An Archive of Evidence
Solo exhibition
at Hå Gamle Prestegård , Norway
http://www.hagamleprestegard.no/
Photography by Oddbjørn Erland Aarstad
Exhibition period
November 12th 2022 - January 15th 2023
Knowing that only 9% of the global construction waste is recycled and seeing that large parts of the waste is sent to ex-colonies, “Deep Wounds” seeks to contribute to open up the discussion about the expressive potential of waste to rearranging the whole narrative, and as Haraway noted, “reorganising the narrative field by telling another version” is a vital process to create new meanings. The series embodies therefore the dialects of ruins between absence and presence, construction and destruction, visible and invisible to pay attention to artificial landscapes being created with the debris of mining activities which seem to ask us to forget the environmental destruction caused by the black gold and metals industries. These sculptures in the form of totems (some) at human scale intend to reveal the unseen and address the ignored. Its individual and architectural presence can be seen as a memorial for those communities affected by colonial exploitation.
The colour palette draws from different metals and oil hues and some of the sculptures’ shiny and appealing surfaces are a reminder of these natural resources as both seductive and destructive. The sculptures are built in a variety of materials – wood, metal and ceramic waste composite.
By Marisa Ferreira, August 2022
The exhibition “An Archive of Evidence” looks at the social, political and economical dimensions of
extractivism, its impact on bodies and matter, with an emphasis on the methods and technologies that
allow us to extract the ore that will then be transformed into our daily commodities. The exhibition
features a fictional text, photography, objects and the sculpture series “Deep Wounds” that resulted
from a walking journey to the Barroso Mining site, the largest lithium reserve in Europe located in
northern Portugal.
For the past fifteen months, I have been looking at archival and patent images from engineering designs of drilling jars. This process has resulted in a series of work titled “Deep Wounds“. “Deep Wounds” consists of vertical sculptures cast in a composite of construction and mining waste with the help of CNC milling technology. They turn drilling jars and mining rotors into sculpture objects (with parts being accurate copies of real mining tools, other fictional) to draw attention to the relationship between capitalism and the ecological crisis, architecture and nature. The works examines how extractive activities and global trade of natural resources shape our landscape and impact life on the planet, while at the same time each individual sculpture becomes a witness of these activities of exploitation that create new layers on the Earth’s geological crust. The body of work seeks to purpose waste as raw material for contemporary art practices and discuss themes of extractivism, matter and urban regeneration.
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Photography by
Oddbjørn Erland Aarstad
For the past fifteen months, I have been looking at archival and patent images from engineering designs of drilling jars. This process has resulted in a series of work titled “Deep Wounds“. “Deep Wounds” consists of vertical sculptures cast in a composite of construction and mining waste with the help of CNC milling technology. They turn drilling jars and mining rotors into sculpture objects (with parts being accurate copies of real mining tools, other fictional) to draw attention to the relationship between capitalism and the ecological crisis, architecture and nature. The works examines how extractive activities and global trade of natural resources shape our landscape and impact life on the planet, while at the same time each individual sculpture becomes a witness of these activities of exploitation that create new layers on the Earth’s geological crust. The body of work seeks to purpose waste as raw material for contemporary art practices and discuss themes of extractivism, matter and urban regeneration.
