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Periferias: Muirapiranga-Coipasa

Installation

back projection video loop, 12,44min
chair made of brasil wood, 
Bolivia/Brazil 2015


    The Installation tries to establish a dialogue between materials that characterize South America as a space of exploitation and exportations of its natural resources.
For this the visitors are invited to sit in a chair made of brazil wood which has been the first material to be exported from South america in great quantities during the portugese colonization. It hols a strong identificatory value for the Brasil, since the countrys name derives from this wood.

    The video loop shows the work of salt miners from the Coipasa Salt desert of Bolivia. This place is on eof the two south american salt deserts where 80% of the worlds lithium reserves can be found. Therefore this region holds enormous economic potential for the future since lithium is the main component for electric battery production.





    The form of the chair is a reproduction of a typical monobloc plastic chair that can be found everywhere in the world. By using this recognizable form, the work also investigates the visual ideologies of our worldwide economic system represented in the most usual, daily used objects.

    The Title also hints to the importance of peripheric econmic regions that are of existential necessity to its econimic centers. It also contextualizes South America as an essential economic promoter, both historically and for the future since its assumed that the influx of capital (silver, gold, brasil-wood) from South America to Europe during the colonization, iniciated an economic development that led to the worlds current global capitalistic economic structure. 

    The work asks the visitor to enter into an investigation on the identity of essential peripheral regions within a globalized economic system, by creating the possibility to sensually experience and relate to the materials that are central to this characterization.
© Janusch Ertler 2022