Rodrigo Azaola
Work About News
Impunity landscapes II (2022) comprises 12 inkjet prints (297×420 mm) on archival watercolor paper, in which the chromatic palette is extracted from open source satellite imagery of residual waters pools of industrial farms in the Yucatan Peninsula.
Business-as-usual operations of industrial animal farms exploit and degrade the main groundwater reserves at national level. It is calculated that at an important volume of at least two million hogs feces and urines are discharged illegally into the underground water channels.
In the last years, the environmental impact of such facilities have been documented and denounced, but nothing has changed, not for a bit. Between 200 and 400 industrial scale farms are scattered around the territory. The majority lack permissions, supervision and even environmental impact regulation. Obviously, this sort of industry causes irreparable and ongoing harm to local indigenous communities.
In the last months I have been analyzing satellite imagery of the Yucatan Peninsula, pinpointing the farms, some previously documented and new ones that I have found (see map here). The color of every discharge pool is then selected and classified in a palette. This chromatic range is used then to create non-figurative imagery.
Impunity landscapes IIattempts to explore ecocide and harmed communities devastation driven by the capitalist rationale of destruction-for-profit, somehow obscuring it –as it happens nowadays– and at the same time highlighting its existence through aesthetic outputs.
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paisajes
allami 2018b
rstly, for understanding how financial fragility and vulnerability, as well as the costs of adjustment during crisis, are unevenly distributed across the world market, largely at the expense of workers, peasants, the poor, and non-human natures in the Global South; s
Despite the pivotal role played by the notions ‘peripheral’/‘subordinate’ in their arguments, those bodies of scholarship dedicate little effort to discuss the geographical assumptions that underpin them. Consequently, a series of questions remain unanswered: What are the relations of space and power that characterise peripheral/subordinate financial integra- tion?
the money-power of capital to appropriate living labor and extra-human natures has expressed itself in particularly violent ways in the spaces of the global capitalist economy successively referred to as the peripheries, the colonies, the Third World, and the Global So
relational geographies of money-power” (Alami 2018b). I
stimulated location strategies based on considerations of cost and of spatial differences in workers’ resistance and working-class power” (Swyngedouw 1992: 46). Foreign investme
zero or negative in the context of quantitative easing programs). Put differently, cheap money borrowed in the core was invested in spaces across the Global South that provided both opportunities for short-term capital gains and better prospects of exploitation of living labor and extra-human natures. Large volumes of money-capital flows poured in. Acombinati
Credit rating agencies and other specialized f irms produce financial knowledge that “categorize” the uneven geographies of global finance, shaping the global circuits of money-capital (Lee 2011). The production of this knowledge is permeated by a set of power-laden imaginaries and representations, such as Western-and capital-centric views of history and modernity, stagist/linear conceptions of development, imperial/neocolonial imaginaries, racism, and specific norms of masculinity (see Alami 2018b for a fuller exposition of those arguments
While often welcomed by local ruling elites, the policy prescriptions largely benefitted transnational capitalist firms, mining and extractive companies, global banks, and the interests of advanced capitalist countries. Theconsequences in terms of social and human costs, socio-ecological destruction, and globally organized dispossession across much of the Third World are well documented (e.g., Saad-Filho and Johnston 2005).
When money is converted into capital it stops being a ‘rational means to sa- tisfying social needs’ and becomes a forceful and ‘irrational’ form of social regulation, subjecting social reproduction to the discipline and logic of capital, i.e. to the money-power of capital to appropriate sur- plus labour-time and extra-human natures such as land, natural re- sources, and biodiversity
Money has the ability to ‘link places distant in space and time’, and therefore contributes to an ‘homogenisation’ of spaces, that is, the tendency of economic practices within and across these spaces to ‘conform more to the abstract conventions and rationalities of the community of money and capital’
un espacio geografico nacional ligado a estrcuturas supernacionales
money-capital leaves those locations and sec- tors of activities which do not conform to capitalist value disciplines, and flows into those locations and sectors with better prospects of la- bour exploitation and domination, thereby both mobilizing and ex- acerbating uneven development
una imagen zoom out que refleja la escala local-global de la explotacion y de una serie historica de sucesos (desregularizacion, precarizacion, desposesion, integracion intl)
ratios. Diversification (across different financial products, sectors and regions) is precisely founded upon the (re)pro- duction of uneven financial geographies (with different magnitudes of risk/reward) ‘at scales greater and smaller than the national in which, however, the national frame is highly influential’
To paraphrase Neil Brenner, expanding spaces of money-power engendered contextually specific forms of socio-spatial dislocation and crisis formation.
My key contention is that this in turn sparked transformations in socio-spatial state configurations in order to facilitate the expansion and deepening of monetary disciplines, and the appropriation of growing pools of living labour and extra-human natures by capital, while politically mediating the contradictions and social conflicts that have emerged at various scalar levels, from the world market to bodies and subjectivities. I
Colonial modes of land appropriation, chattel slavery, indigenous dispossession and genocide have been instrumental in primitive accumulation and in the political constitution of these modern categories (Bhandar, 2018). Similarly, the global division of labor and the nation-state system have been racialized from the outset, structured by the ‘color line’, enforced by imperialism, and supported by a racist cultural order
It allows rationalizing hierarchical ordering between and within human subjects, populations, territories, and states; subjecting them to dif- ferential norms and regimes of capitalist discipline, social control, and exploitation; and unequally exposing them to the violent rhythms of capitalist (de)valuation and concomitant labor degradation, impoverishment, permanent indebtedness, eco- logical destruction, and crisis (Singh, 2016: 31). This, in turn, has implications for value transfers across the world market, and for the reproduction of racialized power and colonial orders.
the asymmetric movement of money as capital in perpet- ual search for higher profit opportunities between uneven spaces is precisely the way through which class power (re)asserts itself, leaving those locations and sectors which do not conform to capitalist value-disciplines and flowing into those with better prospects of labor exploitation and an abundance of extra-human natures, thereby both mobilizing and exacerbating uneven development across places, terri- tories, and scales (Harvey, 2006; Smith, 2008).
Here we encounter again the dialectical moveme
Across these two sites of frontier finance, then, the construction of underdevel- opment as lack of finance is steeped in colonial and imperial histories and relies upon a form of essentialization of this development ‘problem’ along racial lines, a problem which, importantly, is often explicitly linked to the lack of protection of property and investment rights. A major implication of these processes of racializa- tion is that the causes of poverty and underdevelopment are depoliticized, and the racialized inequalities that structure the global monetary and financial systems obscured.
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sibs
representation makes visible or invisible but also rests on the embodied, somatic experience of the partition, distribution, and fixing in place of the perceptive and cognitive capacities of its subjects. Furthermore, the question of the aesthetics of financialization must then also involve determining what its aesthetic regime attempts to render invisible and unperceivable. The hypothesis that financialization depoliticizes economic relations means that what is rendered beyond perception by financialization is that supplement that is the condition for the social and political economic order that sustains a financialized regime to exist but that cannot be acknowledged.