INDEX. A report from the archive
Index is conceived as an online platform for documenting, collecting and appreciating art. It emerges as an examination of the gallery archives to draft new directions and further comprehend the works of art and artists that form our program.
001 Melanie Smith
Fordlandia & Maria Elena
At one end, we find ourselves in the Atacama Desert in the middle of a small mining community nestled in the saltpeter Chilean pampas. On the other side, we find ourselves in the Amazon, on the banks of the Tapajós River, in a ghost city in the middle of the Brazilian jungle. Both products of extractivism at the beginning of the 20th century in Latin America, María Elena and Fordlandia, were conceived under Anglo-Saxon mediation to extract natural resources and subsequently commercialize them.
María Elena appears during the saltpeter boom in the 1920s (used mainly in the production of fertilizers and explosives) when the Anglo-Chilean Consolidated Nitrate Corporation, a company owned by the Guggenheim brothers, bought the land from the treasury. Recognized for its significant and ceaseless production, it became one of the largest saltpeter factories built in the country and is the only one that remains active in the entire world.
Fordlandia was founded in 1928 by Henry Ford and abandoned some twenty years later. The utopia city proposed by the magnate sought to extract rubber in an "idyllic" region of the Amazon. Several problems prevented the plan from being fruitful, mainly due to the resistance of nature, labor revolt, and the appearance of synthetic rubber.
Throughout her career, Melanie Smith (Poole, 1965) has held a particular interest in the abiding failures or collapses of modernity. Fordlandia (2014) and María Elena (2018) brood over the impact of British and American intervention in industrial production in Latin America. Through painting and audiovisual language, Smith notes the ramifications of monopolistic capitalism and industrial colonies, along with the relationship and tension between industrialization and nature, body, and globalization.
The reading is enriched by comparing both films and watching them one after the other. The fragmented montage that Smith resorts to frequently, in addition to the precise and enveloping sound design, transports us to two places that are half-despised and half-forgotten. Both films delve into themes such as colonialism, urbanization, modern industry, the indomitable force of nature, and therefore entropy.
Miners at Maria Elena were paid with tokens, and each one was designed to be used in a specific way: a prevailing method of controlling an already overworked population. There is also an interesting montage in Maria Elena. These fragments provide a glimpse into what happens every day: explosions, heavy machinery operating nonstop, Polo matches also take place and sunbathing seems enjoyable. Machines and nature are in constant confrontation. Life as intended, life as planned, and life as realized.
As opposed to what happens in Chile, in Fordlandia we see a jungle that appears to be calm, with foliage eating away at the structures, fewer people, and lots of animals. Nature triumphed over supposed modernity here, claiming the obvious over business.
Additionally, I am thinking about Ford's efforts to establish convincing proof that he had succeeded. Among the best examples are the documentary The Amazon Awakens (1944) and the revolts in Detroit years before, while Diego Rivera was painting The Detroit Industry Murals (1932–1933), commissioned by Ford Motor Company. Clearly, Ford was more concerned with power and permanence than with the well-being of his employees, or with nature in general. The Fordism Amazonian utopia, which prohibited alcohol and encouraged the poetry of Emerson, which produced laboratory-modified trees and health squads, was consumed by the jungle and forgotten by the system. Now, it lies in oblivion, a testimony to the madness of trying to subjugate nature to the will of a single man.
Both projects read like a cautionary tale: one that questions more than it asserts. Melanie Smith's work transcends because it continues to be present. It reminds us of the inevitability of disaster, as well as the erratic and unpredictable qualities of nature and how minuscule man is compared to it.
— Nico Barraza
STREAMING FOR a LIMITED TIME!
Melanie Smith
FORDLANDIA
2014
Video Full HD, sound, 41’27”
Edition of 5
The tensions between industrial and natural landscape are leveled off in a certain horizontality of hierarchies between form and content, and at the same time the animal resignifies possibilities the community of the living.
