As part of a 4-year long-term visual research, photographer Marcos Zegers has captured the negative impacts of mining in Chile’s Atacama Desert.
According to Zegers, the project entitled Water, Mining and Exodus investigates the consequences that have resulted due to mining such as cultural displacement in addition to desertification.
“The project has been developing from 2015 to the present date. It began as an exploratory journey in order to grant the consolidation of an imaginary to a territory which, according to me, had not been yet defined,” says Zegers. “I thought of other places in the world that had an associated imaginary, or images that come to us just by mentioning the name of the place, such as the desert of Arizona, London or Tuscany … For me, the Atacama Desert did not have that condition, I felt it as a virgin of the invasion of images.”
“Over time and after several journeys, what began as a journey of random registry started to reveal a much deeper world, a series of traces related to the extractive history of a territory,” adds Zegers. “A history that comes from the past and is constantly repeated until today, as has been the fate of many Latin American territories.”
“The research began by using as a theoretical basis the implication of the neoliberal economic model that was implemented in Chile at the beginning of the 1970s, which is based on diminishing the role of the state in favour of granting greater freedom of action of private companies,” explains Zegers. “Today, whether it is the implementation of the neoliberal model at a local level, or the excessive use of resources at a global one, the lack of regulations on extractive matters have strongly affected the territory, its communities and the environment.”
All images in this article are courtesy of Marcos Zegers.
