Writer: Angelica Arbelaez
Essay Mentor: Max Pearl
This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Agua entre la metalurgia (Water in between metallurgy) by Carolina Aranibar-Fernández, with mentorship from Alana Hernandez and on view at CUE Art Foundation from January 19 – March 11, 2023. The text was commissioned as part of CUE’s Art Critic Mentorship Program, and is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online here.
Las memorias de las huellas (The memories of thumbprints), 2022. Photo: David Michael Cortes.
In the exhibition Agua entre la metalurgia (Water in between metallurgy), Bolivian artist Carolina Aranibar-Fernández considers the scale and impact of the global mining industry through poetic and labor-intensive material gestures. Engaging primarily with textiles and copper, the artist uses embroidery and printmaking to create maps and aerial topographies that visualize typically unseen mining-related activities. The extraction of geological matter from the earth, its trade, and its eventual consumption have generated a circuit of capitalistic interest that relies on the availability of natural resources and human labor—primarily from Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. Aranibar-Fernández uses cartography not only to give these dynamics a visual and tangible form, but also as an instructive tool to acknowledge the parallel strain placed on human and terrestrial bodies.
The artist’s insights into mining are based on rigorous studies of its history, economy, and politics. Her exploration began with Cerro Rico, the infamous mountain in the city of Potosí, Bolivia that became a lucrative silver mine for the Spanish Empire in the 16th century. The “mountain that eats men,” as it’s colloquially referred to, has been continually mined for centuries, resulting in incalculable human loss and irreversible ecological damage. [1] Through site visits, archival research, and the first-hand accounts of local mine workers, Aranibar-Fernández began to see Cerro Rico as a blueprint for modern mining. This led her to see connections with colonial and industrial histories in other parts of the world, including the American Southwest and Indonesia, both of which she explores in this exhibition.
Agua entre la metalurgia features six bodies of work that unmask the mining industry’s neocolonial role as an agent of ecological disaster. In lieu of a didactic message, however, the artist weaves these ideas into beautiful, vibrant, and delicate works of art. They carry a softness which is antithetical to the violence and destruction that are characteristic of the practices and histories to which they refer. The artist purposefully cultivates this tension as a way to draw viewers in and encourage conversations on a topic they might otherwise cast aside. As a result, the works are sites where a sobering awareness of our world’s ills can be met with empathy and compassion.
Water Labor, 2019-2021. Photo: David Michael Cortes.
Cartographic Techniques
Water Labor (2019-21) depicts a hand-embroidered world map featuring dense clusters of red and green sequins. These small embellishments represent the positions, routes, and movements of shipping containers and bulk carriers transporting commodities across the globe. For this work, Aranibar-Fernández consulted the website MarineTraffic to see live coverage of international maritime activity. [2] Using a combination of satellite imagery and information from coastal AIS receiving stations, MarineTraffic offers an impressive view of the cargo ships, tankers, pleasure crafts, and commercial fishing boats actively moving throughout the world.
The animated swarm of sequins in Water Labor takes on a parasitic character, overwhelming and infiltrating the withering continents rendered in a dark velvet. They also illustrate the relatively unseen movements of raw materials from their sites of extraction to succeeding sites of trade and consumption. Aranibar-Fernández adopts the coherent design strategies of data visualization in order to track, map, and make sense of this dizzying concentration of activity and the scale at which it operates. While the word “labor” in the work’s title undoubtedly refers to the human and machine work that drives the industry, it’s also reflected in the painstakingly hand-embroidered ocean that serves as the work’s background.
In Silver Labor (2019-21), the artist uses mapping techniques to trace the paths of silver around the world, but with a more abstract approach. By framing the striking silver routes against a sea of dark blue velvet fabric, Aranibar-Fernández removes any obvious representational references to maps. The formal simplicity of this line work invites other associations: a network of tunnels in a mine, the branches on a tree, or veins in a body. It suggests that extractivism continues even after the unearthing: silver changes hands many times as it makes its way from the miner who collected it to our tableware, jewelry, and mirrors. In Silver Labor, mapping is both a tool for viewers to locate themselves along this supply chain and a way of showing connections between bodies across vast distances.
Silver Labor, 2019-2021. Photo: David Michael Cortes.
Registering the Unseen
For this exhibition, Aranibar-Fernández produced two new works featuring fabric flowers that were individually cut from women’s shawls and then sewn together by hand onto diaphanous pieces of tulle. Together, these flowers are used to create maps of specific countries and different regions throughout the world. The installation Los testimonios de las flores (The testimonies of flowers) (2022) consists of two large layers of the aforementioned flower maps: the first is a positive image depicting countries in Central and South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia; the second is a negative image of those same regions. The top and bottom edges of each component are bordered by copper rods that are used to suspend the work from the ceiling. The layers are positioned four feet away from each other, allowing visitors to walk between them. When standing in front of the work, at a distance, the two maps almost become a single vibrant bed of flowers.
