Between 1503 and 1660, 185.000kg of gold were taken to Spain from its Latin American colonies. The extractivism of gold initiated a centuries-long and painful process of plunder, and forged the idea of Latin America as a land of endless abundance to be extracted at the service of Europe. Thinking of how bodies carry these stories of colonial struggle and resistance, I have taken as a starting point the tradition of Latin American women wearing gold hoops to re-think these legacies of extractivism. Here, I combine images of looted gold artefacts from Latin America that are currently in the archive of the Museum of America (Spain) and images of my personal collection of golden hoops. The small gesture of body adornment becomes a powerful subversion of history, reclaiming what has been taken away and posing questions about the differences between objects that sit in archives, disconnected from their communities, and objects that belong to sentient bodies.
2023.
A3, risograph-printed in one ink at Duplikat Press (London, UK).