Anthropology’s Annual Visiting Lecture Series - Legacies of War

Talk: Sculptures of Devastation, A Visual Genealogy of Violence Through the Environment

Abstract: The Cerrejón coal mine, located in the Caribbean of Colombia and the largest coal mine in South America, stands in the present hiding its own history of violence. Since its creation in 1981, the mine has slowly shaped the form of the earth, engulfing entire lifeworlds of human and more than human life: lakes, towns, rivers, entire ecosystems, roads, villages and farms, all destroyed to access the coal underground.

The material present reifies the historic process of the making of the mine, creating the effect of apparent immutability, as if the 69000 hectares of the mine had always been there. Part of this effect is the result of the extent of the mine itself. Part of it because most of the sites that the inhabitants remember are currently inaccessible, for they are inside the mining pits, operation areas or the private property of the mine. Without access, the unthinkability of the past is intensified by what is visible in the present: The giant artificial mountains of inorganic matter; the barbwires establishing the limits of the mine; the railroads, checkpoints, the water canals and septic pools.

In this project, I examine the reshaping of the earth as a struggle between modes of existing that transformed Indigenous and agrarian lives to make possible the coal industry in Colombia. I show that image making and the administration of how images intervene in public policies, private projects and political confrontations define the forms in which this struggle takes place. I use the archive of Cerrejón between 1955 to 2024 to analyze the role of images in the sculpting of the earth. I use these images -whose purpose was to record the conditions of a particular moment of the surface to plan actions for its destruction-, to articulate a visual history of the material struggles that redefine the possibilities of life in the Caribbean of Colombia. Working collaboratively with geologists and Wayúu Indigenous leaders, I annotated, compared and tracked the changes in these images to document how these sites were progressively reconfigured to serve an emergent extractive economy.