01. Metalism y El efecto POTOSI
Conjecture - The Slow Carcinization of the Landscape
Let's imagine a hypothetical observer from another galactic system, casually contemplating our current planetary landscape, seeking to understand it. They might unpretentiously suggest that much of the land directly impacted by human action converges, in one way or another, towards low-syntropy structures. That is, they become a kind of mundane, homogenized, and de-characterized panorama, showing a decrease in the complexity and organization of natural actors, which in turn reduces the ecosystem's available resources and energy. If we then add another idea from evolutionary biology to this mix – carcinization, the evolutionary convergence where some crustaceans from distinct families evolve into a crab-like form – we get a curious conceptual junction of perspectives from the biological field to physical space. In other words, landscapes and scenarios, despite disparate forms and origins, converge toward a singular direction.
While in biology, carcinization is an efficient evolutionary adaptation for specific environments, in our case, the landscape under human action represents the metamorphosis of highly biodiverse environments into a monocultural tableau. This is efficient for production but inherently simplified, vulnerable and, certainly, dependent on pesticides, conservation efforts, cleanup, et cetera. This historical trajectory shapes up as a kind of "degradation program," which, despite its variations over time, has remained consistent in its essence: maximizing economic benefit at the expense of ecosystem health.
Which Direction? Culture and Recurring Images
Broadly speaking, the direction our actions steer us in today's society can also be inferred from the sum of all the symbols and images we create. Internet searches, roughly speaking, would indicate some directions that "culture" is taking. To borrow astronomical analogies, each tangled cluster of thousands of images could become galaxies that reveal the recurrence of repetitive procedures, underlying patterns, and mechanisms operating sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly. Each, with its unique structure and form, points to orderings inherent in our economic or political arrangement. It's an immense behavioral negative/positive.
Here's a crucial point: if we assume that in Western democracies there's less explicit censorship and more algorithmic manipulation, the absence of certain content acts as a revealing index. Such a gap manifests as an informational black hole, whose gravitational repression serves as both a warning and an analytical data point. Moreover, these "shadows" of our societal actions, however repressed and suppressed, will inevitably emerge elsewhere, transfigured as ghosts, haunting desolate and empty places.
Safe Search: Off - Dynamics of Power and Exploitation
So, let's return to the immense recursivity of images any internet search brings us, where similar photos of distinct places emerge in vast quantity and quality. This, of course, stems from the tiresome repetition of our actions. In this case, it's a kind of "advanced program" of global degradation, unveiling a long list of folly and uncomfortable themes: illegal-timber; war-climate-change; amazon-deforestation; demilitarize-decolonize; drugs-illicit-market; girls-gone-wild; narcomining; irregular-landfill; forever-chemicals; and other stark realities.
Here are a few reasons:
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Normalization of environmental disasters, destruction of biomes, deregulation of complex ecosystems. Practical effect: accelerated release of vast quantities of carbon, environmental degradation, and extinction on a planetary scale.
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Persistence, banality, and sheer scale of wars and armed conflicts, coupled with a subsequent surge in "defense" spending (D. Eisenhower's Military-Industrial complex). Over 110 conflicts are currently ongoing globally (2025), with military expenditures estimated to exceed $2 trillion.
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Disinformation. Alienation. Flat-Earthism as mechanisms of control and ideological diversion. There's also much hidden censorship within this brew of public opinion manipulation and suppression of critical voices. To thicken the plot further, the mass dissemination of false information and conspiracy theories practically creates ideological echo chambers impenetrable to dissenting ideas, polarizes society, and obscures an objective reading of facts. Practical effect: perception management.
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Creation of powerful "brainets" (neural networks, closed systems where multiple agents/brains communicate directly) with narratives parallel to scientific consensus, confined to cohesive social groups. All driven by algorithms and influencers. These are social bubbles with strong political and emotional appeal, reinforcing pre-existing beliefs through self-perpetuating ideas and techniques that hinder exposure to different perspectives, further fragmenting the social fabric across a broad political spectrum.
