The challenge posed by art in its encounter with natural landscape has evolved astonishingly in recent times. Our awareness of a persistent crisis that spreads like a thick stain between spaces and species is accompanied by a dark vision of the territories ravaged by the human productive machine that the capitalist system has made grow. In this scenario of altered balances, of incessant disappearances, the idea of this book is presented as a travel blog through the history of the natural territory of Chile.
Through the works of 36 artists and collectives, Earthworks takes up the exploration begun in the exhibition of the same name that raised a series of territorial experiences conveniently recorded and transferred to the National Museum of Fine Arts (Santiago). In this volume, explorations to remote and nearby locations are diversified. Like the journey of a naturalist in the digital age, the recovery of these marks and images allow us to guess a series of signs spread over deserts, mountains, forests and rivers, perhaps like a writing that conjures up, for a single moment, the abuses of our own predation. The beauty of these works vibrates with the material of a landscape in continuous transformation.
The book collects the projects of artists such as Julen Birke, Marcela Correa, Hamish Fulton, Alfredo Jaar, Cecilia Vicuna or Raul Zurita; and collectives as Ciudad Abierta and Colectivo Impermanentes, among others.
