MoneyLab #13. NeMe Arts Centre, Limassol, Cyprus. November 2023.

From minimal bits of light and color encoding financial information and living beings, Impunity Landscapes II looks at the entanglement of local capital (KUOB.MX) within international debt servicing architecture.

As an issuer of private debt for financing its operational costs, Grupo Kuo is accountable to hundreds of investment portfolios, and it's shareholders, around the world. Through researching hundreds of N-PORT filings, which are an obligatory disclosure of funds for any financial entity by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, I established Grupo Kuo's financial obligations and its timelines into the future.

This information is interwoven in a multichannel video installation based on a 42 colours palette, each extracted from satellite imagery of bio-discharge lagoons from large scale animal farms scattered across the Yucatan peninsula.

Like in the other works of my series Impunity Landscapes, I speculate on possible aesthetic outputs to look at the  exploitation of living matter through fields of financial information, light, and time.

Like in the other works of my series Impunity Landscapes, I speculate on possible aesthetic outputs to encode financial abuse and its factual impact. This project, through financial and geospatial information, looks at the exploitation of living matter through fields of financial information, light, and time.

My practice is an ongoing research on the intersection of art, historical narratives and international relations. In a world that is increasingly interconnected but visibly more fragmented, global issues such as political economy, identities and sovereignty are some of the concepts I aim to entwine in my work. I seek to shed some visibility over specific social and political questions, and I try to answer them as I remind myself that history is a fickle and fallible tapestry of contingencies. My formal concern and methodology is to find solutions listening carefully to history, archives and people; I rely on my intuition and let my research mature until it determines its own path. Rather than being attached to a particular technique I thrive in new materials and production speculation.

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Rodrigo Azaola


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Statement:

My practice is an ongoing research on the intersection of art, historical narratives and international relations. In a world that is increasingly interconnected but visibly more fragmented, global issues such as political economy, identities and sovereignty are some of the concepts I aim to entwine in my work. I seek to shed some visibility over specific social and political questions, and I try to answer them as I remind myself that history is a fickle and fallible tapestry of contingencies. My formal concern and methodology is to find solutions listening carefully to history, archives and people; I rely on my intuition and let my research mature until it determines its own path. Rather than being attached to a particular technique I thrive in new materials and production speculation.

                                                                                                                                                                June 2019

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Unrelenting hate, 2019 (stil)
Digital video, sound, colour, 4min. 44 sec.
In collaboration with Hazeen (Safdar Ahmed and Can Yalcinkaya), Bernando Hernández, and Daz Chandler.

Pure-bred race horses are capitalized on through "layering," and funds are invested once and again until their origin is impossible to track back.

Modern financial infrastructures, rooted in performative rituals of claimed fairness and unbridled gluttony, bear a chromatic relation to early global chains of extraction.

This videowork is a vertiginous loss and defeat, embodied by questions made by small-time investors in financial Internet forums and channels that become a ritual of contrition and disbelief, as if the stock market operated in a vacuum imbued with otherworldly, unexplained forces.

As background, the geometry of colonial European flags and three man-made colors function as signifiers of exploitation, social decay, and ecological disruption: Carmine, extracted from the Dactylopius coccus insect in colonial Mexico and Central America; Egyptian brown, aka Mummy brown, prepared with the flesh of stolen Egyptian mummies in the 19th century; and silvery white, the color of processed lithium, a mineral supposedly to spearhead the “green transition."

Each of these colors made and broke societies under the sheer weight of exploitation. As of then and still today, individuals get trapped in epistemological creeds from which supposedly everyone can benefit, but in reality plunders wealt and bodily energy through the deployment of asymmetric financial power throughout geography and time.