Lo que la mina te da, la mina te quita
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Die Mine gibt, die Mine nimmt.
2020
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Exhibition text Galerie Wedding, Berlin.
Curated by Solvej Helweg Ovesen
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The installation „The mine gives, the mine takes“, 2020 by Ana Alenso was co-produced with Galerie Wedding und Urbane Künste Ruhr for Ruhr Ding: Klima, 2021.
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Gold, copper, diamonds and coltan. Resources can be a curse. Mining is an image of the erosion of humanity on an existential level. Ana Alenso’s solo exhibition deals with the connection between the wealth of resources, in this case especially gold, and the longstanding crisis on the ground in Venezuela. Alenso presents a sculptural landscape in which the mechanisms and consequences of mining are revealed as signs of self-destruction and as an anthropocentric modus operandi. The contradictions and uncertainties caused by economic turbulence and the permanent export of resources are translated to the exhibition space aesthetically and haptically in a sculptural „machine“.
Countries like Venezuela are especially affected by the “resource curse”, a term coined in 1993 by Richard Auty, Professor of Economic Geography (Lancaster University) to describe the phenomenon in which the abundance of natural resources paradoxically leads to misery. This only adds to the fact that in the Latin American context, the politics of the extraction of raw materials is formed by a network of powers rooted in its colonial past. Here, deep political, social and ideological wounds coexist.
In the exhibition „The mine gives, the mine takes“, precarious buildings and industrial waste become platforms for discussion and contemplation for a local audience in Berlin. The programme accompanying the exhibition offers an opportunity to explore the problems of mining from a local and a global perspective. In this frame, the artist and the Galerie Wedding team will enter into dialogue with their various collaborators in artistic and ecological research. Among them are members of the activist collective SOS Orinoco, the documentary filmmaker Alexandra Henao and the scientist Anna Dobelmann.
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Fotos: Tomas Eyzaguirre and Ana Alenso
