This text was submitted as a proposal to the apexart INTL26 Open Call
Illegal mining cooperatives have proliferated across La Paz, Bolivia, including the buffer zones surrounding the Hampaturi, Milluni and Incachaca water reservoirs. These supply drinking water to over a million people. Mercury used in artisanal gold extraction is entering the watershed. Forty extraction sites have been identified on the slopes of Illimani; the sacred mountain that watches over the city, an ancestral deity for the indigenous peoples of the Altiplano, now marked with open wounds in its most precious terrain. Bolivian authorities have failed to act. The gold rush continues. The water flows into homes, into glasses, into bodies.
We are five women artists living and working in La Paz. We drink this water. We do not know, with certainty, what is in it.
Together, the five practices span sound, video, photography, and installation. Each of us brings a different practice to this shared condition: feminist dismantling of artistic distance through sound; real-time multimedia documentation, including independent laboratory analysis of water samples whose results will be displayed unedited as the exhibition's final gesture; the body as a political territory that extractivism has always tried to map and control; experimental photography where women, the ancestral, and the technological converge; and intimate, attentive observation of places and matter that surfaces what is present but refuses to be seen.
Each artist works independently, from inside her own practice and her own daily life. The exhibition does not impose a unified aesthetic -- it holds five responses to one reality.
The exhibition will launch a formal petition co-signed by indigenous communities of the Altiplano, scientists, activists, and civil organizations demanding government action. The petition will be printed at monumental scale, a document too large to ignore, and carried through the streets in a collective act, from the gallery to the seat of power.
The exhibition will be held near Plaza Murillo, steps from the Palacio de Gobierno, where the laws that permitted this crisis were written.
Visitors leave knowing something they cannot unknow. Five Women Drinking Mercury does not ask for sympathy. It asks for attention, and answers with the one thing harder to dismiss than data: art made from inside the crisis.
Illegal mining cooperatives have proliferated across La Paz, Bolivia, including the buffer zones surrounding the Hampaturi, Milluni and Incachaca water reservoirs. These supply drinking water to over a million people. Mercury used in artisanal gold extraction is entering the watershed. Forty extraction sites have been identified on the slopes of Illimani; the sacred mountain that watches over the city, an ancestral deity for the indigenous peoples of the Altiplano, now marked with open wounds in its most precious terrain. Bolivian authorities have failed to act. The gold rush continues. The water flows into homes, into glasses, into bodies.
We are five women artists living and working in La Paz. We drink this water. We do not know, with certainty, what is in it.
Together, the five practices span sound, video, photography, and installation. Each of us brings a different practice to this shared condition: feminist dismantling of artistic distance through sound; real-time multimedia documentation, including independent laboratory analysis of water samples whose results will be displayed unedited as the exhibition's final gesture; the body as a political territory that extractivism has always tried to map and control; experimental photography where women, the ancestral, and the technological converge; and intimate, attentive observation of places and matter that surfaces what is present but refuses to be seen.
Each artist works independently, from inside her own practice and her own daily life. The exhibition does not impose a unified aesthetic -- it holds five responses to one reality.
The exhibition will launch a formal petition co-signed by indigenous communities of the Altiplano, scientists, activists, and civil organizations demanding government action. The petition will be printed at monumental scale, a document too large to ignore, and carried through the streets in a collective act, from the gallery to the seat of power.
The exhibition will be held near Plaza Murillo, steps from the Palacio de Gobierno, where the laws that permitted this crisis were written.
Visitors leave knowing something they cannot unknow. Five Women Drinking Mercury does not ask for sympathy. It asks for attention, and answers with the one thing harder to dismiss than data: art made from inside the crisis.
Naira Corzon (Aka Nayra Corzon) is an artist and academic based in La Paz, Bolivia. Trained as a literary scholar (PhD), she is drawn to what escapes language: the sonic life of stones, the feeling of a mountain being excavated.
apexart’s program supporters past and present include the National Endowment for the Arts, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, the Kettering Family Foundation, the Buhl Foundation, The Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Spencer Brownstone, the Kenneth A. Cowin Foundation, Epstein Teicher Philanthropies, The Greenwich Collection Ltd., William Talbott Hillman Foundation/Affirmation Arts Fund, the Fifth Floor Foundation, The Puffin Foundation, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, public funds from Creative Engagement, supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor and administered by LMCC, funds from NYSCA Electronic Media/Film in Partnership with Wave Farm: Media Arts Assistance Fund, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.