Following questions and understandings arising from our explorations of the wider connections and perspectives we might perform – through meetings with the material stuff of the things and places we find ourselves working with; we have come to recognise the importance that the phrase piles and holes has been accumulating for Mike Brookes and I.
For us, piles and holes begins to name an imagining and conceptual model of the processes of extraction and accumulation that shape our use and experience of the landscapes we have been trying to explore. Allowing the expanding resource requirements embodied by electric vehicles, for example, and the similarly expanding copper and lithium mining operations we visited in Chile in 2019, to be tangibly connected in the same object and imagining – across borders, times, scales, and hierarchies. While also allowing us to root the works and experiences that emerge from those recognitions in real and direct engagements with the physical matter and actualities of things – such as a family second-hand car or a late-renaissance religious painting.
The following audio, recorded in Spanish, seeks to articulate some of the evolving and ambivalent collection of perceptions, thoughts and possibilities open by this simple pairing. What began as a playful understatement, of potentially spiralling complexities, has proved itself to be a functional meeting and anchor point for a number of related threads of thought.*
This recording was part of my contribution into the XXXII International Colloquium ‘Mutualidades’ organised by 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos, held in January 2022. Some of these thoughts can be found in English, within Mike Brookes’ intervention into the What is material thinking? seminar series, organised by the Centre for Material Thinking in March 2022.
* The audio combines ideas, reflections, quotes and stories from Sarah Ahmed, Mike Brookes, Ryan Dewey, Mark Fisher, Vanessa Gilbert, John Gilbey, Henri Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, Luciana Pereryra, the Canadian collective SpiderWebShow, Michael Taussig, Anna L. Tsing, Kathryn Yusoff and myself.