned to the aerial photographs of Auschwitz and were then able to see what had always been there. From these events, Farocki concluded the following:
[W]e can only recognize in these images what others have already testified to, eyewitnesses who were physically present at the site. […] There is an interplay between image and text in the writing of history: texts that should make the images accessible, and images that should make the texts imaginable.11
We may ask what cannot be seen in the images we are currently looking at, concerning extractivist sites and practices. Which witnesses are not being heard, thus enabling us to see what is already there? Which texts are not being taken into account, thus preventing the images from being accessible? We may simultaneously need new witnesses and texts that allow us to see what is already there. What I propose is that the witness not being heard, and therefore enabling us to see something that we have already looked at, is the Cerro Rico de Potosí, the mountain itself, the inhuman, and their (geo)texts. We may need to combine our ways of seeing from above with subterranean ones, as Hilari does in his film (Fragment 2). Underground thinking offers a mode of thinking like and with Cerro Rico. The “in” in inhuman may be understood not as the negation of humanity, but as in-organic, in-side, and in-timacy, reclaiming an embodied engagement with the array of more-than-human worlds and an inhuman intimacy.12 More than a groundbreaking approach, we need an “undomesticated ground”13 and an intimate regime of attention that moves between the multiplicities of time spaces of the mountain, involving the entire body, and not just vision.
As mentioned before, Bocamina brings a set of images from the National Mint of Bolivia to the student’s attention, notably black and white portraits of miners, and replicas of paintings of the city. The film also creates its own cinematic portraits that may be called upon in the future, especially of miners at the entrance to the mine, at bocamina, literally, “the mouth of the mine”. After filming the miners, Hilari films Cerro Rico using the exact same framing, focus, plan duration, and medium close-up. This straightaway creates a visual parallel between the faces of the miners and the top of the mountain (Fragment 3). Hilari creates a portrait of this mineral witness and inquires into its expression and texts.
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The mine as a dark room and cinema as desedimentation
Ana Vaz’s film Look Closely at the Mountains (30’51) also points back to the “underground” thinking. The director places us inside the mountain, looking up at the sky, although for a moment it seems that we might also be looking down a well, where the sky had fallen (Figure 4).14 The film addresses extractivism in southern Brazil and northern France, drawing a parallel between the ongoing mining activities in Minas Gerais and the ceased extractions in Nord-Pas-de-Calais. The end of extractivist practices in the case of France then resulted in the emergence of forms of biodiversity which the film closely follows through the work by a team of researchers. Look Closely at the Mountains intersects narratives of “colonial past and prehistory, mining and land use, sky and clouds”, deploying a cinematographic language that “loosens the binaries between human and geological, animal and people, macro and micro, planetary and cosmic.”15 Cinematic techniques, such as zooming and traveling, appear as cinematic ways to create alternative relations with the worlds within the World that do not sustain the anthropocentric logic that qualifies Nature as a resource and landscape as something inert. Consequently, cinema appears not just as a way of registering those relations, but also as part of them, and as a means to critically enhance them. It contributes to changing the ways of thinking and imagining geologic relations, towards non-extractive ways that favor the emergence of situated perceptions of experience.16
Figure 4. Stills from Look Closely at the Mountains (Ana Vaz, 2018)
Like Farocki, although in different ways, Vaz establishes links between cinema and archaeological modes of knowing, with cinema appearing as a patient and insistent gesture of desedimentation17 of the layers of time and meaning fossilized in both landscapes and images. In an interview about The Age of Stone (2013), a previous film by Vaz also addressing mining and extractive practices, the filmmaker wonders:
Could we talk about underground images? About a camera that digs up images? So that they become evidence of what is already there. […] That is why, I think, there are many strata of images in my films, like when you look at a mountain. For me, images and strata are like the sun and the moon, a feverish rotation of light and darkness.18
Archaeology and cinema, minerals and images, desedimentation processes and geowriting19 intersect in the works of Farocki, Hilari and Vaz. It is also significant that both Vaz and Hilari address the light-obscurity games, staging them through the play between the dark mine and the helmet lights which both the miners in Cerro Rico and Minas Gerais and the researchers in Nord-Pas-de-Calais use. Bocamina further addresses the mentioned interplay by depicting sparks of explosions inside the mine. These games of light-darkness once more highlight the possible affinities between cinema and the mine. In the “dark room” that may be the mine, what is being projected and developed?
From inside the mountain, amidst obscurity punctuated by fleeting lights, we can also see ourselves not seeing, i.e., our own vision being obstructed. We witness the medium of (non)vision, the camera itself, unable to see. This directs our attention toward the materiality of the medium, the camera, and of cinema. Since the beginning of its theorizations, cinema has been envisioned as a medium that enables unprecedented audio visualization and relationships between humans and non-humans. Béla Balázs anticipated cinema to be capable of revealing new, hitherto hidden worlds, including more-than-human perceptual worlds, allowing access to the concealed forces of life. For Jean Epstein, one of the greatest powers of cinema dwells in the ability to reveal inhuman existences; for Maya Deren, it can reveal the non-human world as an active creative force; and for Germaine Dulac, in cinema inhabits the faculty to reveal the world of non-human agency.
