Drill, baby, drill !

For his second solo exhibition at the gallery, Alejandro León Cannock constitutes the first chapter of a process of research and artistic creation devoted to the relationships between landscape, extractivism, modernity and coloniality. The exhibition brings together a set of pieces from an archival work - iconographic images, cartographies, engravings, legal texts and contemporary documents - rearticulated in visual devices that question the historical and sensitive conditions of our relationship with the earth.

By putting in tension materials separated by several centuries - from the diaries of Christopher Columbus to the satellite images of Google Earth - these works propose a critical archaeology of the modern gaze. They show how the earth gradually ceases to be a living environment and becomes a deposit of resources, thus revealing the persistence of an inaugural gesture of appropriation, division and extraction. Through a plastic work that combines historical documents, textual fragments and contemporary data on the extractive economy, the exhibition constructs visual constellations where the continuities between colonial conquest and globalized capitalism are read. The landscape appears not as a neutral fact, but as an aesthetic and political device, where the structural violence of a history still in progress is inscribed. These works, conceived as visual essays, are part of a larger investigation developed within the framework of a research and creation grant from the Institute for Photography of Lille.