Provoked Archaeologies #2, 2019

The work is part of a series of searches carried out on the Amazon rainforest investigating, through principles existing in an archaeologic excavation, the soil as artistic materiality. Excavating the soil in the search for the constitution of the past and its extra-material connection with the present suggests a series of confrontations between human and geological temporality, besides a clash of material and immaterial notions revolved by human and non-human agencies, which evoke a gentle, thorough and analytical gesture, but also crude, indifferent and dispersed.

The act of excavating, investigating in order to reveal, protect and preserve what unites present and past, supplying history with evidence, exposes the dichotomy of an invasive action which at the same time creates a rupture with the integrity of time and space, aggressively affecting that hidden reality and manifesting an antithesis of the principles of preservation and protection. 

The contrast between the geometrically shaped proportions of the precisely made excavation confronts the misshapen pile of soil exposed in a careless and urgent way. In addition, the presence of an improvised staircase made with branches and sisal rope emerging from the hole, suggests an absent presence, subverting the narrative of an excavation made from outside in or inside out, hiding the subject of the search, leaving unclear it was dug out or will be buried, and whether who made it, arrived or escaped through it.

The tropical forest biome is being profoundly altered due to the high levels of industrial contamination caused by agribusiness and mining activities, often carried out illegally. Soil is an essential part of this biome and its contamination is no different from that of water or the atmosphere.