Ibero-American Video Exhibition: "Multipla: Mujer Artista Rexiste" (Multipla: Woman Artist Resists)
Museum of Art of the Federal University of Ceará Fortaleza, Brazil Curator: Lilian Amaral Starting August 21, 2019
The demand for sand grows year after year. In addition to its use for road and housing construction, the demand from the fracking industry has been added in recent years, which uses sand along with chemical components and water to fracture the dense rock formations that hide oil and gas. This strong demand is surpassing the supply and driving up the price of this raw material, which is encouraging the creation of groups of poachers who 'hunt' sand on deserted beaches and even in the sea.
Sand is the second most consumed raw material by humans after water, a natural resource which is the main reason for wars in the 21st century and is also very abundant in the Western Sahara occupied by Morocco.
The history of sand trafficking by the industry dates back to 1955. The most notorious example dates back to 1971, when the Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Council requested 50 million pesetas from the Local Credit bank to acquire sand from the Western Sahara, a total of 141,647 cubic meters of sand (approximately 70,000 tons) for the "Las Teresitas" beach project, the largest artificial beach at the time.
In 1998, the beach was regenerated again with another 140,000 cubic meters, this time at a cost of approximately 400 million pesetas, financed through the coastal agreement (Canary Islands-State) signed that year. In November of that same year, the regeneration with Sahrawi sand finished, and subsequently, a plot began that turned out to be a massive theft.
The incessant plunder of the natural resources of the Western Sahara has not ceased since then.
Vanitas I. Gold is part of a set of proposals designed to help visualize the exploitation through a series of simple actions.
Given that, in Spanish territory, ironically, the appropriation of beach sand in quantities exceeding 50 grams is penalized, we collected sand from Las Teresitas beach, little by little and over several days, depositing it in small bags and jars that complied with the maximum permitted amount.
A portion of the bagged sand was sent by volunteer collaborators via mail to the Sahrawi School of Arts, and another portion to the Association of Friendship with the Sahrawi People to be distributed with the aim of finding its way back to the Western Sahara. The idea was that the bags of sand, in a symbolic act, would be emptied into the camps, returning the sand to its place of origin.[1]
A portion of the collected sand was kept to generate two material works: an hourglass as a tangible piece and the photographic image Vanitas I. (Gold). The physical hourglass, created by Edi Escobar, was given to the commander of the camps to be passed on to the Sahrawi activist Aminatou Haidar (along with the images documenting the sand collection in Las Teresitas, as well as its return in the camps), who was designated as the recipient by the Artifariti organization.
And finally, Vanitas I. (Gold) transforms part of the saved sand into an image conceived in allusion to a time that is not measured in hours, nor in days, nor even in months anymore—a time of exception and violation of countless sovereign and human rights that has now lasted 47 years. But above all, it is the image-time of the human practice of extractivism which is not limited to one territory or one specific material, but expands the overexploitation of natural resources to all points of our geography.
Vanitas I. (Gold) points to the material and speculative value of a seemingly abundant, inexhaustible, and infinite material. Its image, a double hourglass (made of matter and void and without a container) narrates the continuous passing of time, its flow, and the transience of human life. But at the same time, the perception of contemporary time with its infinite progressive linearity and the taboo of our own materiality is an evidence that the work reconstructs, looking into the abyss of a suspended space-time.
The action in the camps was extensively documented and disseminated in the media and social networks, both by the Artifariti organization and by the leaders of the SADR (Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic), with the intention of claiming the recovery of access to the sea, as well as highlighting the extractivist practices in the occupied territories.
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