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Widespread destruction of biomes, forests, and woodlands as a driver of illegal economic practices, where a vast network of black markets and sophisticated financial mechanisms with far-reaching societal permeability create a gigantic predatory flow.
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Intentional inability to reach a minimum consensus among major players for coordinated global action... reflected in the rise of extremist political stances. Ultimately, it's the populist surge of nationalism and intolerance as tools of division and control, subtly embedded in a consent engineering framework by social media algorithms, government surveillance agencies, and espionage with indiscriminate illegal instruments.
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The economy of illegality, whose complementary role to the formal world, even under state control (democratic or not), has become essential for market regulation and maintenance. We overtly see the creation of parallel mechanisms for asset transactions, e.g. cryptocurrencies. These collateral structures, these gray areas, whose unregulated nature lubricates and re-feeds the economic system. Siamese twins - vitally interdependent.
The Convergence of Gaze - Perspective of Future and Regression
Ultimately, to grasp the current paradigm of Amazonian alteration and occupation, one must understand that older, more refined, and extensively tested legal and systematic procedures structure and direct this whole. Perhaps the War of the Pacific (1879-1883) was the consolidation, or perhaps the crowning, of a mineral exploitation model initiated with the conquest of the Americas. A grand historical arc: Potosí - Humberstone.
cleaning_field_chain_installation
Adam Smith, in his keen insight, saw in the silver mountain of Potosí the transcendence of mere natural resource exploitation to the very personification of the central gear in the nascent machinery of capitalism. The vast quantity of metal unearthed from its depths reverberated across the globe, catalyzing trade, financing maritime expansion, and fueling Spain's imperial ambitions. Smith recognized that silver wasn't just an intrinsically valuable commodity; it was a vector of economic and political power, capable of shifting trade balances, inflating markets, and sustaining conflicts that redrew the geopolitical map of the era. In his view, Potosí represented an inflection point, where large-scale wealth extraction from one global spot propelled transformations of truly worldwide reach. And it all started in Bolivia...
1553 - 1928
The same regime of violence, war, land grabbing, wealth, destruction, amnesty and abandonment. Again, illegal activities are essential drivers of these processes. They use low-skilled labor, demand low technology, generate cash, and, above all, leave behind scorched, contaminated land, stripped of its native vegetation. While environmentally unsustainable, a modern agro-industrial rationality scheme runs in parallel, with bureaucratic support and control to plan and finance production, just like any other asset. This reality is a carbon copy of most local issues, of the land itself and its physical needs for self-maintenance and equilibrium. It's a ticking time bomb!
The Coming Panorama…
If my idea holds true, these many images are indeed the germ of future possibilities that will materialize tomorrow. Rehashed concepts and thoughts, cooked together with a trail of destruction and greed. A boiling pot!
Yes, there are good things on the horizon. New technologies in protein and crystal development can incredibly accelerate biological-biochemical recovery processes, all emerging in this dawn of AI. There are also other technological advancements outside the military field that will definitively alter the landscape we live in. Will they become the norm?
Ultimately, this artistic work aims to raise awareness, to visually shape the construction of what's crystallizing today in the Amazon region and the world: a model from the past. A kind of Kitsch retro-futurism, with clusters of wealth and vast underdevelopment, where there’s no utopia to fantasize about or safe place to return to. Perhaps, a nostalgia for a past we don't belong to. What might remain are attempts to articulate foreign symbols, statues of liberty, landslides, floods, wildfires, and golden calves.
A Glimpse into the Future
In 1961, Edward Lorenz, one of the first scientists to research climate with computational models, inadvertently discovered that climate is an unstable system in which a small change in one part of the globe can trigger drastic alterations on a planetary scale. He made this discovery by running a program with slightly altered data. Truth be told, this is the point that interests us more than ever. To think that the disordered occupation of recent decades, which has already consumed around twenty percent or more of the Amazon biome, can be seen as a general axiom. Coupled with persistent neglect and the perpetually reluctant enforcement of environmental obligations and compensations by large industry and the market, what can we expect from the world being built? Deep down, it's all about money. But the question remains: when the climate genie gets out of the bottle, who will pay the bill? The many or the few?
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Rodrigo Petrella