As the title suggests, Los testimonios de las flores is a testimony, a presentation of evidence. Historically, many of the countries depicted in this work have been subject to extraction, plunder, and oppression through colonization—mainly at the hands of the countries not represented. The artist refers to these countries collectively as the Global South, a concept that’s been criticized for omitting certain geopolitical subtleties. But when discussing the work, she asserts the term’s usefulness as a way of appreciating the colonial histories these countries share. “These are the places that are constantly sought out for their resources, but don’t benefit economically,” she said. [3]
The Cartografia (Cartography) series (2022) includes nine individual flower maps portraying the following locations: Antofagasta, Chile; Gobi Desert, Mongolia; Kabwe, Zambia; Nevada, USA; Papua, Indonesia; Para, Brazil; Sakha, Russia; Sewell, Chile; and Utah, USA. Each of these places is also home to various open-pit copper, lithium, and silver mines. As in Los testimonios de las flores, the maps are also made of individually cut fabric flowers that are hand sewn on delicate sheets of white tulle. For each Cartografia, Aranibar-Fernández has added an additional layer of tulle with a nearly imperceptible linocut print of the topography of each open-pit mine seen from above. Here, the relationship of presence and absence is expressed again. The sections of land are decorative, captivating, and become the central focus of the work, but the actual effects of the activity imposed on them are veiled, obscured, and unseen. In this work, the geological impact of these activities is as conspicuous as the shroud of obfuscation that keeps the public from finding out.
Cartografías (Cartographies), 2022. Photos: David Michael Cortes.
Cicatriz (Scar) I, II, II, 2021-2022. Photo: David Michael Cortes.
Parallel Actions
While living in Phoenix, AZ, Aranibar-Fernández began researching the Arizona-based mining company Freeport-McMoRan, owner of some of the world’s largest copper and gold mines. Cicatriz (Scar) I, II, and III (2021-22) are linocut prints on cotton paper that were made in response to the artist’s findings. Each print is an aerial view of three different open-pit mines operated by Freeport-McMoRan located in Chile, Indonesia, and Peru. When the artist produced the prints, she scattered copper powder on top of the ink while it was still wet to create an iridescent effect. Open-pit mines are created using surface mining methods to extract rock, minerals, or metals from the earth. The results of such activity are literally and metaphorically profound. They are colossal cavities in the earth that are organized by levels, similar to benches in an arena, as miners descend deeper into the ground. In each Cicatriz, the artist intentionally creates a parallel between the excavation of the earth and the carving that is necessary to manipulate the linoleum surface.
In Las memorias de las huellas (The memories of thumbprints) (2022), sixty-one copper plates that are etched with acid hang from the ceiling in alternating heights to echo the various levels of an open-pit mine. On each plate is an aerial topography of a single mine on one side and the GPS coordinates of that specific site on the other. The line work seen in the topographic drawings is serpentine, forming loose concentric circles. When seen from above, these drawings bear a resemblance to gashes, fingerprints, or the rings of a tree trunk. The artist welcomes the inclination to anthropomorphize these forms and draw parallels to the natural world. In her estimation, it keeps the work grounded in a corporeal reality that engenders a more visceral response to what mining does to the earth. It encourages the question: could these terrestrial wounds be my own?
In addition to the numerous bodily parallels one can project onto open-pit mines, their contours and their visual logic also emulate ripples, a metaphor that gets at the conceptual heart of Agua entre la metalurgia. Small waves turn into larger ones as they stretch far beyond their point of origin, mirroring the flow of people and things as they pass through processes of extraction, trade, and consumption. In the hands of Aranibar-Fernández, maps are useful for visualizing and tracking these patterns, but more so, they’re tools for understanding the inner workings of power in visceral, corporeal terms. Though the effects of these cycles may feel distant, the artist insists that they’re much closer than we know.
Installation view of Agua entre la metalurgia, 2023. Photo: David Michael Cortes.
Endnotes
[1] Forero, Juan. “Bolivia's Cerro Rico: The Mountain That Eats Men.” NPR. September 25, 2012.
[https://www.npr.org/2012/09/25/161752820/bolivias-cerro-rico-the-mountain-that-eats-men]
[2] MarineTraffic [https://www.marinetraffic.com]
[3] Conversation with the artist on December 28, 2022
About the Writer
Angelica Arbelaez is an independent curator and researcher from Miami, Florida. Currently, she is the inaugural Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She was previously the Programs Manager at Oolite Arts, and the Communications and Events Manager at Locust Projects. She holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and a BA in Art History from Florida International University.
About the Writing Mentor
Max Pearl is a writer and translator based between the US and Mexico.
About the Art Critic Mentorship Program
This text was written as part of the Art Critic Mentorship Program, a partnership between CUE and the AICA-USA (the US section of International Association of Art Critics). The program pairs emerging writers with art critic mentors to produce original essays about the work of artists exhibiting at CUE. Learn more about the program here. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior written consent from the author.