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In their materiality, moving images are inherently tied to the material geology of the earth, and they are bound to the earth through their reliance on minerals, metals and chemicals extracted from the ground.20 Cinema is therefore a medium with a special affinity with geology that involves creative practices that stage the encounters of the human, the more-than-human and the technological as co-creators of film artifact, the world and the future as such.21 Despite film being a technology of European modernity, having contributed to the production and reinforcement of the anthropocentric and extractivist paradigms, it simultaneously presents itself as a fundamental field for its questioning. There is no coincidence that Farocki chooses the cinematic medium to ask about the new procedures needed for the investigation of images, comparing it with an archaeological tool. In The Cross and the Silver, Farocki asks about the new procedures whilefilming and through the gesture of filming. That is because cinema itself may offer a partial answer to the issues addressed by Farocki and staged both by Vaz and Hilari. The cinematic dispositif and its creative practices allied with the underground thinking and inhuman intimacy may hold the key to speculating about the right questions to ask rocks and to imagine relations to geological rhythms that do not sustain the extractive and anthropocentric logics. Moving images thus appear as an inevitable medium to listen to the answers of inorganic matter if at least we persist in speculating about the right questions.
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This essay was written with financial support from FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia – Portugal), reference FCT UIDB/05021/2020, under the auspices of the research unit ICNOVA.
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Endnotes
- Vinciane Despret, What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2016).
- Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019).
- Ibid., 38.
- Horacio Machado Aráoz, Potosí, el origen: Genealogía de la minería contemporánea (Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala, 2018).
- Alice Creischer, Max Jorge Hinderer & Andreas Siekmann (Eds.), Principio Potosí ¿Cómo podemos cantar el canto del Señor en tierra ajena? (Berlin/ Madrid: Haus der Kulturen der Welt & Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2010).
- A notion by Aby Warburg. See Georges Didi-Huberman, The surviving Image. Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2016).
- Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge/ London: Harvard University Press, 2010), 14.
- Jens Andermann, “Despaisamiento, inmundo, comunidades emergentes”, Corpus Archivos virtuales de la alteridad americana, vol. 8, no. 2 (2018).
- Teresa Castro, “O Impulso Cartográfico do cinema”, In Ana Francisca de Azevedo, Rosa Cerarols Ramirez & Wenceslao Machado de Oliveira Jr (Eds.), Intervalo II: Entre Geografias e Cinemas (Guimarães: Universidade do Minho, 2015), 23-39.
- Harun Farocki, “Reality Would Have to Begin” in Susanne Gaensheimer, Nicolaus Schafhausen (Eds.), Nachdruck / Imprint. Texte / Writings(Berlin/ New York: Sternberg Press, 2001), 186-213.
- Ibid.
- In this formulation, I draw on Jeffrey Cohen’s proposition of geophilia. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: an ecology of the inhuman(Minneapolis/ London: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
- Stacy Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2000), 10.
- As already happened and is about to happen again, according to the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa. See Davi Kopenawa & Bruce Albert, The falling sky. Words of a Yanomami shaman (Cambridge/ London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013).
- Oksana Chefranova, “After Nature: The Expanded Landscapes of Ana Mendieta and Ana Vaz”, Cinéma & Cia, Vol. XX, no 34 (2020), 45-59.
- As proposed by Azucena Castro & Luis Prádanos and Kathryn Yusoff. See Azucena Castro & Luis Prádanos, “Retos estéticos del postdesarrollo. Imaginarios no extractivos y futuros postfósiles en medios culturales andinos” In Gesine Müller & Benjamin Loy (Eds.), Post-Global Aesthetics. 21st Century Latin American Literatures and Cultures (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023); Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
- Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
- Claire Allouche & Ana Vaz, “Au bord de Brasília, une archéologie cinématique. Dialogue avec Ana Vaz – Claire Allouche et Ana Vaz”, La Furia Umana, no. 43 (2022). Original in French (my translation): “Est-ce qu’on pourrait parler des images sous-terraines? Que la caméra va déterrer des images? Pour que les images deviennent les évidences de ce qui est déjà là. […] C’est pour cela, je crois, qu’il y a beaucoup de couches d’images dans mes films, comme quand on regarde une montagne. Pour moi, les images et les strates sont comme le soleil et la lune, une rotation fébrile de clarté et d’obscurité.”
- Cristina Rivera Garza, Escrituras Geológicas (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2022).
- Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Sean Cubitt, Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies (Durham/ London: Duke University Press, 2017).
- Sasha Litvintseva, Geological Filmmaking (London: Open Humanities Press, 2022).
Salomé Lopes Coelho