El capítulo de los áridos (CaCO3)

The chapter of the aggregates (CaCO3) is part of the series of artistic creation entitled Natural capital that reflects on one of the great debates of today’s society: the existing problems in the relations humanity, technology and nature. No one doubts that the great challenges of the 21st century are the depletion of natural resources and the overexploitation of the territory by the hypercapitalist economic system. Natural capital is divided into several chapters, each of which focuses on a raw material as the axis of critical and symbolic reflection on the different cultural landscapes, today, in crisis. The different chapters are formalized as a multidisciplinary artistic installation, composed of audiovisual material, photographs, drawings, 3D digital models, sculptures, archival documents, publications and the different raw materials: salt, rock or wood. At the moment, the first two are in process: The chapter of the sea (NaCl + H2O) and The chapter of the aggregates (CaCO3).

The chapter on aggregates (CaCO3) seeks to point out the surprising technical capacity of the contemporary human being to make huge rocky spaces of millions of years old disappear from the geological map in just a few seconds. Hundreds of mountains exploited for the extraction of raw materials such as limestone, today make up the morphology of our contemporary landscape on a global level. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, there has been a huge demand for arid resources -in our country, especially the Cantábrica Coordillera- generated by industry and civil engineering, as it is an essential raw material for construction of roads, buildings, dams, etc. How do these industries transform the landscape? When or where is the limit of its activity? Is it the only way out?

As a paradignative example of this complex panorama, the audiovisual installation has as its protagonist a small quarry of the Salas Council, in Doriga, Asturias. A familiar landscape for the artist, the village where her family was born, and where she herself has experienced the arrival of the modern development project: quarry exploitation, highway construction and road radial. The aggregate chapter (CaCO3) wants to function as a critical tool for reflection towards the exploitation of the territory; but it is also a tool of emotional restitution, a utopian space where to recover lost space / time or where to review the evolution of events through the fusion of images and sounds from the quarry. A visual and sound palimpsest of the different empty morphologies of the contemporary Astur landscape in conflict, a rural, industrial, urban and natural space in constant transformation in the Anthropocene era.