Statement
The main body of my work is based on landscape studies, particularly areas in which mineral resources are exploited. I am interested especially in the topographic and social changes connected with the dismantling of a landscape.
I have lived eight years of my early life in Chuquicamata – the biggest open-pit copper mine in the world—located in the middle of the Atacama Desert, in the north of Chile. When, due to environmental contamination and rising fuel costs, this settlement was due to be buried, I returned to document the process using video and photography. The resettlement of the former inhabitants, the change of the landscape and the perceptible consequences for the environment were some of the subjects in which I could work from the material originated, creating a series of videos, photographs and installations which I have presented in different exhibitions in Chile.
Minerals, as raw materials, having the condition of being undifferentiated “evernew” products of massive consumption, are both local and global cultural commodities, simultaneously. What I could analyze from this work is how minerals—in this case, copper—affect not only a local environment and society, but also the global economy. How a national benefit depends also on global rates determined by an ideology of newness that establishes a network of connectivity between those industrialized landscapes.
After moving to Berlin in 2007, I have shifted my focus not to copper anymore, but to coal. The historical context of coal has interested me during the last three years, on the one hand, as the originally most important energy source in Germany, and on the other, the mineral materiality as object of my works.
Coal is an absolutely black material, however, it creates light. This contrast is present in my current work aesthetically: black and white; presence and absence of light.
Michelle-Marie Letelier