Sebastian Acker's latest series Extraction takes Satellite imagery – usually used by mining corporations to detect resources – to mimic, lament and reorder the way we view the natural environment.
Sebastian Acker's latest series Extraction takes Satellite imagery – usually used by mining corporations to detect resources – to mimic, lament and reorder the way we view the natural environment. We talk to him about his latest project and the necessity for contemporary artist's to be more aware of materials and where they come from.
The source of material, where it originates and extracted, is a focus of your work. What drew you to this subject?
I think in our image-saturated world a lot of objects are so loaded with cultural significance, symbolism and cliches that we can’t see their materiality anymore. We can’t see the object, even if we stare right at it. I think revealing the story of the materials is hugely important: where does it come from, how was it moved around the planet, what values does it hold and for whom? What does it say outside of the human reference system? And of course the consequences of extracting, transporting and fabricating materials become increasingly important in the ecological crisis we are in. My friends sometimes laugh at me because I have this urge to knock on any new table, wall and object I come across to get a sense of its materiality.
Is this a criticism you have about a lot of contemporary art being made right now? A lack of consideration for the origins of the material?
Not everyone has to make this part of their subject matter, but I don’t think artistic freedom exempts anyone from taking responsibility for the environmental consequences of their works. I am trying to get away from purely symbolic gestures by including the journey of materials into the equation.
Sebastian Acker's Extraction Series
Your Extraction series takes images from the Sentinel II satellite which uses Infrared and UV images to make unseen resources visible, how did you come by these images?
Some government-funded satellites are open access, anyone can register and directly download the raw images they capture from their huge databases. I decided to go with Sentinel II, which is an earth observation satellite run by the EU and the European Space Agency because it captures a wide spectrum of high-resolution images all the way from infrared to ultraviolet. Making normally invisible elements visible in the landscape is normally done on a computer screen by assigning these various greyscale images to the red, green and blue channels (RGB). I have downloaded and assigned them to pigments instead. There was something quite magical in the process of literally bringing these digital images captured in outer space down to earth, which included rasterising huge files, plotting them onto film, using UV light again to expose screens, and eventually hand printing various combinations of the mineral pigments to develop the image. It was impossible to predict the results until all three layers were applied.
By appropriating the technology of mining companies, these works visually demonstrate the cold neocolonial view of the western world on resource rich lands like the Atacama desert in Chile. What are you demonstrating by doing this?
I think satellite imagery is used as a weapon by actors on all sides. Mining corporations are using it to scout for resources and have an interest in keeping their findings private. NGOs are reversing this power by making crimes against humanity or the environment public. A powerful recent example is the use of satellite images as evidence of war crimes in Ukraine, which is being collected by thousands of OSINT (Open-source intelligence) researchers around the globe. With the Extraction series I wanted to contrast the distanced and abstract aerial view from the satellite image with the presence of the material itself. I like the idea of zooming in and out of the vast distance of the image and the tangible closeness of the pigments. Depending on how you look at it you could be one meter or 100s of kilometres away.
In the physical works, you are applying lithium salt, cerium sulphides, cobalt, manganese, and bismuth – minerals extracted from the desert landscape – directly onto the copper sheets. What is the conceptual significance of that?
The image and the materiality inform each other in this series. The image reminds me of the extraction and journey that the very material you are looking at must have been through in order to come together in this work. The moment I purchased the copper sheets and pigments I had become part of that same economy, with all its consequences. It somehow feels honest to say: don’t just look at the image, look at the material, because just like every other image in this world it is made of stuff, and this stuff has its own story. I think it refuses to just be an image, it also wants to be an object.
How do you resolve the hypocrisy of working on this level – you are daily using the technology that's enabled by this mineral extraction in the cameras, smartphones, laptops you use to make this work…
Instead of making symbolic gestures about systems I claim not to play any part in, my strategy is rather to expose my own dilemmas which arise from this mess we are all in. I do the things we all do, but try to expose rather than hide these moments. But I have also had quite a few ideas for works that I ended up not pursuing because I came to the conclusion that the environmental harm would not justify the result. For example, I have decided against using any NFT platform run on Ethereum because it still uses a lot of energy - what many people still don’t seem to know is that there are many alternative blockchains like Algorand which run on a fraction of the energy (proof of stake).
These works are reconciled with the NFT medium by demonstrating the processes of labour – the transforming of the digital satellite data through manual labour then production before being converted back into the digital space. Was this an important consideration for you?
The digital NFT’s obviously miss the tangible materiality of the asset-backed works. But they have a different quality. To end up with a digital image that came into being through an elaborate physical process of transforming digital data in the first place feels almost ironic. Maybe they work precisely because of this absence of materiality.
These processes of extraction, and global supply chains, are disguised from view for most people – is this part of a wider issue of the separateness of the human (anthropocentric) world detached from the natural environment?
When we look at our smartphone we would probably mostly perceive it as a human-made cultural object. But it is as much nature as it is culture. Half of your phones battery probably comes from the Atacama desert depicted in the Extraction Series, and include the same minerals: lithium, copper, cobalt, manganese. We can’t go back to the imagined idyllic past of the mountain village, but I believe we need to unlearn our concept of nature and culture as separate entities.
Over lockdown you were finishing off your latest photographic artist book, Traces Of Other Places, which focused on China’s copy towns and involved a mediation on the western obsession with originality – to people new to the topic, can you describe briefly what it is about?
The book looks at European architecture which has been replicated in China, including several Eiffel Towers and an entire Austrian village. They are residential towns that appropriate the western image of a romantic past before cars and mass tourism, in which people stroll along cobbled streets and live in harmony with nature.
Of course this idyllic past never existed, neither in the Disney-like Chinese replicas nor their European precedents: the book uses the comparison to reflect back on how the European towns perform their own history/their national myths of origin, not least through the tourism industry.
How have you responded to Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine? Are you changing the work you’re making so as to engage with the situation in some way?
For the first days of the invasion, I was barely able to think about work. What was needed was direct practical and moral support for people affected by this war. But the economic consequences also expose our dependencies on resources and the fragility of global supply chains even more than the Pandemic did. We are finally redefining the global and the local, not just for peace and security, but also for the environment. I am currently revisiting video footage I shot out of the window of the Trans Siberian Railway on a rather monotonous 4-day long journey to Siberia, where I had an artist residency with a fantastic group of Russian and Belarusian artists in 2019. The video clips capture the Siberian taiga, interrupted by the freight containers of passing trains that are connecting the East and the West. I wonder how many trains are still passing through there today.