Rodrigo Azaola
Impunity landscapes II, Debt Architecture
2022-ongoing
Six-channel HD video with sound. 8’37’’
Using minimal bits of light and color encoding financial information and living beings, Impunity Landscapes II looks at ecological damage from within international debt servicing architecture.
As an issuer of private debt to support its operations, Grupo Kuo is accountable to hundreds of investment portfolios around the world. Kuo is also responsible, due to its hundreds of large-scale pig farms scattered across the Yucatan Peninsula, for plundering one of the world’s biggest underground freshwater reservoirs, on which approximately four million people depend for their livelihood.
Through researching financial databases (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission N-PORT filings, Eikon and Orbis financial databases), I established a wide network of private funds, banks, and pension systems invested in the exploitation of living matter.
This information is intertwined in a 42-color palette multichannel video installation. Each color was extracted from satellite imagery of animal farm bio-discharge lagoons, which operate with minimal, if any, ecological regulations.
Fields of financial and geospatial information, light, and time traverse from the micro-scale of looted natural resources to an infrastructural macro-scale of future financialized debt.
Project supported by the SNCA (MX) and SOMO Center for Research on Multinational Corporations (NL).
This work was exhibited at the Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, Berlin, November 2023.