Thinking With | Macarena Gómez-Barris | The Extractive Zone

Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and scholar of cultural memory. She is author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives which theorizes social life through five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous territories (Duke University Press, 2017). She is author of Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas, published by University of California Press. She is also author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009). She is working on three book projects, Latchkey, a work of fiction, and At the Sea’s Edge, a scholarly book, and a book that rewrites environmental history from the perspective of decolonial movements. Macarena is Director of the Global South Center and Chairperson of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute.

Excerpts of The Extractive Zone & Beyond the Pink Tide

Ignacio Acosta is a Chilean-born, London-based artist and researcher working with photography and film, in places made vulnerable through the exploitation of ecologies by colonial intervention and intensive capitalisation. He works with interconnected research projects that involve extensive fieldwork, investigative analysis, audio-visual documentation and critical writing on sites and materials of symbolic significance. Acosta focuses upon resistance to extractivist industrial impact on valuable natural environments and, through technologies of seeing, he develops work towards the generation of meaningful visual narratives. Over the last ten years, he has devoted to the understanding of sites and landscapes that, although often neglected, are of global significance: places of environmental degradation in South America and northern Europe. Through thorough, investigative and ethical practices, his individual research contributes to vibrant collaborations with artists, historians, political activists and Indigenous Peoples. 

Recent exhibitions include: Archaeology of Sacrifice, Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen, Germany (2020); Tales from the Crust, Arts Catalyst, London, England (2019); Drones y Tambores, Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Santiago, Chile (2019);  Litte ja Goabddá; Ájtte Museum, Jokkmokk, Sweden (2019); Game of Drones, Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen, Germany (2019); Drone Vision, Hasselblad Centre, Göteborg, Sweden (2018); Mapping Domeyko, Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art, Poland (2018); Copper Geographies, National Waterfront Museum, Swansea, England (2017); Traffiking the Earth, MAC, Museo Arte Contemporáneo, Chile (2017). Acosta is part of Traces of Nitrate, a research project based at the University of Brighton developed in collaboration with Art and Design Historian Louise Purbrick and photographer Xavier Ribas, which has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). His publication Copper Geographies (2018) that stems from his practice-based Ph.D and has been published by Editorial RM.

Maarten Vanden Eynde graduated in 2000 from the free media department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam (NL), participated in 2006 in the experimental MSA^ Mountain School of Arts in Los Angeles (US) and finished a post graduate course in 2009 at HISK Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Ghent (BE) where he is a regular guest tutor. Since 2020 he is a PhD candidate at the UiB / University of Bergen in Norway.

His practice is embedded in long term research projects that focus on numerous subjects of social and political relevance such as post-industrialism, capitalism and ecology. His work is situated exactly on the borderline between the past and the future; sometimes looking forward to the future of yesterday, sometimes looking back to the history of tomorrow.

In 2017 he was nominated for the first Belgian Art Prize and won the Public Prize. He is represented by Meessen De Clercq gallery in Brussels since 2009 and is co-founder of the artist initiative Enough Room for Space since 2005.

Currently he is investigating the influence of transatlantic trade of pivotal materials like rubber, oil, ivory, copper, cotton and uranium, on evolution and progress, the creation of nations and other global power structures. The initiated project Triangular Trade traces back the origin of the different materials and follows their (r)evolutionary path as they are processed and transformed into 'world changing wonders’.