2024, installation.
In ‘A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies’ Bartolomé de las Casas narrates an episode in which a native community of what is currently known as Cuba, facing the arrival of the Spanish colonisers and aware of their hunger for gold, threw all the gold they owned in a local river as an act of resistance. This brought to my mind the image of a gold river.
Today, gold veins can be seen in aerial photographs of the Amazon rainforest: rivers of illegal gold mining, an activity that poisons the waters and soil, deforests, and brings the presence of organised crime. In ‘Ancestral Futures’, Ailton Krenak uses the image of the ever-shifting river to speak of non-linear temporality: “The rivers, those beings that have always inhabited different worlds, are the ones that suggest to me that if there is a future to imagine, it is ancestral, because it is already present.”
Here, I am using the gold hoop once again as a signifier of a history that is both cyclical and embodied. A repeating cycle of colonial extractivism, but also a future where resistance is rooted in an ancestral struggle.
