"What do the white people do with all that gold? Do they eat it?"

This is what the great indigenous leader Davi Kopenawa of the Yanomami people asks. His people have been resisting for centuries to survive, to maintain their lives and customs and for the preservation of the Amazon forest against the invaders of illegal mining. Currently, the escalation of illegal mineral exploitation in the Amazon has assumed frightening proportions and created a trail of environmental and indigenous bloodshed. 

There is an ongoing genocide, legitimized by the Brazilian government and financed by foreign capital. Like the Brumadinho dam collapse already contextualised, the most recent episode against the Yanomami people, in which a 12-year-old child was raped and murdered, and also the murder of anthropologist Bruno Pereira and journalist Dom Phillips, both crimes with strong indications of a relationship with illegal mining, expose the atrocity of the mineral extraction industry and the impunity through which it walks. The union of two powerful weapons: a government that works against the constitution itself and legitimises illegal practices for the benefit of large companies. Together with the strength of international capital that continues to finance the companies that benefit from illegal logging and the whole scenario that surrounds it. This is the case of large German banks that currently invest in Brazilian mining companies in conflicts. 

 

It is a pattern that is repeated in most situations involving the model of mineral extraction in contemporary Brazil: the banalisation of death and the commodification of human and non-human life. 

 

In this scenario, the installation proposes the re-signification of objects which are, a priori, synonymous of power and oppression.

What happens when we remember that money is earth? And that the self is land? My merchandise, is soil? 

Plantable, we are plantable beings. Everything, everybody. Each one in your own time, but in the limit, we are all a procession of organic materials on the way to becoming fungus food. 

From this perspective, the reasons that sustain capitalism seem to lose their sense and void of glamour, when seen like this, so inescapable of life.